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Posts from the ‘traditional arts indiana’ Category

Sep 11

“At Home and Abroad: Reflections on Collaborative Museum Ethnography at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures”

I am happy to note the publication of a paper in Museum Anthropology reporting on, and considering, the work of two collaborative projects of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University. This piece is: Jason Baird Jackson (2019) “At Home and Abroad: Reflections on Collaborative Museum Ethnography at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures.” Museum Anthropology 42 (2): 62-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12210

Experiments in collaboration are at the heart of contemporary museum anthropology and museum folklore. If you are interested in issues of collaboration in museums of ethnography and world cultures, take note of the upcoming Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA) biannual meeting being held in Santa Fe, New Mexico on the theme of “Museums Different” (September 19-21, 2019). [I wish I could go!] Collaboration was also the theme of the recent conference that the MMWC co-hosted with its partners in Beijing. The program of that conference on “Collaborative Work in Museum Folklore and Heritage Studies” is available online on the American Folklore Society website (see Conference Seven here).

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I usually work hard not to publish behind a paywall. There were CMA-suporting reasons that I did so in this case. Be in touch if I can be of help on that score.

Apr 8

Help! Really. The Mathers Museum of World Cultures Needs You!

An Indiana University event known as #IUDay is nearly here. Scheduled for Wednesday, April 10, 2019, #IUDay is a celebration of Indiana University. It is a day of special events, of sharing stories of the university, and for gathering together friends and supporters to work together to achieve special goals. Last year, in the days right before, and on, #IUDay, sixty-one friends donated to the Mathers Museum’s first #IUDay crowdfunding campaign. Working together, they contributed funds to enable us to launch Traditional Arts Indiana’s Indiana Heritage Fellowship program. Ours was a successful first effort. It was so successful that the Indiana University Foundation encouraged us to take on two campaigns this year, a fact that means that we are seeking to raise more than double the level of funding we received last year. This is an exciting prospect, but it is also daunting. I hope that everyone who reads this post can help us meet our goals. They are good goals. Let me describe them.

Building on the success of last year’s effort launching the Indiana Heritage Fellowship program, we are this year seeking support for its companion program, also new. This is the TAI Master-Apprentice program. The goal here is $2500 and, as of the moment that I am writing this, we have raised $567 from 11 generous donors. With two days to go, we really need your help. Please consider making a gift large or small. Last year 61 donors supported our efforts and we are eager to (=need to) increase this number this year. The good news is that, when successful, this effort will do great work across Indiana communities, providing resources and support for diverse tradition bearers to transmit their skills and knowledge to eager apprentices. This work benefits Indiana communities, the state and ultimately the whole country. If you would like to learn about the first class of TAI masters and apprentices, check out this year’s booklet and learn about the beadwork artists, netmakers, drummakers, ironsmiths, and ballet folklórico performers working together this year.

To learn more and to, if you chose, make a contribution, you can find this campaign site here: https://iufoundation.fundly.com/support-the-next-great-folk-artists

Our other campaign aims to fund K-12 field trips to visit the Mathers Museum on campus in Bloomington. Field trips are an impactful highlight for most school students, but they have become increasingly rare for most students, as budget cuts continue to take their toll. Visits to the Mathers Museum introduce students to cultural diversity worldwide and in Indiana and the US. Museum visits also introduce students to the commonalities of the human experience and to the disciplines–folklore studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, etc.–that build up our understandings of human existence, past and present. As of the time of this writing, this campaign has gathered $1220 from 18 friends of the museum. Here too our goal is $2500, thus we need your help in this effort also. (This funding will enable us to provide the funds that schools need in order to come to the museum and engage with our programs and exhibitions.

To learn more and to, if you chose, make a contribution, you can find this campaign site here: https://iufoundation.fundly.com/mathers-museum-of-world-cultures

Thanks to all who have given so far. Thanks to all who will consider giving. Whether you give or do not give, please, please share these links online and urge others to support the museum’s work. When an #IUDay link is shared online it results in an average of $97 dollars in support, so even if you cannot give $10 or more dollars now, you can help the museum and these worthy projects by spreading the word.

