Third Thursday

Unfortunately last week I became sick with bronchitis so I couldn't work in the library as much as I would have liked. I was able to make it a full day for the "Third Thursday" open house. For this month we were exhibiting maps of Mexico to go along with an MFA student's final project that was going on in the room next door. The student's name was Aaron Johnson-Ortiz and the name of his exhibit was "Exile & Utopia." He wrote a book about a little known attempt at an early Mexican revolution that took place within the United States, and the maps from the Map Library were a large component of his research. He purposely opened his show at the same time that the Map Library featured their "Third Thursday" open house, and I find this to be an interesting choice. While working at the Kelsey Museum I learned about another MFA student who made a similar decision. This student is a sculptor and has developed a piece that is purposely meant to deteriorate and fall apart in a short amount of time. A large component of their piece is its context as this artist wanted to feature this piece amongst the other artifacts in the Kelsey Museum, and display it in a case just as if it were an artifact in the museum's collection. I absolutely love this idea because it brings to question the context of a museum, and what that means to us when we're viewing objects. There are so many directions that museums can head in, yet they have generally remained the same over the years. Mixing modern art with antiquities may be confusing but may also lead us to new thought that we may not have expected when entering the museum. I believe that the museum itself can be a piece of art to be viewed, and there is a lot of room for creative innovations within the industry.

Crunch Time

This week I continued to research items for the exhibit. We're a little nervous because I guess the exhibit is coming up in a few weeks, and the professors haven't been helping out as much as we'd hope. I went to a lecture by Julie Fremuth who is the rare books and paper conservator for the Clements Library. Her lecture was especially interesting, and I was able to talk to her afterwards and she was extremely kind. While I was in the Clements library I was able to check out a little bit of the new exhibit for the Native Americans. It was helpful to see how they displayed their books and created their labels. I've recently been exploring the Clements Library website and they have online exhibits. This is interesting because generally I feel like exhibits are important because you actually get to see the objects, but with this online exhibit there are very enlarged detailed images that actually allow you to better explore the objects than if they were in a case. The other thing that is interesting about the online exhibit, is that there would never be a need to remove it, so it will forever be accessible. The online exhibit concept is very interesting, but I would never hope for it to replace the real thing. On Thursday, while I was doing research in Special Collections, I ran into the paper conservator for the graduate library, Cathy Baker, and I was able to talk to her a little bit about the exhibit we're creating. She's going to have to prepare the objects for exhibit, and I really have no idea what that entails and she has agreed to involve me in the process. There is supposedly an amazing conservation lab at the Buhr facility on South Campus. This is really exciting for me, because in the end I'll have been able to see all angles of the process of developing an exhibit. I really had no idea how much work it was going to be!