Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. ...InDecolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples. She investigates how museums can honor an Indigenous worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypical representations, and speak the hard truths of colonization within exhibition spaces to address the persistent legacies of historical unresolved grief in Native communities.Lonetree focuses on the representation of Native Americans in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. Drawing on her experiences as an Indigenous scholar and museum professional, Lonetree analyzes exhibition texts and images, records of exhibition development, and interviews with staff members. She addresses historical and contemporary museum practices and charts possible paths for the future curation and presentation of Native lifeways.
Nature and culture Alberti, Samuel J. M. M
2017, 2017., 20171001, 2009, 2017-10-03
eBook
Nature and Culture asks how objects were collected and displayed in the twentieth century. It explores natural and cultural objects in the Manchester Museum, a major university collection. How did ...these specimens come to be there? What happened to them in the collection, and who used them?
Harlan Hubbard (1900–1988), a Kentucky writer, environmentalist, and artist, spent many years trying to rediscover and revive the vanishing language of landscape in his watercolor paintings. Known ...for their sense of drifting movement and their depiction of the natural way of life fondly associated with Hubbard, they inexplicably remain his least studied artworks, despite presenting some of the best evidence of Hubbard's place in the history of landscape painting. The Watercolors of Harlan Hubbard not only argues for Hubbard's place in the art historical canon but also highlights and analyzes the artist's own voice. In this unique collection, more than two hundred watercolors are interspersed with anecdotes from those who knew Hubbard or drew inspiration from his work, offering a personal meditation on a deeply influential artist and serving as an invitation to those who have yet to discover him.
Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings is the first complete translation of the well-known document produced at the court of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1125). Dated to 1120, the Catalogue is divided into ten ...categories of subject matter. Under Daoist and Buddhist Subjects, Figural Subjects, Architecture, Barbarian Tribes, Dragons and Fish, Landscape, Domestic and Wild Animals, Flowers and Birds, Ink Bamboo, and Vegetables and Fruit are biographies of 231 painters, ranging from famous early masters, such as Wu Daozi (ca. 685-758) and Li Cheng (919-967), to otherwise unknown artists of the Song-dynasty court, including fourteen eunuch officials and sixteen male and female members of the royal family. Titles of their pictures held in the palace collection are listed for each artist. These 6,396 paintings testify to the visual culture experienced by viewers of the twelfth century. The author's Introduction analyzes the Catalogue as a source of evidence about the formation of the Song-dynasty palace collection and argues that the majority of its pictures were already in the collection before Huizong's reign, as a result of conquest, confiscation, tribute, gift culture, collecting by earlier emperors, and the production of academy artists and regular officials at the Song court. Under Huizong's reign, around a thousand other pictures were added to the Catalogue through acquisition and reattribution.
While visitors to art and history museums may be there to simply enjoy the curated objects, the question of what is included (and excluded) in these collections and who has the power over this ...process echoes the struggle for inclusion that is so central to the African American experience. Since its inception, the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection® has played an important role in this struggle, seeking out objects that give voice to previously excluded experiences, and providing an alternative to the limits of institutional collections. Among the first scholarly books dedicated to a private African American collection, Rethinking America's Past: Voices from the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection both chronicles the reach of this important cultural collection and contributes to its project by sharing selected objects and stories with a broader audience. Essays range in subject from iconic African American artists, such as Loïs Mailou Jones and Beauford Delaney, to important historical figures such as Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, to individuals whose experiences might be lost to history but for the found objects that preserve their stories. Rethinking America's Past demonstrates how the African American story, from slavery through the present, is represented and can be actively remembered through the act of collecting. Rethinking America's Past will appeal to audiences interested in African American history as well as art history, but its real power is in linking the two, showing how important collections are in constructing and repairing historical narratives, and how in the words of editor Tim Gruenewald, "Collecting overlooked aspects of our past and sharing such collections enables a deeper understanding of the present moment, and facilitates a more inclusive and just future."
A textbook reserve program can be one way of helping students who are struggling with the high cost of textbooks, and this book spotlights a variety of examples that can be used as models.
Collecting the new Altshuler, Bruce; Altshuler, Bruce
2013., 20131024, 2013, 2005, 2006-01-01
eBook
Collecting the Newis the first book on the questions and challenges that museums face in acquiring and preserving contemporary art. Because such art has not yet withstood the test of time, it defies ...the traditional understanding of the art museum as an institution that collects and displays works of long-established aesthetic and historical value. By acquiring such art, museums gamble on the future. In addition, new technologies and alternative conceptions of the artwork have created special problems of conservation, while social, political, and aesthetic changes have generated new categories of works to be collected.
Following Bruce Altshuler's introduction on the European and American history of museum collecting of art by living artists, the book comprises newly commissioned essays by twelve distinguished curators representing a wide range of museums. First considered are general issues including the acquisition process, and collecting by universal survey museums and museums that focus on modern and contemporary art. Following are groups of essays that address collecting in particular media, including prints and drawings, new (digital) media, and film and video; and national- and ethnic-specific collecting (contemporary art from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and African-American art). The closing essay examines the conservation problems created by contemporary works--for example, what is to be done when deterioration is the artist's intent?
The contributors are Christophe Cherix, Vishakha N. Desai, Steve Dietz, Howard N. Fox, Chrissie Iles and Henriette Huldisch, Pamela McClusky, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Lowery Stokes Sims, Robert Storr, Jeffrey Weiss, and Glenn Wharton.
Mobile Museums Cornish, Caroline; Driver, Felix; Nesbitt, Mark
2021, 2021-04-19
eBook
Odprti dostop
Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. It brings together an impressive array of international scholars and ...curators from a wide variety of disciplines – including the history of science, museum anthropology and postcolonial history - to consider the mobility of collections. The book combines historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. Contributors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and through space. By foregrounding questions of circulation, the chapters in Mobile Museums collectively represent a fundamental shift in the understanding of the history and future uses of museum collections. The book addresses a variety of different types of collection, including the botanical, the ethnographic, the economic and the archaeological. Its perspective is truly global, with case studies drawn from South America, West Africa, Oceania, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK. Mobile Museums helps us to understand why the mobility of museum collections was a fundamental aspect of their history and why it continues to matter today. Praise for Mobile Museums 'This book advances a paradigm shift in studies of museums and collections. A distinguished group of contributors reveal that collections were not dead assemblages. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by vigorous international traffic in ethnography and natural history specimens that tell us much about colonialism, travel and the history of knowledge – and have implications for the remobilisation of museums in the future.’ – Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge 'The first major work to examine the implications and consequences of the migration of materials from one scientific or cultural milieu to another, it highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of collections and offers insights into their potential for future re-mobilization.' – Arthur MacGregor
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