BMA Trip

Last week, on Tuesday, my mentor and I spent a good portion of our day visiting the Baltimore Museum of Art. We spent all of our time down in the registrar office space looking over Woodward related files, searching for correspondence between Elsie Woodward and the museum about the art collection. Very little was discovered but we left with a few copies of certain documents we found interesting or of use to my project. It probably sounds very boring but I had such a great time reading through everything. I'm very thankful for the opportunity that was given to us. The BMA staff is too kind!

I'm trying to remember what we did the week before - I'm so bad at keeping this blog updated - and I think I spent most of the time choosing what prints/objects to use in the catalog. I started working on tombstone information and gathering credit lines.

I helped do inventory one day down in the storage building...learned about feedsack quilts...

Here, have some pictures.

A document I thought would be helpful to my project.

Pretty painted photograph of Fenelon, a Woodward horse.

Example of what tombstone information should look like.

Eclipse award.

Eclipse Award looking creepy.

Feedsack quilt!

More quilt.

Working on Catalog Project

So it's been a few weeks since I last posted anything about my internship, I apologize for that. Two vacations happened and I wasn't about to not have fun this summer (went to Florida and Rehoboth Beach, DE). Before I become a "real" adult I felt I needed to visit family and friends! So I did. It was fun, saw a shark...
Anyway, now I'm back to work and I have been steadily researching the Woodward Art Collection. I've gathered quite a few primary sources to help support what I will be writing about for this catalog including two books written by William Woodward himself.
Through all of this research I have learned a lot about equine portraiture. I never knew it became it's own genre until the 19th century. One of the most prominent artists of that time period was a man by the name of John Frederick Herring,Sr. William Woodward's art collection consisted of many Herring horse portraits.

Here are some random pictures of notes and art prints I have been looking at the past couple of days:

I think I'm at 80 something hours so far, too! The project probably wont be finished by the time I reach 100 but that's okay, I plan to stay until the very end.

Cataloging and Transcribing

My mentor trained me in using the cataloging software PastPerfect on Monday. To do this, she gave me a small bag filled with 23 Bowie Race Track Betting Tickets from April 7, 1942. I was to catalog all 23 tickets to forever be stored into the museum system.

Here a picture of some of the tickets

It was pretty neat to be able to touch something from 1942. It's funny but true.

I think it was last week that I mentioned I was transcribing a probate inventory. I have a photo of a part of the inventory that I can share now. I have already transcribed it into a word document.

Project Planning

This week was all about planning out the project I will be working on for the mansion. We have decided that I will be creating a catalog that depicts and explains the Woodward Art Collection, specifically anything that has to deal with horses.

Looking through PastPerfect today my mentor and I grabbed anything that was under the search key 'Woodward', exported the list to excel, and deleted anything that wasn't a photo, print, trophy, painting, etc... For example there were books that had nothing to do with horses or horse racing so those were deleted off the excel spreadsheet.

The next step was to look through the physical vertical files and pull anything ranging from old documents of the Woodward estate inventory to articles, letters, emails, and auction catalogs relating to the art work. We looked through each of the documents and then I was sent away to make copies. So I made the copies, had a meeting with my supervisor about what I'd be doing, and that was it.

Tomorrow and next week I will be reading over everything I collected, possibly going into the storage facility to look at the objects/art work stored away, and figuring out what I want to interpret. I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment but the gathering process is almost over!

This is a picture of a part of a document I will be using for my catalog

Polished Silver for the First Time

Yesterday at the museum we had a donors family come in to see the collection they had donated, so we had to set up a small exhibit for them to view the artifacts. I learned how to carefully move old paintings around, how to dust paintings properly with the right type of brushes, and how to polish silver. It was my first time ever touching silver so it was a new experience for me.
Silver tarnishes over time and curators often have to take the silver objects out to polish them (removing the tarnish with calcium carbonate or silver cleaning cloths). When dealing with older silver pieces, it's best to wear gloves so that the oil on your fingers doesn't stain the silver.
And so I polished a badly tarnished silver trophy cup until it looked like-new again. The process took about 25-30 minutes, which is actually pretty short according to my mentor. Sometimes it can take longer depending on how bad the damage is.

 This is a portion of what I set up. 

 The cup on the right is the tarnished silver trophy.

And this is what the cup looked like after I finished polishing it.

 Another part of the collection we were showing off.

 Close up of my favorite painting out of the small collection.

 Me. Polishing silver with calcium carbonate.

What I did today was completely different! I got to transcribe a probate inventory of Smauel Ogle's estate. A probate inventory is basically a list of all the things a person owned, along with the value of each item. The inventory monetary value I was given is in the English Pound.

Here is a picture of what the handwriting looked like. It took a long time to read what I needed to transcribe...

Internship Duties

What I have been doing so far is still a bunch of shadowing the head curator and reporting what it is I learned at the end of the day. I am given articles, books, and handbooks to read through on my own time in order to understand more about art curation. At the end of each day I am expected to have a small list of questions to ask (and believe me, I have a good number of questions that I ask).

I work with my mentor a lot of the time since she has so much experience. She is currently teaching me how to catalog objects for the museum collection using a software called PastPerfect. Using this, I plan to collect all the information I can about the racehorse paintings inside Belair Mansion in order to create a small book. Belair Mansion has a huge chunk of it's history in horse racing, yet there is nothing physical to read about the equine artworks. The supervisor thought it would be a great idea for me to come up with a booklet detailing the equine collections that were once displayed in the house as well as the ones that are currently there. It's a good way for me to learn how to do this process and to be able to give something back to the museum. 

If you are interested in some of the articles I have been reading, here is the list:

1) Mining the Museum by Fred Wilson

2) September 11 and the Mourning After: Reflections on Collecting and Interpreting the Historry of Tragedy by James B. Gardner and Sarah M. Henry

3)From Being about Something to being for Somebody - The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum

Internship: What I Have Been Doing Thus Far

On Tuesday, I began my first day as a student intern in Belair Mansion. I've been given the title "Curatorial Intern" by the head curator, as I have been shadowing her for the past two days, learning how to catalog collections and other various museum duties.

The first day was a lot of discussions involving what I am interested in doing in a museum, where do I see myself inside a museum/gallery, how can I benefit from this experience and foremost, what can the mansion get from me in return. So, it was basically just a lot of questions until we were able to break down what I would be doing for the museum and for myself.
I learned what a curator job entails, which is educating and inspiring the public. A collection/object/art piece tells a story and it's up to the curator to make sure it can be easily conveyed to visitors. Inspiring questions and thinking is the main goal.
Behind the scenes a curator is also responsible for marketing and networking with other museums.

The second day, Wednesday, I shadowed the curator on a guided tour of the mansion. She explained the history behind each room but also went into detail about the art work that was decorating each room. I realized that you constantly need to keep up to date with information about each work in order to answer questions correctly. Also, getting over a fear of public speaking is a must for those who work in the forefront of a museum/gallery.

I was given some materials to read about museums and curatorial work to help me better understand what I can do. So I'll be reading the books given to me, along with starting to plan out the project we want to work on.