Best of
Museums

2014

Ways of Curating


Hans Ulrich Obrist - 2014
    Since then he has staged more than 250 shows internationally, many of them among the most influential exhibits of our age. Ways of Curating is a compendium of the insights Obrist has gained from his years of extraordinary work in the art world. It skips between centuries and continents, flitting from meetings with the artists who have inspired him (including Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, and Gilbert and George) to biographies of influential figures such as Diaghilev and Walter Hopps. It describes some of the greatest exhibitions in history, as well as some of the greatest exhibitions never realized. It traces the evolution of the collections from Athanasius Kircher's 17th-century Wunderkammer to modern museums, and points the way for projects yet to come. Hans Ulrich Obrist has rescued the word "curate" from wine stores and playlists to remind us of the power inherent in looking at art—and at the world—in a new way.

Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest


Ryan Thompson - 2014
    Despite stern warnings, visitors remove several tons of petrified wood from the park each year, often returning these rocks by mail (sometimes years later), accompanied by a "conscience letter." These letters often include stories of misfortune attributed directly to their theft: car troubles, cats with cancer, deaths of family members, etc. Some writers hope that by returning these stolen rocks, good fortune will return to their lives, while others simply apologize or ask forgiveness. "They are beautiful," reads one letter, "but I can't enjoy them. They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience. Sorry...." Bad Luck, Hot Rocks documents this ongoing phenomenon, combining a series of original photographs of these otherworldly "bad luck rocks" with facsimiles of intimate, oddly entertaining letters from the park's archives.

Taxidermy Art: A Rogue's Guide to The Work, The Culture, and How to Do It Yourself


Robert Marbury - 2014
    Author Robert Marbury makes for a friendly (and often funny) guide, addressing the three big questions people have about taxidermy art: "What is it all about? Can I see some examples? "and "How can I make my own? "He takes readers through a brief history of taxidermy (and what sets artistic taxidermy apart) and presents stunning pieces from the most influential artists in the field. Rounding out the book are illustrated how-to lessons to get readers started on their own work, with sources for taxidermy materials and resources for the budding taxidermist."

Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit


Minor White - 2014
    His photographic career began in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, with assignments for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). After serving in World War II and studying art history at Columbia University, White’s focus shifted toward the metaphorical. He began creating images charged with symbolism and a critical aspect called equivalency, referring to the invisible spiritual energy present in a photograph made visible to the viewer.   This book brings together White’s key biographical information—his evolution as a photographer, teacher of photography, and editor of Aperture, as well as particularly insightful quotations from his journals, which he kept for more than forty years. The result is an engaging narrative that weaves through the main threads of White’s life, his growth as an artist, as well as his spiritual search and ongoing struggle with his own sexuality and self-doubt. He sought comfort in a variety of religious practices that influenced his continually metamorphosing artistic philosophy.   Complemented with a rich selection of more than 160 images including some never published before, the book accompanies the first major exhibition of White’s work since 1989, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from July 8 to October 19, 2014.

Penn Center: A History Preserved


Orville Vernon Burton - 2014
    Helena Island still relate that their people wanted to “catch the learning” after northern abolitionists founded Penn School in 1862, less than six months after the Union army captured the South Carolina sea islands. In this broad history Orville Vernon Burton and Wilbur Cross range across the past 150 years to reacquaint us with the far-reaching impact of a place where many daring and innovative social justice endeavors had their beginnings.Penn Center’s earliest incarnation was as a refuge where escaped and liberated enslaved people could obtain formal liberal arts schooling, even as the Civil War raged on sometimes just miles away. Penn Center then earned a place in the history of education by providing agricultural and industrial arts training for African Americans after Reconstruction and through the Jim Crow era, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Later, during the civil rights movement, Penn Center made history as a safe meeting place for organizations like Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Peace Corps. Today, Penn Center continues to build on its long tradition of leadership in progressive causes. As a social services hub for local residents and as a museum, conference, and education complex, Penn Center is a showcase for activism in such areas as cultural, material, and environmental preservation; economic sustainability; and access to health care and early learning.Here is all of Penn Center’s rich past and present, as told through the experiences of its longtime Gullah inhabitants and countless visitors. Including forty-two extraordinary photographs that show Penn as it was and is now, this book recounts Penn Center’s many achievements and its many challenges, reflected in the momentous events it both experienced and helped to shape.

