In my History and Theory of Museums class we have been discussing contextualization of artifacts. How when you remove an object from its natural surrounding (context) and place it in a museum you are giving the object an entirely different contextualization. After talking about it and writing it down as I just did, it seems elementary to what we do as museums, but I’d never really thought about it that way before. It brings up several interesting points about learning in museums.

Referred to as, “The Museum Effect” in the article Museums as a Way of Seeing by Svetlana Alpers, it includes three main parts.

Museums:
1) Take an artifact or work of art out of its original context.
2) Kill the object’s social purpose (why it was or what it was used for).
3) Put objects into a new context, i.e. museums take cultural objects and turn them into art objects.

Take for instance a religious alter. It is a social/cultural object kept within a church/chapel etc. It is a practical object used as a place to worship and pray, but when removed and placed in a museum its social purpose is dead, it becomes purely aesthetic. With small exception, artifacts in museums are NOT used; a person does not go up to a religious alter on display in a museum and kneel to pray. Typically in a museum setting, this artifact will become an art object; people will view and appreciate it for its inherent beauty i.e. intricate wood or stone work.

This is a small addition to my post Unpaid, Unfed and Unhoused. It is not uncommon to find a museum job listing with extreme or unreasonable demands. No doubt this is often done to dissuade the meek from applying to begin with. I am continually scanning job boards and non-profit business sites for currently vacant positions and I recently came upon a museum in the New York City area that was looking to fill a development type position. Most of their demands were reasonable until I read that they were requiring three years of PAID development experience in order to be competitive for the position. This is not the first time I’ve seen a demand similar to this.

We all as museum professionals or interns know that PAID positions/internships are falling to a low number. Does the fact that a museum professional has completed several UNPAID positions absolutely negate their qualifications as an individual? Paid internships/entry-level positions are far and few between, and when they happen at all, they are typically compensated minimally.

But, here is the kicker! This particular museum ONLY offers UNPAID internships. Does that mean that their interns are sacrificing their time and personal resources only to receive unqualified experience? Their own interns do not complete their internships with experience that could even begin to get them a position at that museum. This seems to be a downward spiral. If more museums start placing all of their stock on PAID positions, but few museums will pay their entry-level staff, then a miniscule portion of upcoming museum professionals will even be qualified enough to secure a job. Some of the unpaid positions/hours I have spent have provided me with the best experience I have gained. Have others noticed this stipulation creeping into job postings? Do you feel your unpaid experience is of a lesser value than your paid experience?

Here is a little treat for everyone! Though I of course wish my blog was on this list (I guess it is a little new), 100 blogs OTHER THAN mine that you SHOULD be reading!  Many of these I read and there are a few I do that aren’t on the list. Indulge!

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2009/07/100-best-curator-and-museum-blogs/

This summer I did an internship at the Union Historical Society in Union, Maine. While on one of my many field trips I visited the Owl’s Head Transportation Museum. If you are ever in Mid-Coast Maine you MUST visit this museum near the Rockland-Camden-Rockport area. The very first thing I picked out to love about this museum was their logo which inspired this blog. “Branding” is becoming increasingly prevalent across the museum sector. Branding as defined by http://www.businessdictionary.com/ is as follows:
“Branding – Entire process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product (good or service) in the consumers’ mind, through advertising campaigns with a consistent theme. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.”

For the purpose of museums it is the creation of a logo, and sometimes even a slogan, that people will recognize and immediately associate with that museum. A logo is a simple way for people to link events or publicity materials with a certain institution without having to read or recognize an address. There are too many museum logos to post in one blog but I have chosen a few that I find particularly interesting or creative.

1. Owl’s Head Transportation Museum in Owl’s Head, Maine
First, this logo is adorable. Second, it does an excellent job of bringing together the location and the mission of the museum.

I love word shapes and this toy top naming the museum is very well done.

3. The New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford Massachusettes
This logo is just very suitable and is very neat. Whether intentionally or not it shows how integrated whaling and these large ships were.

4. Green Mountain Children’s Museum will be in Burlington, Vermont
This museum is not even an actual physical museum yet but it has an excellent logo. I feel it will be perfectly iconic to a children’s museum. Who doesn’t love a good game of connect the dots?

5. Doleman Black Heritage Museum in Hagerstown, Maryland
This is a BEAUTIFUL logo called the Tree of Triumph. It is, “ A representation of our rich African-American history of working through and overcoming adversity.” As quoted from the Museum’s website.

Logos Straight from the Development of a City –

6. The Philadelphia History Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The hand-drawn sketch of a grid was a concept taken from a map which was William Penn’s original plan for the city. How fascinating and it gets even better, read more here: http://www.160over90.com/blog/2010/02/03/the-philadelphia-history-museum/

7. Museum of London in London, England U.K.
A fairly recent branding change for the Museum of London made for an interesting and modern twist. “Colored layers map the shape of London over time, reflecting the ever-changing, diverse and dynamic make up of London and Londoners, past, present and future.” From this website where you can read more about it: http://www.museumoflondon.org/

Logo Contests and Submissions – Many businesses or museums hold contests to gather submissions for a logo. Two of the museums I have worked in received excellent submissions and have very creative logos.

