Treasure Tuesdays

One of my favorite parts of the internship has been Tuesday mornings. That's when museum volunteers from the Museum Guild come in and help with the Goble collection. Usually they are divided into two groups; I have one and Sam has the other. We have been looking at the Gobles and describing the content, the goal being to have a really accurate and complete list of search terms for the database. The majority of the members of the Guild are senior citizens, mostly women. They are into it, they research what we're looking at and every week they have a new bunch of questions. They are all well read and eager to learn. The best part is that they really enjoy themselves and we enjoy having them. If you are thinking little old Midwest housewives you couldn't be more off the mark. These ladies travel all over the world and keep up with technology. They love their museum, they do tours, they man the front desk, they are involved in fundraising, they are an amazing bunch. No museum could exist without their volunteers and we have the best.

The Workshop: A Pretty Cool Three Days

My last couple posts I have mentioned that something cool was happening last week, here's the scoop. For the last three summers the museum has hosted an event called Lakota Arts + Identities. It is a three day workshop/conference/seminar that is a cooperation between the museum and an organization called Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies AKA CAIRNS. CAIRNS is a group dedicated to both scholarly and social study of American Indian culture, as well as an educational support for teachers. It is made up of both Indian and non-Indian anthropologists, historians and educators. The purpose of the workshop is to help educators, scholars and museum folks learn how to interpret, use and exhibit Lakota art and artifacts in a respectful and accurate manner. for those that don't know, Lakota is the correct term to use when referring to the people often referred to as the Sioux. Well known Lakotas include; Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud and Black Elk. One of our presenters/instructors was Dr Craig Howe, an Oglala Lakota. The other was Dr Harvey Markowitz, a non-Lakota who lived and studied on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation. Some of the topics we covered were: Indians in movies, the lack of even general knowledge in South Dakota of the Lakota people, despite the fact that 20% of the land in SD is reservation land, as well as issues involved in museum's display of Indian items. For an idea of how limited the knowledge of the Lakotas is; Samantha, my fellow intern and history major , and I collaborated on an assessment or quiz on the subject and we scored 25%. We also learned some Lakota words and phrases, I really struggled.

Our main activity was getting to design, bulid and present an exhibit on a specific aspect of Lakota identity using objects from the museum's large collection of Lakota art and artifacts. This was where being a museum insider was fun. Sam, my boss Lisa and I pulled the items from storage and laid them out on long tables in our multipurpose room on Monday, the day before it got started and for the duration of the workshop we were the only ones allowed to touch any of them, with gloves of course. So whenever one of the four teams that we were divided into wanted to move anything they had to call one of us. Of course this was a bit of an advantage to the teams Sam and I were on. My team's assignment was an exhibit reflecting the idea of the Lakotas having a specific place within the physical space of their homeland. We tried to show how the Lakotas view of their place has evolved since being confined to reservations as well some of the constants of their sense of identity through sacred items, mainly the pipe. We used old photos, an old arrow, a farming tool, religious items, modern Lakota art and a pipe. We did a fifteen minute presentation to the group and though we weren't graded or judged, I feel we did very well.

It was an amazing experience that I am still thinking about. It was kind of a big deal to have the opportunity to attend and facilitate the workshop. We had people from all over the US and a Canadian Australian guy as well.I wanted to go last year but it is pretty expensive, it was free for me this year. It was my first time creating and curating an exhibit and I really loved it. It was also pretty cool to be an "insider"

My team's exhibit

A piece of modern art in our exhibit and a paragraph about our exhibit that I wrote.

A photo from 1930 of a Lakota family and their cabin, a hymn book with a beaded cover, a broken down old hoe.

A beautiful pipe and pipestem as well as two Lakota depictions of their homeland.

My Week In Solitary

I recently was the only one at work in my area, alone with access to collections storage and pretty much alone in one end of the basement of the museum. It was me and Mr Goble one on one. I surveyed the illustrations for four or five of his books, about a hundred all told. You would think it would get boring but it didn't. In fact I enjoyed really delving into his work, which continues to amaze me. I am noticing tendencies in how he does things. For example, when he includes wild animals in his pictures there are either one or there are pairs of them. Something I noticed earlier is that his illustrations are put together in a really interesting format that makes them  ready for the printer to use when producing the books. Since I worked in commercial printing at the time these books were being printed, I recognized what he was doing. He started with a hand drawn ink image of the black lines and shadows; then that was printed in a light blue called non-repro blue that would be invisible to a graphic arts camera and then he painted the color parts around the blue whic acted as a place holder for the black ink of the printing process. It's really ingenious. Nobody else in the museum had my printing experience so didn't quite understand what they were looking at. I should say that I think I understand his method; I am going to write him to find out if I am correct. My boss has asked if I would be willing to do a presentation on my summer with the Gobles to the Museum Guild. I said I would be happy to. I know, that doesn't really sound like me. In fact I did a presentation about my very first exhibit that I curated today. More on that later.

The black ink drawing

Color paint around non-repro blue

M-I-C-K-E-Y     a little detail Mr Goble snuck in

The Next Few Weeks After

Last time I mentioned working on paintings by Paul Goble. Our museum houses his entire body of work and the plan was to survey a random sample. As it turns out it was decided that because we have the entire life's work of a living painter and author and because of it's strong ties to the state, that every one of his pieces should be individually surveyed. That is going to be my job, I will be examining each one and evaluating it's condition and prioritizing those that need treatment. There's only about 600 of them, so should be a snap. I was the only one there last week so I got a lot done. His work is amazing, it's so precise and so well executed it is shocking when any tiny flaw shows up. If I wasn't looking at them under special lighting conditions through magnification, I would never have seen them. It won't be the only thing I work on this summer, but it does feel like my mission. I will post pictures soon. This week is a very cool event at the museum, tune in later this week for details.

First Couple Weeks Part II

A big part of my job is going to be working with a collection of illustrations by an artist named Paul Goble. He's a Brit who writes and illustrates books about Plains Indians. He is unbelievably precise, he does these tiny details that just don't seem like they could be done by hand. We have his whole body of work and the Gobles are one of the three main collections we are known for. The others are Harvey Dunn and Oscar Howe. I have to survey all of them in detail and create a condition report. I have to look really close, that explains the CSI look.

First Couple of Weeks Part I

So about two weeks ago I started my summer internship and I thought I might write a little about it as I go along. Some of this is going to be history/museum nerd type stuff that appeals to a pretty small audience. Hopefully it won't be too educational. This summer project has to do with conserving a part of the museum's works on paper collection. You might ask, what does that mean? Well, it is everything from paintings to photos to sketches and some other rather unique things that qualify as art somehow. The first day and a half was spent packing up an exhibit to be replaced by a new exhibit. This was a collection of really big, complex pieces of roku ceramics; I believe roku is Japanese for heavy, fragile and expensive. Amazingly I broke nothing, the head of collections, not so much. After this it was on to the real work, the works on paper. Basically it is me, another intern and the curator of collections going through the collection, checking them out and deciding what if anything we need to do to repair or prevent damage and make sure it is stored correctly. More or less, new homes for old art. The very first thing I worked with was a stack of plain old lined notebook paper with some random watercolor brushmarks; like you'd get cleaning a brush is what they looked like to me. They were just in a stack in a folder. I built a custom box and put sheets of super secret magic paper between the sheets and made notes online of what I'd done. luckily, I didn't find out until afterwards that each one of those little brushcleaners is worth $10,000.00. Yep, they gave me 80 grand worth of art to start with. I also made a super deluxe box for a mixed media piece, that is what's going on in the pictures.