S.J. Redman's Blog
Posted by S.J. Redman
This site deals with museums of every site and stature, from the Louvre to conceivably, the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum. The writer will write for a readership of both tourists and museum professionals. This site also deals with the historical studies aspect, including such topics as preservation, re-enactments, historical costuming, and careers in history. The writer must have a passion for, and knowledge of these topics and would ideally have some museum work experience.
Writers must bring their topic to life, have strong writing skills and write one original, focused, and timely 250- 400-word article/week as well as one promo 200-word blog entry on the topic homepage/week. Compensation is US$2.00 per 1000 page views of all material authored by the writer subsequent to signing the contract.
For more details on the job requirements, compensation, and application procedures, visit our Write For Suite101.com page.
Posted by S.J. Redman
In the late 1970'?s, the National Socialist Party of America, an offshoot of the American Nazi Party announced that it wanted to hold a march and rally in the town of Skokie, Illinois. Skokie, which has been the traditional home of a large percentage of Chicagoland'?s Jewish population, and the home to a large number of Holocaust survivors, was deeply disturbed by the American Nazi Party's attempts to march in their city and made repeated efforts to block the rally. At the outset of a significant court battle in recent American history, the American Civil Liberties Union, led by a Jewish lawyer, represented the American Nazi Party in the case of National Socialist Party vs. Village of Skokie. Eventually, the Nazi party was allowed to march in Skokie, yet they were barred from showing or wearing the swastika. After the rally, the American Nazi Party started to disintegrate and its leader Frank Collin was later charged and convicted of sexually abusing young boys in 1980. It was also revealed that Collin himself had rejected his own Jewish ancestry.
With such a large number of Holocaust survivors, and their families, residing in Skokie, combined with the Chicago suburbs more recent history, it seems only natural that the town would decide to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, on which it broke ground on June 22nd.
Local ties to Chicago area residents stand to make this institution both unique and deeply powerful. The museum, which is set to open in June 2008, is scheduled to exhibit artifacts such as a brick from a gas chamber at Auschwitz, a forged ID card from a member of the Jewish Underground, a blanket used to hide a child while being smuggled out of a ghetto, and examples of ghetto money.
You can <ahref="http://www.chicagosuntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-holocaust22.html">read a full Chicago-Sun Times article on the museum here.
Also, you can visit the <ahref="http://www.chicagosuntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-holocaust22.html">Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center's web site here.
<ahref="http://museumhistorystudies.suite101.com/article.cfm/museums_and_politics">In an earlier article, I discussed various controversies surrounding museums and how it could potentially help museums be relevent.
Posted by S.J. Redman
With the first round of the 2006 World Cup in full swing, I thought it might be fun to take a closer look at the National Soccer Hall of Fame and Museum in Oneonta, New York. Unfortunatly, American soccer took a bit of a step backward with a 3-0 loss to the Czech Republic.
The museum, which was established in 1979 has a mission statement of, "Dedicated to the sport of soccer in America by celebrating its history, preserving its legacy, inspiring its youth and honoring its heroes, for generations to come." The actual Hall itself as an organization was established well before the current building was constructed in 1950.
The museum, as well as the website, provides visitors with a wealth of information about the history of soccer in the United States. The website notes that, "The Hall of Fame is home to the nation's soccer archives, which, with more than 100,000 items, comprises one of the largest collections of soccer artifacts and records in the world."
The webpage also notes the recent history of the museum facility itself, "From 1979 until 1998 the museum was located in downtown Oneonta. During the early 1990s more than 60 acres of land were purchased and four world-class soccer fields were constructed at its present location on the outskirts of Oneonta. Then, in 1995, the Hall was awarded a $4.5 million dollar grant from the State of New York to begin the design and development a dedicated museum on that site. In 1998, the U.S. Soccer Foundation pledged $1 million towards the new facility and a major fundraising campaign was undertaken. That campaign generated over $7 million for the construction of the first phase of the National Soccer Hall of Fame. It culminated in the current 40,000 square foot, state-of-the-art, museum facility, which was officially opened its doors on June 12, 1999."
Posted by S.J. Redman
In my article this week, I discussed the fact museums can be politically charged and controversial. Many of these controversies stem from the fact that the issues, either historic or contemporary are simply misunderstood. The efforts of two museums focusing on African-American history and culture will attempt to combat much of this misinformation pertinent to Black history and culture in the United States. Earlier this week, a Washington Post article discussed the fundraising efforts for a new United States National Slavery Museum. Also appearing this month in Smithsonian Magazine was an article announcing that a site has been selected for the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).