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Debra Bolaños (left), a ballet folklórico dancer and instructor in East Chicago, Indiana, and Harold Klosterkemper (right), a fiddle player from Decatur County, Indiana, will soon be honored for their lifetime achievement as Indiana traditional artists. They will be recognized as Indiana Heritage Fellows in a special ceremony on April 27, 2019. Learn more about the event here.

 

 

Mar 30

Museum Anthropology Review is a Teenager Now; New Issue is Now Out

Life got away from me last week and I still have more “Exhibition Week” posts to share, but today I turn attention to the new issue of MAR.

It is hard to believe but Museum Anthropology Review is now in its thirteenth year. If you are interested in a bit of how MAR got to this point and where it will be heading in the near term, you can check out the editorial that I wrote for the new issue, just out. You can find the whole issue, including my piece, online here: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/issue/view/1589. As always, MAR is not just free to readers but open access.

MAR is the journal of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, Indiana University’s museum of ethnography, ethnology, and cultural history. The new issue is particularly focused on reports recounting projects undertaken at the MMWC and by its partners, friends, and regular collaborators.

Three MMWC colleagues share projects that they led. Jon Kay tells the story of Traditional Arts Indiana’s exhibition for the Indiana Bicentennial, Emily Buhrow Rogers reflects on the Cherokee Craft, 1973 exhibition, and Kristin Otto discusses our museum’s projects relating to so-called Ghanaian fantasy coffins.

MMWC partners C. Kurt Dewhurst and Timothy Lloyd report on the larger Sino-US collaboration project that the MMWC has been an active participant in and Marsha Bol, another participant in that collaboration, shares background on a different project, her recent exhibition on beadwork at the Museum of International Folk Art. Regular MAR contributor Kerim Friedman is joined by his collaborator Gabrielle de Seta for a discussion of the Sensefield exhibition that they organized as a companion to the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival.

The issue concludes with a book review and an exhibition review by Otto. Both focus on innovative projects of special relevance to museum anthropology in African contexts.

Thanks go to the reviewers and others who helped with this issue behind the scenes. MAR’s transition to teenager status provides an opportunity to thank the librarians and library staff who have worked to support and encourage the journal since its beginnings. Thanks also to all of the graduate assistants who have worked on the journal over the years.

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A partial view of Museum Anthropology Review 13(1)

Apr 17

1 Comment

#IUDay at the Mathers Museum!

(We need your help!)

Its almost #IUDay! What is #IUDay? As the #IUDay organizers explain:

IU Day is a 24-hour, binge-watching, social-sharing, IU-wearing, online celebration of Indiana University and the people who make IU possible (that’s you). Maybe you’re a student getting your start. Maybe you’re an alumnus well on your way. Maybe you’re a parent, friend, or fan with a special place in your heart for “old IU.” In any case, these IU connections are cause for celebration.

#IUDay is happening tomorrow (April 18, 2018)!

The museum is participating in #IUDay in a number of ways. Some are surprises for tomorrow. Some will be accessible online, while others–such as our participation in the #IUDay scavenger hunt, will happen in the museum’s galleries. One item that is not a surprise is our inaugural crowdfunding campaign. I hope that you will check it out. You can help us meet our #IUDay goal by sharing the link via email or social media (there are buttons to help you with this). You can definitely also help us meet our goal by making a gift. With one day to go 43 donors have gotten us to 83% of our $2000 goal. Please help us get all the way there before #IUDay ends.

What is our crowdfunding campaign for? Great question. To find out, I hope that you will take a minute and twenty seconds and watch our brief campaign video and learn about the Indiana Heritage Awards program that–with your support–we will be launching later this year.

https://iufoundation.fundly.com/celebrating-folk-artists-of-indiana#gallery/2

Thanks to everyone who has already supported this exciting effort. If you have not given yet, please consider joining these generous supporter.

