Director Of Museum Research Articles

Amazonian Activism for European Museum Audiences: Critical Reflections on the Development of an “Amazonia” Exhibition at the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands

AbstractThis paper describes and expands on the discussions held at a symposium at the Research Center for Material Culture in the Netherlands in February 2020, which was held as part of the planning of an upcoming “Amazonia” exhibition to be curated at that institution by some of the authors. The symposium invited curators and museum directors who had recently carried out projects with Amazonian communities to share their experiences with co‐production and co‐curation. The discussion and this paper aim to be a reflexive critical first step before reaching out to potential partners in South America. This paper supplements discussions on participative museology by examining the underlying frameworks of an exhibition project at its outset, in addition to contributing, as happens more commonly, post‐rationalizations in a final written evaluation. The discussion furthermore contributes to exhibition co‐curation by focusing on Amazonian‐European collaborations, which are under‐represented in Anglophone museological literature.

Contextualizing the Artistic Repertoire in Museums

To remain financially sustainable while promoting cultural activity and operating within artistic, symbolic, and cultural norms, museums must consider a multitude of commercial and organizational elements. This article examines the impact of economic, organizational, and structural characteristics of art museums on the repertoire of art they exhibit. Using a mixed-methods approach, we draw on data pertaining to 11 art museums in Israel that are supported by the Ministry of Culture, analyzing administrative data collected yearly from the museums from 2000 to 2014. Next, we analyze 20 interviews with museum directors, curators, and artists to further explore the findings that emerge from the analysis of administrative data. Findings indicate three factors that influence a museum’s artistic repertoire: revenue structure, museum location (center or periphery), and the museum director’s preferences. We discuss these factors and explain the significant role that nonartistic factors play in shaping cultural outcomes.

Botanical Gardens in the city of São Paulo at the beginning of the 20th century

At the beginning of the 20th century, the city of São Paulo had three Hortos: the "Horto de São Paulo", better known as Horto da Cantareira, created in 1896 by Alberto Löfgren; the Horto do Museu Paulista, which was first planted in 1898 by the Museum's director, Hermann von Ihering; and the Horto Oswaldo Cruz, created in 1917 by the botanist Frederico Carlos Hoehne. All of them no longer exist with their original functions, but they preserve, in their spaces, some built and plant elements that are testimonies of the creation of these places. In this context, this article aims to make a brief history of these gardens, their insertions in maps of the time, the investigation of the fate they had and some components that preserve their memory today. Methodologically, the research used textual, cartographic and iconographic references present in primary documents, articles, theses and dissertations, as well as in the sites that house these places, in order to assess the objectives to be achieved. Through the material collected, it was possible to visualize and understand the locations of the mentioned gardens, their current uses and remaining elements.

A decision-making method for planning exhibitions in arts organizations: A case study of CaixaForum Barcelona

Museum directors play a fundamental role in the management of arts institutions, and they need to constantly adapt to the changes and requirements of the society. Questions have been raised about how decisions are made in museums, and if any specific method exists to analyze and select exhibitions for a complete annual program. Interviews conducted with several directors and experts have confirmed that, in general, the decision-making process within cultural institutions is intuitive and based on the experience and subjectivity of the director, who has an artistic background but sometimes lacks experience in arts management. In order to address this subject, this study applied the Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) to CaixaForum Barcelona, an important cultural institution in Spain, and analyzed the decision-making process followed while selecting artists and topics for a temporary exhibition. This research contributes to a new decision-making method and the improvement of exhibition scheduling in arts organizations.

