Welcome

My trip to England last month gave me a lot of food for thought and some ideas and experiences that I wanted to share with colleagues here at UPMAA but I wasn't sure what medium would be best. I finally decided a blog might work, because people could pick and choose and go at their own pace. This is my first attempt at anything like this, bear with the glitches. I put in as many pictures as I could to make it interesting. Clicking on the pictures will enlarge them.
I tried to break it down into subject specific postings:
The conference - a bit about the conference I went to, mostly interest for Egyptological stuff and conservation.
Mummy wrapping - a workshop I went to which may be of interest to Education and Events and the craft lovers among you.
At the British Museum - some interesting initiatives in the BM galleries
Cross-cultural exhibits - two exhibits at the BM that are thematic rather than geo- or cultural-centric. One seemed to work better than the other.
The Wellcome Collection - a newly opened exhibit space with some interesting exhibit ideas.
The 'other' Ur - a brief look at the BM's gallery
Gallery extras - what the BM and Fitzwilliam were doing to keep their galleries relevant without renovation
Mounts - what's in use Over There
Storage - some storage ideas we may find useful
Tourism - pretty pictures of Cambridge

Hope you find something interesting and feel free to comment, either on the blog, by email, or in person.

The conference.

In early September, I attended a conference called Decorated Surfaces on Ancient Egyptian Artifacts: Technology, Deterioration, and Conservation (much more interesting than it sounds), held in Cambridge, England. It was the third in a series of conferences on conservation of Egyptian artifacts (the others were held in 1988 and 1995). There were over 100 attendees, including conservators, students, Egyptologists, scientists and administrators, from 16 countries.

There were 18 papers on subjects ranging from red shroud mummies, cartonnage, Egyptian pigments, metal treatments, etc. One paper, by Egyptian conservator Nadia Lokma, was especially lively, relating her team's efforts to save termite-riddled coffins from the new tomb (click here) found at the Valley of the Kings, all the while fending off hoards of media and VIPs. In addition to the papers, there were great posters (both the papers and posters will be published next year) as well as a public lecture on Amarna by Professor Barry Kemp, tours of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and workshops.

I went to three workshops, two serious and one 'fun'. The first was on Egyptian bronzes, discussing methods of casting and how to identify them as well as identifying metal polychromy on Egyptian artifacts (the ancient Egyptians often used different colors of copper alloys or different metals as inlays or attachments on their sculptures giving them a multi-colored effect that could be obscured by corrosion or poor choices of conservation treatment.
Here's one example of the multi-color effect achieved by using different metals.













The second workshop was on cartonnage mummy cases. Apparently the full body cases came into use as a response to the practice of re-cycling painted coffins, dumping the original inhabitant, and replacing his/her name in the decoration, leaving him/her nameless (and therefore lost) in the afterlife. The cases were not reusable and a properly labelled mummy case ensured one's identity in the afterlife even if you were turfed out of your coffin. Something I never knew was that the cases lace up the back:















The British Museum has been doing some work to figure out exactly how such cases were made by recreating them.

They start with a straw form, cover it with mud shaped to the desired contours, and cover it with linen wrappings. Once the wrappings are firm, the straw and mud is removed from the inside and the outside is covered with gesso and painted. They're still not sure whether the mummified body is inserted before the gessoing or after.

Make your own mummy wrapping

The fun workshop was a mummy-wrapping workshop on the last day. Dana Goodburn-Brown, who had worked with Dr. Zahi Hawass on the golden mummies from Bahariya Oasis, taught us to make our own Greco-Roman era mummy wrappings using action figures or water bottles(!) in place of mummies. I think this would be a great activity for the campers next year....


Dana's wrapped mummy, made for a TV program in Britain. It's modelled after one from the Bahariya find; I know the boobs look goofy but so do the original's.


The raw materials:





























My waterbottle mummy wrapping:




























A work in progress

At the British Museum - some new ideas (Lynn Grant)

This was my first trip back to the British Museum since they'd done their major renovation: filling in the central hollow square and turning it into a reception/special exhibit/shop/cafe space - something like what the masterplan envisions for the inner courtyards, I think. I liked it. The Xian warriors exhibit was due to open two days after I was there and the hype was enormous.

One neat new idea was stations like these in the galleries. Manned by volunteers, they gave visitor a chance to directly experience artifacts similar to those exhibited in the gallery.

Can you believe a conservator is actually almost encouraging artifact handling? But, with the right artifact choices, it's an idea worth considering.

The BM had its collecting philosophy prominently displayed in its Egyptian gallery:

Cross-cultural exhibits

The British Museum had two thematic galleries featuring materials from more than one area of the world, unlike their (and our) usual monocultural galleries.

One was in the former Reading Room, a space I'd always loved. They'd taken advantage of the ambience for an exhibit titled Enlightenment: Discovering the world in the 18th century. To quote their intro, "The Enlightenment was an age of reason and learning that flourished across Europe and America from about 1680 to 1820. This rich and diverse permanent exhibition uses thousands of objects to demonstrate how people in Britain understood their world during this period."