An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir


Ruth M. Underhill - 2014
    Underhill (1883-1984) was one of the twentieth century's legendary anthropologists, forged in the same crucible as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. After decades of trying to escape her Victorian roots, Underhill took on a new adventure at the age of forty-six, when she entered Columbia University as a doctoral student of anthropology. Celebrated now as one of America's pioneering anthropologists, Underhill reveals her life's journey in frank, tender, unvarnished revelations that form the basis of An Anthropologist's Arrival. This memoir, edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen E. Nash, is based on unpublished archives, including an unfinished autobiography and interviews conducted prior to her death, held by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. In brutally honest words, Underhill describes her uneven passage through life, beginning with a searing portrait of the Victorian restraints on women and her struggle to break free from her Quaker family's privileged but tightly laced control. Tenderly and with humor she describes her transformation from a struggling "sweet girl" to wife and then divorcee. Professionally she became a welfare worker, a novelist, a frustrated bureaucrat at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a professor at the University of Denver, and finally an anthropologist of distinction. Her witty memoir reveals the creativity and tenacity that pushed the bounds of ethnography, particularly through her focus on the lives of women, for whom she served as a role model, entering a working retirement that lasted until she was nearly 101 years old. No quotation serves to express Ruth Underhill's adventurous view better than a line from her own poetry: "Life is not paid for. Life is lived. Now come."

Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century


Karen A. Rader - 2014
    Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle profound changes in these exhibitions—and the institutions that housed them—between 1910 and 1990, ultimately offering new perspectives on the history of museums, science, and science education.             Rader and Cain explain why science and natural history museums began to welcome new audiences between the 1900s and the 1920s and chronicle the turmoil that resulted from the introduction of new kinds of biological displays. They describe how these displays of life changed dramatically once again in the 1930s and 1940s, as museums negotiated changing, often conflicting interests of scientists, educators, and visitors. The authors then reveal how museum staffs, facing intense public and scientific scrutiny, experimented with wildly different definitions of life science and life science education from the 1950s through the 1980s. The book concludes with a discussion of the influence that corporate sponsorship and blockbuster economics wielded over science and natural history museums in the century’s last decades.             A vivid, entertaining study of the ways science and natural history museums shaped and were shaped by understandings of science and public education in the twentieth-century United States, Life on Display will appeal to historians, sociologists, and ethnographers of American science and culture, as well as museum practitioners and general readers.

Digital Preservation for Libraries, Archives, and Museums


Edward M. Corrado - 2014
    For administrators and practitioners alike, the information in this book is presented readably, focusing on management issues and best practices. Although this book addresses technology, it is not solely focused on technology. After all, technology changes and digital preservation is aimed for the long term. This is not a how-to book giving step-by-step processes for certain materials in a given kind of system. Instead, it addresses a broad group of resources that could be housed in any number of digital preservation systems. Finally, this book is about "things (not technology; not how-to; not theory) I wish I knew before I got started." Digital preservation is concerned with the life cycle of the digital object in a robust and all-inclusive way. Many Europeans and some North Americans may refer to digital curation to mean the same thing, taking digital preservation to be the very limited steps and processes needed to insure access over the long term. The authors take digital preservation in the broadest sense of the term: looking at all aspects of curating and preserving digital content for long term access. The book is divided into four parts based on the Digital Preservation Triad: 1.Situating Digital Preservation, 2.Management Aspects, 3.Technology Aspects, and 4.Content-Related Aspects. The book includes a foreword by Michael Lesk, eminent scholar and forerunner in digital librarianship and preservation. The book features an appendix providing additional information and resources for digital preservationists. Finally, there is a glossary to support a clear understanding of the terms presented in the book. Digital Preservation will answer questions that you might not have even known you had, leading to more successful digital preservation initiatives.

Interpreting Native American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites


Raney Bench - 2014
    This resource gives museum and history professionals benchmarks to help shape conversations and policies designed to improve relations with Native communities represented in the museum. The book includes case studies from museums that are purposefully working to incorporate Native people and perspectives into all aspects of their work. The case study authors share experiences, hoping to inspire other museum staff to reach out to tribes to develop or improve their own interpretative processes. Examples from tribal and non-tribal museums, and partnerships between tribes and museums are explored as models for creating deep and long lasting partnerships between museums and the tribal communities they represent. The case studies represent museums of different sizes, different missions, and located in different regions of the country in an effort to address the unique history of each location. By doing so, it inspires action among museums to invite Native people to share in the interpretive process, or to take existing relationships further by sharing authority with museum staff and board.

Strangers on a Train


Meg Maguire - 2014
    Then his weekend with Brenna progresses to a weekend fling...Ticket Home Encountering her workaholic ex on her commuter train is the surprise of Amy’s life. Especially since Jeff seems hell-bent on winning her back.Thank You for Riding At the end of Caitlin’s commute, her extended flirtation with a handsome stranger finds them facing a frigid winter night locked in an unheated subway station.Back on Track A wine tour isn’t enough to take Matt’s mind off his baseball slump—until sexy, funny Allie plops into the adjacent seat and tells him three things about herself. One of them, she says, is a lie. Then Allie lets slip one truth too many…Big Boy Mandy doesn’t want romance, but monthly role-playing dates with her stranger on a train—each to a different time period—become the erotic escape she desperately needs. And a soul connection she never expected.