Aug 5

A Southwest Central Indiana Collaboration: The Art with a Purpose Exhibition at the Brown County Art Gallery

This afternoon the Brown County Art Gallery in Nashville, opened the exhibition Art with a Purpose: Brown County Baskets. The exhibition is a homecoming, of sorts, because it is being staged in the community in which the baskets and basket makers who are the exhibition’s focus lived and worked. Oak rod baskets, while once made in other pockets in the Eastern United States, were unique within Indiana in a small region centered on Brown County. The exhibition is also a homecoming in another way. While the exhibition’s curator–Dr. Jon Kay–produces exhibitions that appear all around Indiana, and at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures‘ galleries in Bloomington, it is much less common for him to be able to present an exhibition in his own home town of Nashville. Thanks go to Lyn Letsinger-Miller, President of the Brown County Art Gallery, and to the Gallery’s other leaders, for hosting the exhibition and a very special kick-off event today.

The exhibition is also an exciting re-mix, as it is a new, edited, and updated version of Working Wood: Oak-Rod Baskets in Indiana, the 2015 exhibition that Jon curated for the Mathers Museum of World Cultures as part of the 2015 Themester @Work: The Nature of Labor on a Changing Planet (a program of the IU College of Arts and Sciences). As you can see from the photographs, the exhibition was adapted for the art gallery and includes two beautiful paintings related to the county’s unique basketry heritage executed in the Brown County Art Colony’s signature style. They are The Basket Weaver and The Basket Weaver’s Daughter, both by E. K. Williams.

In Jon’s talk this afternoon, he explained the history and practice of oak rod basketry and tracked the ways that these baskets went from being valuable tools for everyday living to being symbols of an old-fashioned way of life consumed by urban tourists visiting the county to disappearing when easier-to-make white oak splint baskets were imported to the county from basket making areas of Kentucky and Tennessee. These rustic splint baskets were good enough for tourists who did not know the local history of rod basketry and who were not collecting the works of named artisans.  The story of particular basket making families linked across time, in Jon’s account, to the broader history of tourism and the politics of culture in Brown County. These themes, in turn, reflected larger modern and anti-modern sensibilities in the U.S. as a whole during the twentieth century.

There was a big crowd out for the opening events. The attendance by descendants of the two key basket marking families–Hovis and Bohall–made today’s events extra special. Thanks go to the Brown County Art Gallery for its wonderful efforts bringing this exhibition to a new audience. Congratulations to Jon and to all of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures staff and students who worked on the project.

Some background…

Traditional Arts Indiana, the Mathers Museum of World Cultures program that Jon Kay directs, is a partnership between Indiana University and the Indiana Arts Commission. Its task is to document, interpret, and support the folk and traditional arts across all of Indiana. It does that in a myriad of ways, including through the production of exhibitions that circulate across the state and engage its people in deeper appreciation for Indiana’s diverse heritage.

While TAI has a statewide focus, as does Indiana University, Indiana University Bloomington is making a special effort to support, and positively impact, the eleven counties of the Southwest Central Indiana region in which our campus is located (Brown, Crawford, Daviess, Dubois, Greene, Lawrence, Martin, Monroe, Orange, Owen and Washington). Projects being pursued in this region are, like the Art with a Purpose: Brown County Baskets exhibition, intended to be partnerships between parts of the university (such as Traditional Arts Indiana/Mathers Museum of World Cutures) and local community organizations, such as the Brown County Art Gallery. In pursuing collaborations such as this one, we are happy to be advancing our campus’ goals while, we hope, also enhancing the quality of life and cultural richness in the region in which we live and work.

Jon Kay is Director of Traditional Arts Indiana and Curator of Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. At Indiana University, he is also a Professor of Practice in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. His most recent book is Folk Art and Aging: Life-Story Objects and their Makers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). That book is a title in the Material Vernaculars series that the museum co-publishes with Indiana University Press. Jon’s studies of Brown County are reflected, for instance, in his article “A Picture of an Old Country Store“, published in Museum Anthropology Review.

Learn more about oak rod baskets in Annie Corrigan‘s 2015 radio story with Jon for WFIU (“Southern Indiana’s Lost Craft“).

Sep 26

Who Cares About Craft as Traditional Knowledge?