The "Religion and Ritual" section showed Maya, Egyptian, and Buddhist deities all chumming together.













It was an interesting display, almost like open storage but it relied on a lot of text to make sense of the juxtapositions and I noticed that few visitors were reading labels; most just grazed one or two and moved on. For more info, click here


The other cross-cultural exhibit was less ambitious but seemed to be easier on visitors:
"Living and Dying" in the Wellcome Trust Gallery. From their intro: "People throughout the world deal with the tough realities of life in many different ways. The displays in Room 24 explore different approaches to our shared challenges as human beings, focussing on how diverse cultures seek to maintain health and well-being. "

The center piece of the gallery was a contemporary artwork, "Cradle to Grave", incorporating a lifetime supply of prescribed drugs knitted into two lengths of fabric, illustrating the medical stories of one woman and one man. To see a detail, go to
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aoa/c/cradle_to_grave.aspx

While I'm not usually a fan of contemporary art, this was very attention-catching and led people to spend time looking at the other exhibits that made up the gallery, some of which are shown below. It probably helped that it was fairly light on text.

The Wellcome Collection - exhibit ideas

I did not have much free time outside the conference and visiting the BM, but I did get to see one other museum, the Wellcome Collection, which just opened its new exhibit space in June of this year. I really enjoyed their permanent exhibit Medicine Man, featuring the collections of their founder, pharmeceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome. During his lifetime (1853-1936) he made a huge collection of art and artifacts relating to health.



















The objects themselves were fun (Florence Nightingale's mocassins!) but they also used some interesting display ideas. Labeling for the artifacts themselves was minimal: a number, object name, materials, date, accession number; some cases didn't even have that much. To find out more, you had to explore...


Text labels were 'hidden' in cupboard like this in the adjoining walls (note the little white knob on the right-hand door). Inside there was a thematic label (left) and detailed artifact labels (right), with the basic object information (as above) augmented by more background information on the specific object (for instance, the Florence Nightingale, a pioneering nurse, had worn those mocassins while working at Scutari during the Crimean war.) This way, the visitor could experience the artifacts with whatever level of info they wanted.


What I really loved, though, were these little drawers below the wall cases, such as this one showing a collection of amulets. (The individual object labels were in an adjoining cupboard). The right-hand drawer is labelled with a hand, and included a reproduction of one of the amulets that could be handled, along with braille labeling. [In another of these drawers below a Durer etching was a three dimensional relief version of the scene in the etching with braille labels]

The left hand drawer had three push-button recordings of various people talking about what the objects in the case meant to them. In the case of the amulets, there was an anthropologist talking about the meaning of amulets in various cultures; a prominent Islamic author talking about how amulets had been a part of her everyday experience growing up and how strange it was to think of them in a museum context; and a well known British author talking about how he put more faith in amulets than in modern medicine. I could imagine lots of applications for the idea of using different voices to discuss the same objects in our galleries. These were pretty low-tech interactives, but they worked really nicely, much better than the more ambitious 'speaking chairs' that they had in another gallery that were already on the fritz only 2 months after opening.

The 'other' Ur

I was really interested in seeing the BM's Ur material, having spent so much time with ours over the last 10 years. There was little mention of the Penn Museum's partnership in the excavations in their labelling. You'd never know we had most of Pu Abi's jewelry.




This is their version of the handmaiden, looking a little tatty, but I think it dates to the 30s....


To be fair, I took the guided tour offered by one of their volunteer docents and he definitely gave the Penn Museum fair billing (even before I told him that was where I worked).
This is their crushed handmaiden skull. Unlike ours, this one was crushed top down (instead of from the side), giving a good idea of the original layout of the gold ribbons.

Their ram.

Gallery extras

Both the Fitzwilliam and the British Museum had large scrims in many of their galleries that detailed current research and activities. I (naturally) noticed that many of these featured conservation, while others were about scientific analyses. The first two are from the Fitzwilliam; the others from the BM.




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Mounts

Mount makers in Britain still seem to be using a lot of plexi rather than the brass mounts we've switched to. One mountmaker I talked to told me the Fitzwilliam was thinking of switching to brass. The plexi works well for some things (I like the ring mount) but overall I prefer the less obtrusive painted metal.

Storage

As part of the conference, we got to tour the Fitzwilliam's conservation labs and antiquities storage. Storage is shown here; as you can see, there's not a lot of space to spare. Not an ideal space for artifact storage but they've done the best they could with what they had, putting in hand-cranked compactors. Note the very low ceilings...







I thought these pipe juncture cosies were neat. Maybe we could find something similar for the places where our sprinkler pipes ooze that lubricant.









I really liked this idea for storing large stone blocks. They used crossbars with pre-drilled holes as backs of the shelves. Then they could use padded L-brackets to hold the pieces vertically, saving space and making it easier to see the pieces. Below - shelves seen from the back and detail.