The Century Yearbook 2021

It may seem odd to review a New York social club's yearbook, with its list of members’ addresses and series of committee reports. But such books sometimes contain material of more general interest. The latest one from the Century Association, for example, devotes 250 of its 685 pages to “Century Memorials”—that is, biographical sketches of recently deceased members, written by other members. Among the well-known figures taken up in these eighty-three sketches are the artists Richard Anuszkiewicz and Robert Motherwell; the architects Henry N. Cobb and Charles A. Platt; the newspaper editors Harold Evans and Whitelaw Reid; the historians Henry F. Graff and William McFeely; the translator and literary scholar Donald Keene; the collector of literary and musical manuscripts Frederick Koch; the popular writer on Russian history Robert K. Massie; the clergyman James Parks Morton; the financier Felix G. Rohatyn; the lawyers Whitney North Seymour Jr. and Isaac N. Phelps Stokes; the literary editor Elisabeth Sifton; the university president Michael Sovern; the museum director Evan H. Turner; and the broadcast journalist Sander Vanocur. The sketches are generally well written and often richly evocative: the writers include Louis Begley, Kenneth T. Jackson, D. T. Max, and Honor Moore.The long shelf of Century volumes like this one clearly constitutes a valuable contribution to prosopographical literature. And the Century is not the only institution with such a tradition (other examples are the British Academy and the American Philosophical Society); but their publications are a frequently overlooked source, one not always available in research libraries. Unfortunately, it is also a source that seems to be diminishing: the American Antiquarian Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are examples of organizations, each with a history of providing biographical information, that are no longer doing so. Of course, the great previous runs of the former's Proceedings and the latter's Reports remain (one hopes) on the shelves for those who know to look for them. A step in the opposite direction has recently been taken by the Grolier Club, which has not had such a tradition (except for two biographical volumes in 1959 and 2000): its Gazette now includes a section of memorials in each issue. This is a welcome move, but one has to regret that so little scholarly use is made of this whole body of biographical detail and reminiscence.

The literary museum and the Korolenko family

The article discusses the professional ties and personal friendship between V. Korolenko and V. Bonch-Bruevich, examining their correspondence dating back to 1892. Upon Korolenko’s death, Bonch-Bruevich, later to become director of the State Literary Museum, continues his correspondence with Korolenko’s daughter Sofia, discussing primarily, but not solely, the writer’s archive. Even though the family decided to entrust Korolenko’s archive to the Lenin Library, which boasted more appropriate preservation facilities than the Literary Museum, Bonch-Bruevich and Sofia Korolenko would exchange letters for many more years, enjoying each other’s trust and friendship. Bonch-Bruevich would support Korolenko’s family. After Bonch-Bruevich passed away, followed by Sofia two years later, the correspondence between the Literary Museum and the Korolenko Museum in Poltava continued until 1960; the letters were written by Evgeny Balabanovich, director of Chekhov Museum affiliated with the State Literary Museum, and his counterpart in Poltava, Lyubov Geishor, who ran the Korolenko Museum. The earliest letter quoted in the article dates from 1892, while the latest discovered epistle comes from 1960.

Estetisk ingenjörskonst och konstens ekologisering: Richard Bergh, Människan och nutiden och Öyvind Fahlström

Summary The following article seeks to analyze the biopolitical interconnections between cultural policy and the arts during the Swedish 1900s. Of special relevance is the concept of “aesthetic engineering”, denoting the attempt to vitalise and activate the population through manipulation of the sensuous environment. In this context, the significance of the individual artwork can only be understood in relation to the larger media ecology of which it forms a part. The study analyzes three heterogenous examples of aesthetic engineering, juxtaposing a Social-Democratic report on cultural policy, Människan och nutiden (1952), with the essays of painter and museum director Richard Bergh (1858–1919), and the utopian visions of neo-avant-gardist Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976). The different examples all provide theories on the purported necessity of art's “ecologization”: i.e. of the integration of the artwork in the environment. By recognising this shared ground, we suggest that a novel context for the understanding of art and welfare politics in twentieth-century Sweden can be established.

So Much to Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969–1979

So Much to Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969–1979

Audiface Diotallevi e Gustav Friedrich Waagen: il carteggio per l’acquisto della Madonna di Raffaello e della Natività di Luini per il museo di Berlino (1841–1842)

Abstract The archive of the Diotallevi family preserves a folder of unpublished letters concerning the purchase of the so-called Diotallevi Madonna by Raphael and a Nativity by Bernardino Luini for the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, which in the Diotallevi collection had been misattributed to Perugino and Garofalo, respectively. The correspondence between the art collector Audiface Diotallevi and Gustav Friedrich Waagen, director of the Berlin museum, documents protracted negotiations during which both buyer and seller politely bargained for advantage. Whilst Diotallevi was keen to bolster the reputation of his collection by the prestigious sale of the two paintings to the Berlin museum, Waagen did his best not to reveal his belief in Raphael’s authorship of the Diotallevi Madonna. The two paintings, reserved for Waagen since December 1841, eventually left Rimini in April 1842, and were sent to Berlin via Rome.

Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer ed. by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson

Reviewed by: Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer ed. by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson Daniel Shank Cruz (bio) Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer Edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson Palmer Museum of Art of the Pennsylvania State University, 2020. xx + 225 pp. $39.95 paperback. Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer is a hybrid exhibition catalogue and essay collection published to accompany a show of the Rohrers' work that was supposed to take place in several Pennsylvania venues in 2020, but has been delayed due to the pandemic. The book is edited by three scholars affiliated with Penn State: Julia Spicher Kasdorf, a Mennonite poet and essayist; Christopher Reed, an art historian and literary critic; and Joyce Henri Robinson, the assistant director of Penn State's Palmer Museum of Art, where the exhibition was scheduled to debut. The book celebrates the Rohrers, a Mennonite couple who have made significant contributions to their respective creative fields in both Pennsylvania and the broader world. Each was one of the first Mennonites to do so. Warren Rohrer was a painter (1927–1995) whose art has been exhibited in numerous prestigious venues such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jane Rohrer is a poet (born 1928) whose work appears in two collections, Life After Death (2002) and Acquiring Land (2020), as well as periodicals such as The American Poetry Review. The book contains reproductions of more than seventy of Warren's paintings sprinkled throughout, and the book's final section is a collection of thirteen of Jane's poems. Both selections span their creators' careers, and the book includes about a dozen photographs of the couple as well. Aside from the Rohrers' work, the book includes nine original chapters [End Page 232] plus the first examination of Warren's work in a mainstream art periodical, Steven Z. Levine's 1983 Arts Magazine essay. The chapters attempt to give readers a sense of the tension in the Rohrer's work caused by their sectarian religious background and their participation in secular, "worldly" fields by examining how the couple's work relates to these contexts. As Janneken Smucker writes in her chapter, "Neither Warren nor Jane found satisfying ways to negotiate the limits and boundaries that defined their [Mennonite] culture," but their art helped them to "survive" (79). Kasdorf and Reed begin the collection with an introduction that establishes the importance of Pennsylvania's geography, of the Rohrers' abandoned Mennonite faith, and of their collaborative marriage for their work. Following the introduction, there is a chapter by Reed that examines Warren's abstract painting within the broader context of the art world, focusing on the Modernist emphasis on the past that runs through his work, and a chapter by Kasdorf that recounts Jane's biography and describes how she began her poetic career in her forties during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Kasdorf highlights the importance of themes such as sexual desire, loss, and travel in Jane's work. The book's range of other contributors exemplifies its interdisciplinary nature. Historian Janneken Smucker examines Warren's work in relationship to Amish quilts, which utilize a similar plain aesthetic (the Amish split from Mennonites in 1693) and came to prominence as collectibles in the art world around the same time that Warren's work began gaining critical attention. Another historian, Sally McMurry, writes about changes in the farming landscapes of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania throughout the twentieth century. Warren grew up in the county and the Rohrers lived on a Lancaster farm for several decades of their marriage, and much of Warren's work references this space. McMurry quotes Warren's observation that "[t] he fact that my work looks different than most New York painters [sic] has to have something to do with the fact that what I see is different than what New York painters see" (98). Her chapter is one of the book's standouts because of how it treats the physical landscape that affects the emotional landscape of Warren's work, and to some extent...

Review: Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, by Laura Raicovich

Review: <i>Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest</i>, by Laura Raicovich

Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity

Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity

Excellent!: Textiles from Mali

Excellent!: Textiles from Mali

Continental Collaboration: Consulting, Institution Building, and Mentoring Across Africa

Continental Collaboration: Consulting, Institution Building, and Mentoring Across Africa

The role of museums, design accessibility and community concerns: A case study of the State Bank of Pakistan Museum & Art Gallery

ABSTRACT This article addresses strategies for community engagement and social inclusion in museum practice through a case study of the State Bank of Pakistan Museum & Art Gallery from the museum director’s point of view. Through the initial interior and visual design and the ongoing programmes design, the museum staff have sought to foster interactivity and accessibility that support the engagement of a diverse community of museumgoers. In this case study, specific design strategies are described which are used at the museum, as well as a range of interactive activities, from tours for the hearing impaired to the incorporation of local craft making into museum programmes. Through these actions, the museum works to support the community’s engagement with heritage as well as heritage’s development through community. Museums must be accountable to and supportive of communities because it is people’s active participation in museum activities that keeps heritage alive.