Miró: The Experience of Seeing—Late Works, 1963–1981


Carmen Fernandez Aparicio - 2014
    This body of work, almost entirely unknown in the United States, showcases Miró’s exceptional ingenuity as both a painter and sculptor.  Miró: The Experience of Seeing includes color illustrations of nearly 50 paintings, drawings, and sculptures that show the breadth and contrast of this body of work—from bold, colorful canvases with expressive gestures to the most minimal calligraphic markings on white fields. His sculptures made of found objects are a revelation. Comparisons between paintings and sculptures highlight startling connections between shapes and symbols that Miró used in each medium. These mature works represent the culmination of the artist’s development of an innovative and personal visual language. Engaging texts, including a contribution by noted Spanish filmmaker Pere Portabella, explain Miró’s role as a political figure and his quest to speak about the most intangible subjects through the materiality of objects and the painted gesture. This important new examination of Miró’s later work allows for a richer, deeper understanding of this significant modern artist’s distinguished career.

Darren Waterston: Filthy Lucre


Susan Cross - 2014
    Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre is a contemporary reimagining of James McNeill Whistler’s decorative masterpiece Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room—originally a dining room in the London mansion of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland. In 1876 and 1877, Whistler transformed the space with painted leather walls, gilded shutters, and a ceiling reflecting the coppery golds and brilliant blues of a peacock’s plumage. Waterston reconstructs the historical room as a sumptuous ruin, replete with reinterpretations of Whistler’s paintings and 250 hand-painted vessels. This title features all-new photography of Whistler’s and Waterston’s rooms, accompanied by essays by their curators and a scholar of patronage.

Museum of the Future (Documents Series 18)


Cristina Bechtler - 2014
    They attract ever-larger audiences; architects constantly redesign them; and the ever-swellling ranks of artists are producing a greater quantity of art than ever before. Meanwhile, museum funds are dwindling amid economic crisis and an overheated art market. The question of which art is to be collected has also become a more openly discussed topic. How do curators meet these challenges? How do artists view their relationships to museum? How do practitioners navigate between ideas, ideals and realities? This publication gathers interviews with artists, architects and curators of the contemporary art world, such as John Baldessari, Ute Meta Bauer, Suzanne Cotter, Bice Curiger, Chris Dercon, Charles Esche, Liam Gillick, Michael Govan, Jacques Herzog, Thomas Hirschhorn, Philipp Kaiser, Rem Koolhaas, Lars Nittve, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thierry Raspail, Tobias Rehberger and Beatrix Ruf, among others.

Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical


Patricia A. Junker - 2014
    Capitalizing on their particular geographical position at what was a modern art outpost -- working free from the strong influences of New York and Europe, and sitting at the portal to the Far East -- a close-knit group of artists sought to address the global political, social, and economic ills of their time.The seminal figures in this group -- Mark Tobey and Morris Graves especially -- quickly garnered critical attention in New York for their uncommon imagery and expressive technique, which drew upon spiritual tenents ranging from Zen Buddhism to the Persian Baha'i faith and their mastery of Asian calligraphy. Modernism in the Pacific Northwest presents an overview drawn from SAM's unparalleled collection of the key figures of this generation: Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Leo Kenney, Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Phil McCracken, James Washington Jr., and Tony Angell.

Pop Departures


Catharina Manchanda - 2014
    Early Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol adopted alternately critical, embracing, or ambivalent attitudes toward America’s rapidly proliferating consumer culture and its representations. Key works by these artists are illustrated as the foundation for this look at the ongoing relevance of Pop Art and its interrogation of American culture into the 21st century. Following Pop’s heyday in the early 1960s, new generations of artists have returned to the questions surrounding consumerism and media culture. Works made in the 1980s and 1990s by Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and others reveal new methods and visual strategies that addressed these issues in a much different political and social climate. The innovative work of younger contemporary artists such as Elad Lassry, Josephine Meckseper, and Ryan Trecartin demonstrates that commodity culture, display, and the cult of celebrity maintain a strong resonance and are critically examined by today’s artists. The catalogue also includes short texts by several artists, curators, and art historians, including Josephine Meckseper, James Voorhies, Richard Meyer, and Hal Foster.

Chigusa and the Art of Tea


Louise Allison Cort - 2014
    In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed from a humble vessel into a celebrated object used in chanoyu (often translated in English as tea ceremony), renowned for its aesthetic and functional qualities, and awarded the name Chigusa.Few extant tea utensils possess the quantity and quality of the accessories associated with Chigusa, material that enables modern scholars and tea aficionados to trace the jar's evolving history of ownership and appreciation. Tea diaries indicate that the lavish accessories--the silk net bag, cover, and cords--that still accompany the jar were prepared in the early sixteenth century by its first recorded owner.

The Only Grant-Writing Book You'll Ever Need


Arlen Sue - 2014
    A revised and updated edition of the essential guide to grant-writing.