Infinite Variety, or, quilts as far as the eye can see

I meant to write about this earlier, but my spring break was awesome. Why, you ask? Oh, no real reason... just going to New York and attending a groundbreaking and amazing quilt exhibition on its closing day.*

The show was incredible — over 600 quilts exhibited at once, more than have ever been shown at one time. And the one unifying theme was color: they were all red and white. The quilts were on loan to the American Folk Art Museum from Joanna S. Rose, and the exhibition (which only lasted six days)** was paid for by her husband as a birthday gift. The real recipient, though, was the city of New York — Rose's husband paid to make sure the show was free to all visitors.

The quilts are all unique — even ones that were made with the same pattern have small differences. They are also all American, spanning in date from the late 18th century to the present day. The vast variety of quilts was amazing, but the truly fantastic thing about the show was the exhibition staging. Assembled in the Park Avenue Armory, the quilts were suspended from the ceiling in a series of cyclical pods. If that makes no sense, don't worry — it was this ridiculously overwhelming sensory experience that really can't be described. The pictures below only go so far to explain how fantastic it was. To be honest, I think I cried a little bit.

The American Folk Art Museum website describes it as a "magical yet ephemeral event." I couldn't agree more. I'll also add that in this crazy museum industry that I seem hell-bent on entering, there are certain shows that live on in people's memory. My professors still talk about "THAT" show, the one that blew them away or made them want to pursue curating as a career. Staged in the American Wing of the Met in the 1960s or at the Whitney in 1985, about art, furniture, basket-weaving, whatever... the thing these shows have in common is that they opened visitors' eyes to the potential of exhibition, to the creativity and power inherent to objects. This is one of those shows, I think, and it is definitely that show for me.







*Thanks, Lizz, for the heads-up via materialconcern! It was truly phenomenal.
** If you missed it, don't worry... there is talk about it being mounted again as a traveling exhibition.

Stupidity, atrocious calumny, infamous wickedness!

Google Translate is my new favorite toy.

As I type I am sitting in Winterthur's rare book room and (carefully) flipping my way through La Mode Nouvelle, a French fashion and political periodical printed in 1832. I'm looking for early 1830s fashion plates in order to compare the styles against French paper dolls from 1822 for a paper that I have due on Friday (oh, graduate school!), but I keep on coming up against very impassioned-looking sentences written in italics and with multiple exclamation points that just cry out for translating.

My current favorite? "Gens de la revolution, avez-vous prodique aux pretres assez de menaces et d'outrages?" Which, according to Google Translate comes out to something like: "People of the Revolution, do you have enough priests to lavishes upon threats and insults?" Somehow I think something was lost in translation.

So, I ask you, people of the revolution: DO you have enough priests to lavishes upon threats and insults? Inquiring minds want to know.

Boxes for everyone!

No, actually, I just made one. So a box for me, I guess.


His name is Walter. He is big enough to hold maybe five pens and a mini-stapler, but he's mine, all mine!

I ended up using linseed oil as a coating instead of shellac - it lets the grain of walnut shine through more. And if I keep using words like "grain," "dovetail," and "chisel," I might be able to fool you into believing that I know what I'm talking about. Which, clearly, I don't.

Still, I made a box! I guess if this museum curator thing fails, I can always fall back on a career in cabinetmaking. (The furniture conservators who supervised our box-making just got pounding headaches and they don't even know why.)

Dressing down

So, like most cultural institutions, the Chicago History Museum has a blog. It's a pretty neat resource and a great way to get an inside look into the dark and dirty workings of a museum. My favorite entry? The one about de-installing Chic Chicago, the huge costume exhibit that was up from summer of 2008 until last month.

I was part of the de-installation team, so if you want to get a look at the sort of work I do on a daily basis, check out the slideshow of the de-installation process. I show up about half-way through - see if you can spot me!

Okay, and my favorite picture from the entire slideshow is the one of me on my knees in front of a huge dress, called the butterfly gown. If it looks like I'm sticking my head and arms up under the skirt, that's because I am. We were trying to push a built-out support peice (what essentially amounts to a body pillow) through the torso of the gown to make sure it doesn't collapse under it's own weight in storage. A worthy endeavor, certainly, but one that made it look like I was giving the gown a very thorough pelvic exam. Say it with me now: "awkward."

"Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt."

Yesterday I handled clothes worn by this man. Some of his belongings are being added to the museum's collection, so I had the honor of examining his wool trousers, classic red socks, worn-out fedora and of course the outerwear of reporters everywhere, the Burberry trench coat. And the crowning jewel? His old-man's terry-cloth bathrobe.

It's kind of funny - if you're famous or important, eventually every aspect of your life, every mundane moment or embarrassing tchotchke, will be combed over with a magnifiying glass by well-meaning museum interns like myself. Once you die the materials of your life, the stuff that you surrounded yourself with, becomes the historical playground for museum professionals and academics attempting to reconstruct your life. What was perfectly normal and boring to you - that ratty stuffed bear from your childhood, your toothbrush - becomes a testament to your importance.

The moral of the story? If you plan on doing something important and influential with your life, make sure that you throw out all your granny panties, hole-y socks, and unflattering house dresses before you die. And for goodness sake, PLEASE clean your bathrobe. Those interns of the future have to get up close and personal with it, and they don't need to see the remains of your egg breakfast on it.

