What do world art curators do in lockdown?

Rachel's desk (and coworker) while working from home.

A guest blog from Rachel Heminway Hurst, Curator of World Art, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove and MEG events officer.  Rachel tells us what she's been up to in lockdown, if you'd like to let us know about your lockdown experience then get in touch!

Towards the end of March I was gearing up for spring conferences, research visits, holiday activities,busy juggling multiple project commitments, with core collections work responsibilities that are on-going and seemingly never ending at times, and will no doubt feel a familiar scenario for most museum staff! When all of a sudden we went into lockdown. I left my office as usual on Monday 16th March thinking I would be back there the next day and haven’t set foot in my office, the museum or the stores since. It still felt like winter then, and now we are enjoying full summer weather and have just passed the longest day of the year. 

 

Before the lockdown, I was feeling quite overwhelmed by the number of commitments ahead of me, when all of a sudden everything just ground to a halt. One by one events were cancelled, researchers and project partners stopped emailing, our museum postponed moving to Trust on April 1^st 2020, and all the competing deadlines just melted away and everything was ‘postponed’, and not just work, it felt like life had been postponed. 

Like many people in the UK, I developed a mild case of the corona virus during the first week of lockdown, and spent 6 weeks on a bit of a rollercoaster of good and not so good days. My head was foggy during this time and I could only concentrate on one thing at a time and gave up trying to multitask and carry on working as normal. I decided that this was an opportunity to focus on just one task, and finish something I had been working on without much success since 2016. 

I usually work from home one day a week and keep a lot of digital work files on my home computer, and I also have a freelance colleague and project curator, Kathleen Lawther, who is tech savvy unlike myself! So we set about completing a web resource that we have only had the time to work on in a piecemeal way up to now. The lockdown allowed me to focus clearly on one project and one goal, and this felt really liberating.

Myself and Helen Mears, Keeper of World Art have been working on the Fashioning Africa Project since 2015, we have been collecting garments, textiles and art that reflect fashion and style in post 1960s Africa and Africa UK diaspora, this work had been guided by an external Collecting Panel. It turned into a huge but extremely rewarding project, including working with numerous partners and donors, hosting many events and papers given at conferences, some objects from the new collection have featured in displays at Brighton Museum, and some objects will be going on loan. But creating our web resource has at last given us a platform on which to share the new collection and most importantly the stories that accompany these objects.

Working with the Collecting Panel meant we were guided by people who are specialists in African Fashion both through personal experience and through academic training. Their input enabled us to source objects that reflected the personal styles and stories of individuals as well as designers and specific communities. Our focus was on building a collection where individuals voices and stories were told, and we collected photographs of donors wearing their outfits, testimonies, quotes, pamphlets and pieces of creative writing that all accompanied the outfits. As well as film footage and oral histories.

We have collected over 400 objects and although we haven’t yet finished professionally photographing them all or processing all of the accompanying media, creating the web resource has enabled us to provide access to a large number of them with their accompanying stories. If it were not for being in lockdown and being able to work on this in a sustained way and daily over the last few months, creating this resource would not have been possible, and this would have been a missed opportunity. I also feel as if I would be letting people down, people trusted us and offered their objects and stories and wanted to share these. When finishing an interview with Ewe kente weavers and twins Fred and Richmond Akpo in Ghana, I asked if there was anything else they wanted to tell us or share and they said ‘We just want people to know we are here and what we do’. 

This work has also afforded me the time to make contact with donors and partners to check information with them, and through this contact, a chance to check in and catch up with one another. So yes other things haven’t got done, which is hugely frustrating - we don’t have collections database access at home and haven’t been able to access the stores or facilitate events and the uncertainty over budgets and resources means other projects are delayed. But I feel that I have really benefitted from this period of time to take stock, to focus on this important work, gather everything together and process it, and get something finished, and I am really pleased to be able to share the results. The question is now, when things begin to pick up and gather momentum, how do I sustain this focus and clarity? I do know that I will make a concerted effort to try and plan in blocks of time to enable this type of important work to happen.  

Take a look at the web resource.

Rachel Heminway Hurst, Curator of World Art, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.