Both museums are attempting to raise funds in rather creative fashions. The United States National Slavery Museum hosted a banquet which featured attractions from choirs to comedians. The NMAAHC, in conjuncture with the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Culture Heritage will present a concert series highlighting musical traditions from New Orleans.
In addition to the concert series, the NMAAHC plans to raise awareness for their efforts by helping develop a traveling exhibition with the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition, "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraiture", will feature photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Gordon Parks and prominent subjects such as Sojourner Truth and Nat King Cole.
Posted by S.J. Redman
On May 31st, the Washington Post reported that the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum were both scheduled to drop their admissions fees because of an $800,000 gift from the city and county. A private donor chipped in $30,000 toward making admission free museums possible. In recent years both museums had been charging around $10 for admission.
The bold idea should allow not only a greater number of visitors to explore the museums, but also increase the socio-economic diversity of those visiting the institution. Museums in Baltimore noted that they were impressed with the way attendance has increased at museums such as the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Cincinnati Art Museum after admission fees were eliminated.
Both museums projected to lose about $240,000 from turnstyle fees in the move. Additionally, the Washington Post reports that the museums plan to spend about half a million dollars promoting the new policy. The institutions hope to meet the shortfall by approaching various foundations, corporations, and private donors for funding.
If the museums are successful after the decision to eliminate admission fees, it might continue the wave of institutions in the United States making the move. It is also interesting to note that certain museums, such as the Smithsonian, are contemplating heading in the exact opposite direction.
Posted by S.J. Redman
Earlier this week, the Washington Post offered its readers a good tip; if you are in the D.C. area and plan on heading to the National Gallery, you can call ahead and schedule an appointment to look at works in one of the museum's print study rooms. Or you can simply explore the collection by viewing the museum's new exhibit, "Master Drawings From the Woodner Collections".
The exhibit, according to the Washington Post article, "selects more than 100 wonderful works donated over the past 15 years by the Woodner family of New York". Woodner was a real-estate developer and avid collector of works by artists such as Leonardo, Durer, Raphael, Rembrandt, Fragonard, and Goya. The display also includes works by lesser known artists such as Andrea del Sarto, who the Washigton Post suggests, "ought to be a star but has been overlooked".
Most museum visitors, as the Post article alludes to, are simply unaware of the massive behind the scenes holdings or collections of most large museums. While some museums have attempted to display a larger percentage of their collections via methods such as visible storage, most museums still only display a small fraction of their collections.
Museums like the National Gallery should be applauded for attempting to innovate methods by which museum visitors and scholars alike can gain access to these collections. Perhaps other museums will learn from the success of the National Gallery and attempt to offer easier public access to study collections such as the National Gallery's.
Posted by S.J. Redman
Opening nights for new museum exhibits can range from moderately exciting to downright boring. More often than not, the press has been invited, and a few cameramen choose to attend to take a few token photos of the new displays. The scholars behind the show are typically in attendance, and they mingle about and answer a few questions. Most scholars, however, fail to achieve celebrity status outside of their discipline. While the opening of new contemporary art galleries might offer an exception to this rule, it is a relatively small percentage of people that can recognize the faces of significant contemporary artists. A few exhibits, however, feel more like movie premiers than exhibit openings. The opening of a new National Museum of American History Exhibit honoring the 50th anniversary of the Muppets must have felt like one of the more exciting exhibit openings.
While famed archaeologists or historians might be hard to recognize, most everyone will remember the features of Kermit and the gang. In the Washington Post article (registration required) covering the exhibits opening, museum director Brent D. Glass described how excited he was to have the Henson artifacts on display this summer, when large crowds are expected to attend.
Many of Henson's relatives as well as those who worked with the puppeteer in his many projects were in attendance. Those at the event spoke about the impact that the projects had on them as well as Henson's broader impact on American culture.
Those who grew up watching the Muppet Family and other Henson creations in all of their wild and creative incarnations will no doubt be excited to see the exhibit and there is little argument that Jim Henson's creations have played a significant role in entertaining generations of Americans.