Next stop: Monticello

This* makes me think that I should be planning a trip to Thomas Jefferson's epic mansion, Monticello. In fact, I think every American Studies department should have a required course called "Long Road Running: A road trip through America's history." Or something equally enticing yet vague. I mean, c'mon, think about it: we'd start at Plymouth Rock and then hit a mixture of famous and underappreciated spots. It'd be awesome! Who's with me?!

*Thanks, Ben, for the link.

Adventures in Hot Glue Gunning, part 3

I finally got around to uploading photos from my shiny new camera (thanks, parents, for the birthday gift!) and discovered deep in the bowels of my memory card the pictures I had taken of my failed Gibson Girl paper wig.

Here she is, in all her 18th century/Linda Evangelista glory:


Bertha Honore Palmer, circa 1893 she is not. Not so bad, though, for some blotting paper, tissues, pantyhose and a glue gun, right? Just call me the MacGyver of the museum world.

Deep thoughts about history, feminism, clothes, and so on.

So I've been thinking a lot about this costume collection internship, and what makes it so different from my stint at Grey Towers (and isn't it funny that I've basically turned being a perpetual intern into my post-college career plan?), and while I was sorting through scads of wedding gown information today I think I finally put my finger on it.

I love history, right? Because it's tells us about ourselves or other people (or ourselves AND other people), and about where we come from and what we're heading for and ultimately, what we need to do (and avoid doing) to make the world a better place. And because it's awesome. But to be honest, the majority of history we encounter is dude-focused. And while I am certainly a fan of dudes, sometimes it gets a bit old.

And I don't mean this in a "damn the Man, down with the Patriarchy" sort of way (although really, damn the Man, down with the Patriarchy). It's just that the events that we memorize, the wars we commemorate, the nation-building we praise or deride, all of it reflects the work of men. And it's not just how we learn history in school, either. Look at the collection of any history museum and you'll see famous documents, antique guns, impressive furniture, important pieces of art - all made for or by men. And sure, there are pieces of a museum's collection that relate to women, but those are almost always a minority . Except, of course, in costume collections. At the Chicago History Museum, our costume collection is probably 85% women's clothes. The number of men's clothes are FAR outmatched by women's, and the women's clothes tell a much richer and deeper story. They span centuries, countries, ages and class levels.

Really, what I love about costume collections is not just that they showcase pretty clothes (though they do), or that they're amazing capsules of history (although they are.) What I love about them is that they don't just tell history - they tell the history of women. What a woman in a given time period valued, what she had to account for in her daily life, how she lived, even what she was called by those around here; it's all there in her dress.

More fake than a tan in February

It's still all weddings, all the time at the museum, and I've been wading through piles of gowns writing up document reports and taking photographs of them for the exhibition notebook. All of which is great, especially when I run into antique breast implants.

Or, if not breast implants, than certainly the world's original push-up bra. One of the wedding dresses I handled, a gorgeous cream silk taffeta from 1851 with three-quarter sleeves, a deep v-neck (which was pretty rare - most of the other wedding dresses we have from that decade have a wide bateau neck and cap sleeves), and some crazy diagonal ruching, also had built in breast-pads. The entire chest area was extra thick, with round pads made of cotton batting sewn into the bosom.

I guess the more things change, the more things stay the same. Female insecurity and the need to live up to the expectations of a society that objectifies the female form don't really disappear from century to century. I don't know why I'm surprised - after all, this is the same society that forced women into constricting corsets and advocated removing a rib to make them skinnier. I guess it's just because the big-breast thing seems like such a hallmark of the silicone age.

Of course, I could be overthinking this... maybe our anonymous 1850's bride was just sick of being part of the itty-bitty titty committee and decided to do something about. After all, it's her party, and she'll enhance her chest if she wants to.

Adventures in Hot Glue Gunning, part 1

So the museum just got some amazing new mannequins, right? And they're super-cool and adjustable in a way that the old mannequins aren't, and they're specific to a time-period (late 1800s - early 1900s, Victorian to Progressive era, to be exact) so they have a silhouette that is commonly referred to as "pigeon-breasted," and they're wonderful, amazing, fantastic, the best thing since sliced bread, etc.

HOWEVER... they don't have hair. This normally wouldn't be a problem, of course. Most of our mannequins don't even have heads, and the ones that do are just these blank ovals that we leave bare. But these new mannequins have surprisingly well-defined facial features, which means that having them be bald just makes them look creepily like aliens in really gorgeous hospital gowns. But we can't use real wigs made of fake colored hair, because the mannequins are sheet-white. Having some strange white lady with the suggestion of facial features but a full-on titian red updo would end up being as distracting as leaving them bald.

So what's a museum to do? Why, get their trusty intern to make a paper wig! So that's what I did today - constructed a paper Gibson Girl* updo out of white pantyhose legs, thick cardstock, and tissue paper. And A LOT of hot glue. I felt like the MacGuyver of the museum world.

*as reference, this is what a Gibson Girl hairdo looks like. It was apparently very difficult to achieve - women would form the big loose bun with the tiny topknot and then fill in their hair with tissue paper in order to maintain the look. So actually, my paper wig isn't so far off the mark, materials-wise.

Judging without experience is my forte, after all; hence: museumist.wordpress.com

In keeping with both what I'm best at (judging without any sort of experience or knowledge to back me up) and what I hope to get good at (museum curating/material culture exhibiting) I'm going to be maintaining a blog where I write about museum exhibiting and review new exhibitions. I'll still be keeping up with Shoshana Writes as my personal blog, but if you want to hear about local museum shows, my thoughts on museum exhibiting philosophy, and why I love early Federal style furniture, be sure to check out www.museumist.wordpress.com.