‘Such intimate relations’: on the process of collecting string figures and the paradigm of participant observation fieldwork

The inaugural Kings College Australian National Fellows Seminar is taking place on Wednesday 8 May 2019, 18:00 – 20:00 BST

Kings College London Bush House

Bush House South East

Room (SE) 101

London

WC2B 4BG

Dr. Robyn McKenzie  will speak on ‘Such intimate relations’: on the process of collecting string figures and the paradigm of participant observation fieldwork

She writes:

The publication of Haddon and Rivers’ article “A method of recording string figures and tricks” in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Man in 1902, led to a knowledge of a few types, and ability to record others becoming part of the anthropologist’s tool kit. Haddon attributed much of his fieldwork success to his knowledge of string figures as a medium for interacting with people and creating rapport. This paper focuses on his 1914 trip to the Torres Strait and New Guinea with his daughter Kathleen, and her account of her own experiences collecting string figures in the unpublished manuscript ‘An English Girl in New Guinea’. On this trip the Haddons visited Malinowski, then on the island of Mailu, occasioning a comparison between the two men’s approaches in the field.

I argue that the practice of collecting string figures in many ways confounds distinctions that are made between the surface ethnography of the nineteenth century survey approach to fieldwork and the depth of the intensive study as it developed into the classical paradigm of participant observation in the twentieth century. By looking at just what was involved in collecting string figures I show how it pre-empts the ‘somatic turn’ in anthropology of the 1980s when Michael Jackson for example recommended ‘using one’s body in the same way as others in the same environment’ as a ‘methodological strategy’ for mediating anthropological insights. Above all, I argue, it established an immediate intimacy of relationship—a mutual sympathy—the sought-after goal of the participant observation method.

Dr. Robyn McKenzie is a Research Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. She initially trained in Art History at the University of Melbourne. She has published extensively on contemporary Australian art. She was art critic on The Age newspaper in Melbourne for a number of years in the mid-1990s and from 1996–2002, was editor of LIKE, Art Magazine. Her PhD, completed in 2016, looked at a collection of mounted string figures made in Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land in 1948, that is in the Australian Museum, Sydney. Robyn is currently the inaugural Australian National Fellow at the Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College, London.

MEG event: Trip to Intrepid Women

Zena McGreevey discusses Beatrice Blackwood

The most recent MEG event was a visit to Intrepid Women: Fieldwork in Action,1910-1957 an
exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.   The exhibition was curated by Joanna Cole, Zena McGreevy and Julia Nicholson and we were very lucky to be given a tour of the exhibition by Zena and Julia and to have the chance to talk with all three of them over lunch.    

 

 

The exhibition focussed on six women who all contributed significant collections to the Pitt Rivers museum.   Each women had her own section which featured a mixture of photography, film footage and archival material alongside objects from the collection.  The exhibition was arranged chronologically but it was possible to approach the exhibition from either end or to pick and choose which individuals to focus on as each profile works as a standalone exhibit.

 

The first woman featured was Barbara Freire-Marreco one of three people to enrol on the Oxford Anthropology Diploma when it was founded in 1906 and the only one to be awarded a Distinction.  It was particularly good to hear about Makereti a woman from New Zealand with a Maori mother and an English father.  She worked as a tour guide and ambassador for Maori culture around Rotorua before marrying an English man and moving to Oxford.  Her collection is mainly made up of her own possessions which she bought with her to the UK. The third women is perhaps the best known of all of them, Beatrice Blackwood.  During the 1920s she undertook fieldwork in Canada, USA (including spending time in the same Pueblo communities as Freire-Marreco) and New Guinea before beginning work at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1935.  

 

Julia Nicholson and MEG members

Highlights from Elsie McDougall’s collection of textiles from Mexico and Guatemala were beautifully displayed alongside drawings and diagrams of the techniques used and photographs of the weavers.  These textiles contrasted nicely with those collected by Ursula Graham in the Naga Hills.  Graham’s collection included a wide variety of object types with photography and some early colour films.  Neither of these women considered themselves anthropologists but nonetheless there collections and diligent records have made important contributions to the field.  The exhibition ends with film footage made by Audrey Butt Colson while she was doing fieldwork in the Upper Mazaruni District of Guyana in the 1950s.  The film was intended as a teaching tool but her work continues to be used by Akawaio people to support their claim for legal ownership of their ancestral lands.

 

It was particularly good to attend the exhibition as part of a MEG event as it gave us a chance to talk in detail with the curators and understand some of the issues they faced putting on the exhibition.  These included practical considerations like the accessibility of some of the collections and how they worked as a team as well as intellectual and ethical issues.  For example, Zena emphasised the importance of the manuscripts and archives in the collection that relate to the women and the meticulousness of their record keeping.  We debated over lunch whether these women had been overlooked because they did not come up with any grand overarching theories and whether this should now be regarded as a strength of their work as their extensive notes on a wide range of subjects, and not in support of a particular view, make them more useful to contemporary researchers.  Julia discussed the ethics of choosing objects for use in marketing and the decision not to use spiritual objects in this way.   I was particularly keen to hear about all the women who didn’t quite make the cut as it seemed like the curators were spoilt for choice!