This fall has been a particularly busy season for research-based programs at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. An an outgrowth of our Indiana Folk Arts: 200 Years of Tradition and Innovation exhibition and our participation in classes and programs for Themester, we will have hosted, by semester’s end, a very large number craftspeople or groups of craftspeople representative of a broad swath of vernacular making in Indiana. Because of our Themester mandate to focus on questions of Beauty in our engagements with these artist-craftspeople, our discussions with them have always had an aesthetic component. We have asked, for instance, questions like: “What characteristics do you associate with a beautiful weaving [or chair, or drum, or pottery bowl, or…]?” or “When producing for the marketplace, how do you balance functional use and aesthetic impact?” Art and aesthetics are a crucial part of the human experience and of what makes cultures distinctive and meaningful.

But the objects that we curate and interpret, and the makers of things with whom we engage, are not only about art. Even while many have both aesthetic and functional purposes, many others of our museum’s objects are not reasonably framed as art and some of our interlocutors are talented, knowledgeable makers and users of things, without being artists. Our work is bigger than art, as important as art is. Aesthetic values are part of larger cultural systems and those larger wholes are our focus. Whether in China or in Indiana, our work is about local knowledge, including traditional cultural knowledge. A big part of our engagements with makers focuses on the knowledge that goes into making–craft expertise along with local environmental and contextual knowledge concerned with uses, meanings, significances.

A detailed story in last Saturday’s Independent by Amalia Illgner is a good evocation of the kinds of concern we (particularly Traditional Arts Indiana, led ably by my colleague Jon Kay) try to bring to our work with craft objects, craft knowledge, and craftspeople. (I appreciate Matthew Bradley for sharing it with me.) Read the story (“Raiders of the Lost Crafts”) here. (I note here that, despite the declensionist hook and playful title, the author is not so obsessed with authenticity discourses that she disregards fruitful rediscovery of older craft knowledge through the study of museum collections and documentary materials. The story is a rare and rather sophisticated treatment of its subject.)

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Who cares about craft as traditional knowledge? My colleagues and I do. We also like art and we also love seeing where contemporary craftspeople, including studio craft, DIY craft, and many others, are taking their passions–but documenting what people know and have long known is important and helping foster environments where those who have traditional cultural knowledge are supported and encouraged is key part of our mission. If you care about such things, you still have lots of chances to engage your interests at the museum this year. This week we will host a wonderful group of African American quilters and a talented maker of African drums. In following weeks, we offer chances to connect with Indiana limestone carvers, a hoop-net maker, a rosemaler, a pysanky artist, a Native American potter, a Zapotec weaver, and an Orthodox iconographer. Learning from such craftspeople is something we intend to keep doing as along as we can.

Aug 30

Get Oriented to Themester 2016: Beauty

Reviewing the Mathers Museum of World Cultures events and exhibitions pages is probably the only way to get a full sense of all that we are doing for 2016 Themester, but for an overview of Themester as a whole and its focus on Beauty, I recommend checking out yesterday’s kickoff press release (Figure 1). In addition to the MMWC pages, it would also be great to see the Themester website. For MMWC, Themester boils down to three great classes [A400, E460, F360] taught at the museum, three great beauty-focused exhibitions [Costume, Hózhó, Siyazama], plus a lot of programming, including folk artists residencies throughout the semester, as well as films, lectures, and hands-on activities. Check out the full list here. Thanks go to the College of Arts and Sciences for including the museum in an impressive roster of Themester activities. Thanks too go to the students who are helping us organize our Themester activities and to the artists and tradition bearers whose work we are highlighting. Please join it this remarkable exploration of beauty around the world.

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Figure 1: The Themester 2016 press release, which leads off with a photography b MMWC Consulting Curator Pravina Shukla, from her exhibition Costume.