Posted by S.J. Redman
This week, the ArtsJournal reported that, "Rep. James Moran (D-Va.) suggested that the Smithsonian Institution charge $1 for admission". The Smithsonian has been struggling financially lately and news stories surrounding corporate proposals to subsidies museum projects and the announcement that the museum's Arts and Industries Building has been named to the National Trust for Historic Places' 2006 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places have not helped the Institution's public image. While the Smithsonian's struggles are disconcerting and perhaps reflective of much larger national trends, their impending crisis should be seen as an opportunity to set the tone for American heritage preservation in the 21st century.
I agree with Tyler Green's assessment in the ArtsJournal that proposals like Rep. James Morgan's pitch to charge a small admission fee are simply, ". . . dim-witted, stop-gap measures that fail to address the Smithsonian's substantial needs." In order to truly fix the Smithsonian, as well as the financial crisis facing museums across the United States, Congress, as well as the broader American public need to ask themselves about the priorities of their own society. Recent reports regarding the makeup of museum audiences should be deeply disturbing for Congress and should serve as a warning for the American public against placing our national heritage out of reach for anyone.
The fact that the Smithsonian has started looking to corporations for more significant support is not evidence that the Smithsonian is greedy, or willing to sell itself, it is substantiation towards the reports that the Institution is grossly under funded and needs the support of both its government and its people.
The makeup of those visiting museums should reflect our national population, and the museum itself should be a point of national pride, not shame. The city of Washington D.C. was designed to impress foreign visitors, however, a lack of commitment to premier museums would be an embarrassment to American's everywhere.
Posted by S.J. Redman
Earlier this week, the New York Times declared that, "Three of six men charged in the 2004 theft of Edvard Munch's paintings 'The Scream' and 'Madonna' were declared guilty today in Oslo District Court and sentenced to prison terms of four to eight years." The article goes on to describe the theft in some detail:
"What no one disputes is that two masked robbers yanked the paintings violently from the walls of the Munch Museum here on Aug. 22, 2004, as about 80 visitors cowered on the floor or milled about obliviously in side galleries. The robbers - one of whom threatened museum employees with a .357-caliber handgun - carried the heavily framed paintings to a black Audi station wagon, driven by an accomplice, and then disappeared."
Thefts of art or artifacts from museums, while not exactly commonplace, are common enough to warrant rather high level security for museum collections including bulletproof glass display cases, fingerprint I.D. access for behind the scene storage rooms, and, of course, on-site security guards. Museums not only keep track of objects that have been stolen from their exhibits and store rooms, they have started to report art thefts to international databases, such as the Art Loss Register - which has offices in the U.K., U.S., and Germany. Databases like the Art Loss Register allow auction houses and museums to explore whether or not an object has been reported as stolen before they send it to auction or attempt to purchase it or accept it for donation.
Cases like the theft from the Munch Museum indicate that the private art market is desperate enough for certain, high profile, pieces of art that private collectors are willing to pay large enough sums of money up front to sponsor daring robbery attempts from museums across the world. While museums and auction houses have started to take steps to avoid fueling the black market for art and artifacts by purchasing them, private collectors desperate enough to stoop to stealing from public institutions to build their collections will continue to harm museum collections all over the world.
The Munch case is proof; however, that crime does not always pay, as two of the three convicted men have been order to pay the city of Oslo $121 million, the combined insured value of the still missing paintings.
Related Suite101.com articles:
Buyer Beware! Part II: Fakes and Reproductions
By Barbara Nicholson Bell (see also the topic Antiques and Collectibles)
and
Stolen fossils are in the news again. What effect does this have on science, and what can you do to prevent it?
By Beverly Eschberger (see also the topic Paleontology)
For more about the theft of art and antiquities:
Wikipedia's entry on art theft offers some good general information about the subject as well as notes about a handful of high profile cases.
The Christian Science Monitor recently ran an article about the looting of archaeological sites and art theft from private collections - click here to read.
Posted by S.J. Redman
In March 2006, the University of Chicago published a study which found that museums in the Chicago area are not attracting diverse crowds. The crowds that pass through Chicago's turn-styles, "are disproportionately white, educated and affluent". The study included The Art Institute of Chicago and The Field Museum of Natural History.