8. Cedar Rock State Park: The Walter Residence in Independence, Iowa
This Frank Lloyd Wright designed residence is one of his few signature tile homes. I’ll spare you the entire FLlW history but an Iowa college student submitted this idea for the Cedar Rock logo. The black represents a silhouette of the cantilever at the Cedar Rock home itself, and the red square is representative of FLlW’s red signature tile, tying in two of the most important aspects of this museum. It is a VERY nice logo.

9. University of Northern Iowa Museums in Cedar Falls, Iowa
This is another student logo submission for this museum of natural history. This unique logo embodies the main collections of the museum which are birds, rocks, fossils, minerals, campus memories and people of the world.

Just Because I Can and I Felt I Needed a 10th Selection –

10. Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts
Alright, you got me. This logo isn’t particularly creative, exciting or deep BUT I like it because it reminds me of my name, just dramatized…PaAM!

These are some of my favorite, from what I have seen. What museum/institution logos do you find particularly interesting or creative? Here is a link to the Logo Design Blog’s Top 10 Museum logos: http://www.logodesignworks.com/blog/top-10-museum-logos

Today I received my first text book for my graduate studies, only once before have I been so excited to begin reading a textbook. The other time was for my undergraduate Museum Studies class. The book I received today was The Manual of Museum Exhibitions edited by Barry Lord and Gail Dexter Lord. I opened the package and immediately began reading the list of contributors and “The Introduction: The Exhibition Planning Process”. I only read the first 10 pages but it is already very interesting, perhaps more so to me because my background is primarily in quite small museums. Reading about the grandeur scale on which people design exhibits and the numbers of people is always a little shocking to me. I noticed a bit of this same shock when I worked at The British Museum. There are an insane amount of employees and it takes a large amount of people to produce exhibitions there.

Working at the University of Northern Iowa Museums it took six. Six extremely hard-working and motivated women to put up some of the most interesting exhibits I’ve ever seen. I realize this is all a matter of scale; that the BM puts up some major exhibits with MAJOR artifacts and MAJOR money in comparison to the small area the UNI Museums use for their space.

I’ve often battled with myself about what size of a museum I would IDEALLY like to work at; of course where I end up working will be a matter of opportunity to some extent. There are obviously pros and cons to both.

Size of the museum – In a small museum workers know every nook and cranny, my first day at the BM I almost got lost trying to find my office. Apparently this is not uncommon. My supervisor, when taking me to get my BM i.d. asked a coworker how to get there because she thought we may get lost. We managed to regardless of our given directions.

Size of the staff – In a small museum you know everybody you work with and they are not only your colleagues but also friends. Working in an enormous museum you will likely not meet half of the people you work with everyday. In fact you may never meet the people who work right across the hall from you, except through e-mail. My second observation is a fairly obvious one; working in a small museum you take on a multitude of tasks, not just one specific duty. This is an aspect of small museums I particularly like. It gives you the option to learn new things but to also step away from a project if it gets boring or tedious.

Funding – I ’d like to say this is a conceivable argument but it is variable. Stereotyping, I’d like to say many small museums suffer from a lack of funding, but some are backed by very wealthy people interested specifically in their mission. This leads to a lot of interesting improvisation in exhibits which can sometimes be very innovative.

“Operating a small museum is [different than] operating a big museum,” says Steve Olsen, assistant director at the Museum of Church History and Art, Salt Lake City. “There are qualitatively different approaches. There are remarkable innovations from small museums that large museums would do well to take heed of.”

On the other hand most small museums don’t receive large amounts of corporate funding as the BM does from BP Oil. This allows larger museums to have blockbuster exhibitions utilizing some of the most noteworthy artifacts from all over the world, very cool. The potential plus side of working at a large museum is that you have a better chance of raking in a bigger salary with better benefits.

Visitors– Many employees (not all, but many) in VERY large museums are fairly removed from their guests. They don’t talk to them or meet them on a personal level. What information they get from their guests is through a select few employees or satisfaction surveys. I feel in a small museum you know your repeat visitors and you take the time to talk to most every person coming in to enjoy your museum. This is one thing I think makes a museum experience more personal and memorable for a person as opposed to wandering through galleries full of hundreds of people and waiting in extremely long lines to get into an exhibit.

Many people truly want to relate to a museum or an exhibit and they want to share their story, to feel like they are being heard and have a reason for being there. How often does an employee of the Art Institute of Chicago walk up and ask how you relate to a painting? Or take the time to listen to a farmer share a story about a tractor just like the one in that painting his father had when he was a boy. My favorite thing about working in a small museum is that I actually GET to talk to my visitors and share an experience with them. It is beneficial and meaningful to the visitor but also to the museum. It lets us know we’re inspiring people and connecting with them, that our exhibits are doing what they are supposed to.

“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” – Dwight David Eisenhower