Aug 28

Material Vernaculars: Institutional Role, Review, Authors, and Genres

The new Material Vernaculars series is co-published by the Mathers Museum of World Cultures with a huge amount of heavy lifting from our partner, the Indiana University Press. The first two volumes in the series are Folk Art and Aging by Jon Kay and the eponymous edited volume Material Vernaculars: Objects, Images, and Their Social Worlds. Jon Kay is the author of the first of these and I am the editor of the second. Jon and I are both on the IU faculty (in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology) and in the MMWC, where Jon is Director of Traditional Arts Indiana and Curator of Folklife and Cultural Heritage and I am the museum’s director. As the new series becomes known, it is reasonable to ask—is it just a publishing venue for the museum and its associates and partners?

MW Website

The answer here is no, but as you might guess, the series is intended to be the go to place when the museum does have its own publishing projects. This answer prompts then a couple of more points needing to be made. Peer-review for the series is fully managed by the IU Press and editorial review is a joint matter, thus it is quite conceivable that a museum project might be passed on by the press either at the early editorial review stage or at the peer-review stage. (I note that the press has already passed on one possible project, to illustrate this point tangibly.) Thus the series will hopefully be the home for additional MMWC authors and projects, but this is not guaranteed—and should not be.

The other side of this is that the series will hopefully come to publish authors without ties to museum, including colleagues not yet known to me. As the series homepage presently notes, “Potential authors interested in the Material Vernaculars series should contact the series editor Jason Baird Jackson via mvseries [at] indiana.edu and Aquisitions Editor Janice Frisch at frischj [at] indiana.edu.” That phrase, and the series overview, are available here.

As noted there, a new series also poses genre questions. Here, my intentions as editor are broad. “The series accommodates a diversity of types of work, including catalogues and collections studies, monographs, edited volumes, and multimedia works.” To me, these are the key genres of relevance for research museum practice in ethnography, ethnology, and cultural history (our museum’s fields), but it could be that new, as yet not fully recognized genres could also find a home in the series. While the forthcoming edited volume is something of a sampler, future edited volumes will likely have a strong thematic focus. Stand alone essays will continue to find a home in the museum’s journal, Museum Anthropology Review.

I hope to hear from potential authors and editors interested in learning more about the series. Thanks to all who have supported this new effort.

 

Aug 27

Plethora of Patrons and Programs Prompts Parking Progress

(Sorry about that headline. I could not control myself.) This fall there will be an extraordinary number of programs at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. We hope to see you here for many of them. The wave begins in the week ahead. Before we get there, I want to reach out especially to Bloomington and Indiana friends who do not work at Indiana University and who sometimes find visiting the museum difficult for lack of close-to-the-museum parking. This is especially a concern for those with mobility issues. The museum has consistently advocated for increased near-museum visitor parking and I am happy to note that–with quite engaged support from the relevant university offices–we have recently made some solid progress forward.

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Until recently, the museum and the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology shared five visitors spaces on the west side of the lab and museum, on the circular drive that is entered northbound on Indiana Avenue (and that one exits westbound on 9th Street). There were five IU staff spaces also located on this drive. Those staff spaces have been moved a bit north to the McCalla School lot (between 9th and 10th, off Indiana) and converted to five more Museum/Lab visitor spaces. In addition to doubling the near-museum parking, happily all of the metered visitor spaces at the McCalla School lot remain in service.

The number of events that we are hosting–especially since the move of Traditional Arts Indiana–to the museum and the increased numbers of people who are joining us (or who express a desire to join us, if they could just park more easily)–is a key factor in the addition of these spaces, but I note quickly here that work is underway to make the museum building more accessible and that the increased parking is part of a larger effort in that realm. More on that asap.

Of course, we would love for you to walk, bus, bike, skateboard, etc. to the museum. That is great for the earth and great for you and for the museum too. When you take a scooter to the museum instead of driving, you are freeing up one of those spaces for a person who can only get here by car. Even if they do not know to appreciate your effort, I appreciate it on their behalf. Carpooling helps too for the same reason. And if you are an IU person with an IU parking pass, you can help as well by parking in staff spaces around the museum rather than taking one of the visitor spots.

We are going to continue working to make the museum easier to visit. You can help us by spreading the word. It is sad when people say to me that they have never come to the museum because they just don’t want to fool with the parking issues. If you know someone who says such things, tell them the good news and encourage them to make their first visit. We’ll be glad to see them–and you.