‘Light in the Temple’: The Influence of Mouseion and the New International Museology in the Rooms of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina

This article analyses the changes that took place in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (the National Museum of Fine Arts) of Argentina in the 1930s. Founded in 1895, it moved to a new building in 1933, leaving behind the chaotic display of the 19th-century pavilion that used to host its collections. The newly relocated museum then revealed a brand-new museography, which implied radical changes in its display methods and artwork selection. The main person responsible for this revamping was Atilio Chiáppori, its Director. An avid reader of Mouseion, he edited the Boletín del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, where he published articles – that he translated into Spanish himself – for the Argentinian public to read. Our article aims to understand the influence of the International Museums Office – International Council of Museum’s direct ancestor – and Mouseion in Argentina, taking the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes as a case study. We will trace the influence of the debates conveyed by this magazine in the 1930s to better comprehend the place of Argentina within the context of the birth of museography as we know it today, and within newly born multilateral organisations like the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. Along with the study of the Museum’s Boletín and its photographic archives, we will also dig into Mouseion’s pages and the proceedings of the famous 1934 Muséographie conference. By reviewing these sources together with Luz en el Templo, the memoir written by Chiáppori about his time as a museum director, we will try to understand the transformation of a 19th-century museum for the elite into a place of public education and debate.

Exhibiting city, region and Germanness: Erich Keyser and the State Regional Museum of Danzig History (1927–1939)

ABSTRACT This article explores the work of Erich Keyser, the creator and director of the State Regional Museum of Danzig History, which also functioned as the Museum of the Free City of Danzig. We discuss how Keyser conceptualised exhibitions, organised the collections and interacted with visitors. The article examines the way that Keyser envisioned the role of the museum as an educational and political space, where a transfer of knowledge took place, including right-wing and anti-Polish interpretations of the city’s past. In addition, the museum in Danzig (Polish: Gdańsk) serves as a case study for the analysis of the relationship between urban and rural space in city museums. The ambition of the exhibitions went beyond a representation of Danzig’s urban past, which led to an innovative attempt to combine urban and rural history in the frequently changing displays. Finally, the article discusses the significance of location for this city museum. It was somewhat exceptional, as it was a city museum located in a rural setting in the former Abbot’s Palace in the suburb of Oliva (Polish: Oliwa). Throughout we discuss the intersections of museology, political propaganda, education and nationalism in a city–state setting.

Hungarian Freemasons as “Builders of the Habsburg Empire” in Southeastern Europe

In the 1890s, Hungarian Freemasonry began to expand its sphere of influence in southeastern Europe. The establishment of lodges in the southeastern border areas and even outside the Kingdom of Hungary exemplifies this expansion. When devising explanations for this policy, the Hungarian Freemasons made use of colonial and imperial discourses to justify expansion into the “Orient” with reference to the alleged civilizing role they attributed to Freemasonry. They divided the world into two parts from a cultural-civilizational point of view: one where Freemasonry was already established and flourishing and another where this form of community and social practice was not yet known or established. This discourse was entangled with political, economic, and academic practices that were prevalent among the Hungarian Freemasons. Masonic activities and discourses therefore merit consideration in the cultural and social context of their time and analysis from the perspective of new imperial histories, especially since the importance of the discourses and political symbolisms used in the expansion and maintenance of imperial structures has already been pointed out by many historians and scholars of cultural studies within the framework of New Imperial History and postcolonial studies With a view to the undertakings of Hungarian Freemasons in the Balkans, this paper asks whether Hungarian Freemasons can also be considered “Builders of the Habsburg Empire.” This question is particularly relevant given that Freemasonry was only permitted in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy. Thus, Hungarian Freemasons acted as both national and imperial actors, and they did so independently of Vienna. As the framework for my discussion here, I focus in this article on the discourses and activities of the Symbolic Grand Lodge of Hungary and the contributions of the most relevant actors, such as the Turkologist Ignácz Kúnos and the journalist and deputy director of the Hungarian Museum of Commerce, Armin Sasváris.

Storytelling: Preservation at its Best

Cassie Chinn, Interim Executive Director of the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, and best-selling author of historical fiction, Jamie Ford share their passion for storytelling and the different ways they use this preservation tool to connect others to the Asian Pacific American experience and reflect on how sharing the history of physical places and objects can foster healing and increase the resiliency of our communities.

What’s up? EthnoConference : Conference of Directors of European Ethnographic Museums – European Ethnographic Museums’ Search for New Paths in the 21st Century

What’s up? EthnoConference : Conference of Directors of European Ethnographic Museums – European Ethnographic Museums’ Search for New Paths in the 21st Century