Now what is going on here? The first thing that both the media and museum professionals recognized is the fact that museums in major metropolitan areas have been increasing their prices rather consistently over the past few years. While price gouging would be an easy, if clearly overly simplistic, case for the media to make, almost all non-profits across the country have struggled since 2001. The price of a college-education has gone out of reach for most families since that date as well, for example.
In reality, government funding has either declined or stayed at or near their 2001 levels over the past few years, and many museums have been forced to gradually charge more for admission to keep up with cost.
So is it fair to say that museums are just for the rich? As is often the case, the answer is far more complicated than many will lead you to believe. Prices for most public outings have skyrocketed in the past few years. Going to a baseball game as a family, for example, has become more difficult over the past twenty-five years.
I would like to try to frame this discussion in a slightly different fashion. In discussing the diversity of museum audiences, it is clear that museums, and the state and federal governments that support them should be very concerned with the findings of this study. That said, however, I think it would be fair to argue that many of our popular conceptions of scientific, historic, or artistic ideas come from museums. If a child takes just one trip to a natural history museum, seeing a dinosaur first hand will help build his paradigm for an understanding of paleontology he will carry for the rest of his life.
Museums should be affordable, and their attendance should reflect the diversity of the people in the city or region they are meant to serve - not just the "upper crust" of the people in the area.
Posted by S.J. Redman
For some time now, those interested in the museum world have been following Peru's efforts to have artifacts from Hiram Bingham's 1911 expedition to Machu Picchu returned from the Yale Peabody Museum.
The Yale Daily News recently printed a rather in depth look at the controversy, including an interesting quote by the influential archaeologist Lord Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University, "The position of Yale, as reported, seems a very contradictory one. . .If it's a loan, then it's legally the property of the lender. I find the whole thing breathtakingly arrogant."
The article does a rather good job of hitting on many of the important issues. In a debate such as this one, people involved with the collections will no doubt bring up their safety. People advocating for the British Museum and its decision not to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, for example, have used similar arguments in the recent past.
The article continues by quoting Yale archaeologist Richard Burger as stating, "Peru has a long history of problems in terms of security of its' collections. . ."
The Yale Daily News noted that Peru's National Museum was recently the victim of a robbery involving over 4,000 artifacts.
Pointing out that the artifacts may be safer in one country or another, however, has no legal bearing, and while Burger's concerns over the safety of the artifacts are interesting, there is little doubt that a court would not give that fact much consideration. Both Yale and Peru argue that the documents surrounding various agreements between the government of Peru and Bingham indicate that their side should be awarded custody of the artifacts.
The Yale Daily News article concludes by noting that, ". . . even if the lawsuit is filed, neither party -- given the utter significance of the precious artifacts in question -- will concede easily."
Machu Picchu is a significant archaeological site on many levels. Not only is it important as a part of Peru's cultural heritage, but Yale will certainly argue that it has played an important role in the intellectual development of its' institutions' more recent history as well. Exactly where and how many of the spectacular finds from Machu Picchu will make an impact in the future is unclear at this point. One can only hope that the issue is resolved in a constructive, intelligent, and fair manner.
Posted by S.J. Redman
The National Museum of American History (NMAH) has just announced that it will close for nearly two years to redesign many of its exhibit halls and build a new gallery for the Star-Spangled Banner, the Washington Post is reporting.
According to the Washington Post article, the main purpose of the redesign is to make the museum more chronological and give the audience a more cogent 'take home' message. This is an interesting move for the Smithsonian, since the recently opened National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) relies less on a chronological approach than a series of thematic approaches. This difference may be due in part to the background of those curating each institution; historians are mostly responsible for running the NMAH, whereas many of the curators of the NMAI possess a background in anthropology.
The Washington Post article quotes Gary Haney, a partner in the architectural firm managing the redesign of the NMAH as saying, "You will be able to identify the purpose of the museum as you walk through the door."
The pressures to deliver a more cogent, clear, and understandable message to museum visitors will no doubt prove to be a difficult challenge for the curators at the NMAH. Attempting to package a generalized and simplistic message about the history of the United States is a potentially dangerous move. Building a framework for the museum that a wide-variety of audiences can understand could possibly result in an overly simplistic history that would assuredly spark criticism from historians across the country. The curators at the NMAH will need to take great care in attempting to present the history of the United States with balance and attentiveness to some of the more difficult episodes in the history of America if they want to avoid such criticism.
Historians and museum professionals across the nation will be keeping a close eye on how this story develops.