By Cordelia Miller ‘15, Summer Education Assistant
As a summer education assistant at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, I’ve been involved with research for the exhibition The Object Show: Discoveries in Bowdoin Collections for the past few months. Watching the show come together from the inside has been very exciting for me. Many of these objects have never been exhibited before at the BCMA, or have been shown only rarely; for some of them, we have little or no information on file as to where they come from or what they have been used for. My role has been to help out the curators by researching these fascinating objects, trying to discover information about the people who made and used them.
Where does one even start with one of these fascinating, yet puzzling, objects? I always started with the Museum’s files—folders containing information we have on each piece, including documents about how we acquired it, if we’ve loaned the work to other museums, and paperwork concerning conservation. For a piece like Head of A King (1220 – 1230, 1915.100), which was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970, there was considerable correspondence between curators at different museums, which was interesting to look through. If I was lucky, the folders would also have information about the object’s history and original usage; in the file for the Head of a King, I found an essay written by a Bowdoin professor with information on its original location at Chartres Cathedral in France, as well as correspondence between several academics from the 1960s who were trying to determine whether the sculpture was a modern forgery. (Thankfully for the Museum, it isn’t! It really was carved in the thirteenth century, which is quite extraordinary.)
Next, I would turn to the Bowdoin library for sources like art history encyclopedias, academic journals, or books to gather additional information. I gathered a number of types of information for each object: its time period and geographical region; what it was made of and how those materials were obtained and processed; its original function; and who actually held, possessed, and used it in their everyday lives. The answers to these questions were always different. For example, the Head of a King had both a religious and a practical function; this statue fragment was part of a choir screen dividing laypeople from clergy in the cathedral at Chartres. The maiolica plate from Italy (1520 – 1530, 143.2010), had quite a different function—it was used to serve food every day, probably in the household of an Italian merchant. My most important goal was to determine how people actually used these objects in their day-to-day lives, in order learn both their stories and the stories of the people who used them. For some of these objects, unfortunately, sources were really difficult to find.
For example, a file for the Articulated Crayfish (late 19th century, 1992.55.a) did not exist; the only information I had was a time period and a country. In this and in similar cases, I looked up similar objects, the material (ivory), possible countries of origin (China and Japan), and the time period (19th century) to come up with information; I had to fit all these pieces together to come up with a coherent whole. Finally, I would try to assign each object a broad, overarching theme. These categories helped the curators better ascertain how people regarded and used these objects, and made it easier to explain how they are all culturally important, in singular ways.
My research was particularly interesting to me as an art history major. In my classes at Bowdoin, most of the art I’ve studied has been painting or sculpture that was made to be exhibited in galleries or private homes, not to be handled and used in everyday life. The objects that I’ve researched at the Museum, though, were not just beautiful but also functional, and from researching them I was able to learn much more about the cultures they came from. This approach taught me about aesthetic and artistic trends like my art history classes did, but also about economics and trade, political and religious structures, and social interaction. Hopefully, by coming to see The Object Show, museumgoers can get a sense of not just art history, but also social history, economic history, and the day-to-day lives of the people who used them.