by Andrea Rosen, BCMA Curatorial Assistant
As curators from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Peary-Macmillan Arctic Museum, and Special Collections came together to plan the exhibition The Object Show: Discoveries in Bowdoin Collections, two things needed to happen simultaneously: 1) we had to decide what the show was about; 2) we had to decide what we would put in the show! Thus long, fruitful conversations among the show’s planners about the concepts of the exhibition were often followed by trips into storage at the Museum of Art. Certainly we all had ideas about objects we wanted to include, but this show was also about finding the objects we’d forgotten about—the strange and unique pieces that had for various reasons made their way into Bowdoin collections, and had for too long been hidden away in storage. This would involve a process not of focused searching but of leisurely browsing. On April 9, 2013, 6 curators fumbled through art storage, opening drawers and peering back into deep shelves, seeking unusual objects that would tell fascinating stories. As we started opening drawers, we were at first baffled by what looked like random parts – a glass tube, a crank, a handle, metal fittings – before we realized that they belonged to our eighteenth-century air pump. “How does it work exactly?” asked Sarah Montross, Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow. Consulting Curator for Decorative Arts, Laura Sprague, pulled out a copy of a page from Joseph Callender’s Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She pointed to a picture on the left that looks like an armoir. “It looks like a piece of furniture,” she explained. “This is what it looks like when it’s in your house or parlor, for the rare person who had it. And then, you take the cabinet off, and you’d get the parts out of the case, and you’d assemble it, and there’d be a glass jar, like a bell jar, that would fit on a round tablet. And you’d use the crank to pull the air out of the vacuum chamber. And so you could do experiments like, how long can you keep a bunch of grapes alive and ripe, without rotting.” Laura believes that James Bowdoin II may have funded the building of this particular device. “This was being built in the middle of the Revolutionary War, when not many people had the money that would have been required to pay for a case like that. We know that the instrument maker was a Salem minister named John Prince, who was using pretty easily attainable parts to create the instrument itself, but it has this incredible case that is like none other.”
Another drawer opened to enthusiastic exclamations, revealing a glittering ancient Greek diadem from the 8th century BCE. “That’s really unique in our collection,” remarked Joachim Homann, curator of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. “Is it woven gold?” asked Laura. Jim Higginbotham, Associate Curator of Ancient Art, answered: “No, it’s repoussé [a metalworking technique that creates a low relief design], with some riveted decoration. It’s made of an alloy of gold and silver called electrum.” “It’s cheaper!” joked Joachim.
“We also have an ancient musical instrument,” added Jim, pulling out a curved ivory flute. It’s Roman, from the 1st or 2nd century, and Joachim was astonished that it’s actually ancient. Genevieve LeMoine, curator of the Peary-Macmillan Arctic Museum, commented that they have an ocarina, a small wind instrument shaped somewhat like a blimp, that would complement it well. “Is it whale bone or something?” asked Joachim. “No, it’s clay,” she answered, “it was part of the Greely expedition,” an ill-fated Arctic expedition led by Adolphus Greely in 1881. “Did you know you can turn your iPhone into an ocarina?” said Jim. He proceeded to describe an app for that, and to demonstrate it on his own phone.
As we started opening drawers of textiles, Joachim remembered two particularly stunning fabric samples designed by Rockwell Kent, the early-20th-century American modernist painter and Monhegan Island resident. “When was the last time these were out? I’ve never seen those!” exclaimed Laura. “The colors are so well-preserved that I hardly recognize this as fabric,” said Joachim. “Are they printed or woven?” I asked. “Printed,” Laura answered. “I think they’re samples of a furnishing fabric.”
As we wrapped up, we felt satisfied with all we’d found, just by browsing. “I’m glad you have the same sense of discovery, because when I don’t have a reason to open all these drawers, I just don’t do it,” said Joachim. Two problems remained to us: 1) how to squeeze so many fascinating objects into one show; 2) how much research there was to conduct on objects that Bowdoin has owned for years and years, but whose many lives have remained shrouded in mystery.