Aug 25

Improving Access to Scholarship: Material Vernaculars as Milestone and Experiment

First the take away, then the story. While produced in very nice and reasonably priced hardback, paperback, and ebook editions, works in the new Material Vernaculars series are also being made available in free-to-the-reader PDF versions. This is a great thing and, if you agree with me about that, and can afford to do so, I really hope that you will purchase the edition of your choice, thereby signaling your support for making such works freely accessible to those who cannot afford to purchase them. If this seems strange to you, its a lot like community and public radio in the United States. Those who can support these services help make them accessible to those who cannot afford to make their own donations. We all gently nudge those who use them and could, but don’t, support them. (Called free riders.) Its not utopia, but its what we have and its better than the vast majority of people being locked out of non-commercial arts and education programming (and scholarly books). Now you can skip to the end for the link if you are in a rush.

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Those who know about my work know that I have been focused on promoting free and open access to scholarly work for a relatively long time. My advocacy efforts followed soon after I began work as a scholarly journal editor. At that time, I was drawn into a diverse range of problems, opportunities, and paradoxes that the transformation of scholarly communication was (and is still) engendering. Probably the best place to find the things that I have written on this theme is to look at the interview that I did with Ryan Anderson (published in Cultural Anthropology in 2014)

In 2015, my focus in this work shifted to books when I was a participant in a project funded by the Mellon Foundation. The results of that project were reported in: A Study of Direct Author Subvention for Publishing Humanities Books at Two Universities: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation by Indiana University and University of Michigan.

Concurrent with such advocacy work, I have tried to build real-world projects that could advance scholarship while testing strategies for increasing public access to research. Now in its tenth year, Museum Anthropology Review (now the journal of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures) is the best example of this. On the book side, there is now the Material Vernaculars series co-published by the museum and the Indiana University Press. In my previous post, I highlighted the series first title—Folk Art and Aging: Life-Story Objects and their Makers by Jon Kay and the series’ scholarly mandate. Here I am flagging the series’ relationship to free and open access movements.

Books cost a lot of money to make. In a peer-reviewed article, based on our humanities book research studying publishing work of the Indiana University Press and University of Michigan Press, my colleagues report that the zero copy cost for a typical humanities book is about $27,000. Efforts to increase access to scholarship have to find ways to confront these costs from all sides—finding ways to lower prices but also new ways of funding the professional work that it takes to make a quality book.

For me, for the museum, and especially for the IU Press, the Material Vernaculars series is an experiment. If we get past talking about it and actually begin doing it, what can we learn that will, we hope, help us learn to do it more and better? This is part of what is at stake for IU Press and for the whole world of university press humanities book publishing. I am thrilled to be a part of a new series that has a secondary role (beyond its primarily scholarly one) of finding ways to make scholarly books more widely and openly accessible.

So paradoxically, if you believe (for example) that the communities about whom ethnographers write should have access to what they write, then I call on you, paradoxically, to purchase a copy of Folk Art and Aging and the other other books that are in the pipeline. Your purchase helps support the goals of the series and it demonstrates that paid-for print editions or e-book editions are not mutually exclusive of free-to-readers electronic editions. If it helps, think of the print edition as a thank you gift for your donation to this cause rather than as a commodity that you are purchasing in the marketplace. You can feel particularly good about it if you purchase it directly from the Indiana University Press, thereby cutting out one or more commercial intermediaries.

It (PDF) won’t always be the file format of choice, but for now the free editions of Material Vernaculars titles will be circulated in PDF form via the IUScholarWorks Repository. When people download the books from IUScholarWorks, there is a download count, which helps us learn how many people, over what time period, showed interest in the book(s). (So, send your friends to the link rather than passing around the PDF…)

If you are wondering how to download the book, see the picture above for the place to click.

Here is the link. Two actually. The first is durable but enigmatic. The second is more human readable, but potentially less permanent.

http://hdl.handle.net/2022/20906
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/20906

Happy reading.

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