Museum Mysteries--Objects and their stories
_History investigation. Detective work. Laboratory research. This hands-on seminar involves all three. Students will learn how to identify American artifacts by their material, construction, style and age, how to catalog and document material culture collections, and how to create an interpretive plan for objects by locating them in a historical and cultural context. In other words, students will learn how to make a mute object tell its “story.” Students will develop these skills in the Phillips Museum of Art on campus in collaboration with other museums and collecting institutions in Lancaster and will present their discoveries to the public.
Course Goals:
At the end of this course students should be able to:
Identify and Describe objects in terms of their physical properties, including materials, construction, age, and design.
Recognize the many different layers of meaning and relevance that are embedded in objects.
Use different research methods to pursue specific interpretive strategies (ie. what is the most interesting of the many stories one can tell about this object?)
Convey those stories to different audiences (ie through writing, presentations, and exhibitions geared to both popular and academic audiences)
Some quotes about things and the power they have in our lives:
"Say it, no ideas but in things!" William Carlos Williams
"'Thoughts' and 'things' are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other...But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are." William James, "Does Consciousness Exist," (1904)
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
"Show me thy furniture, and I will tell thee what thou art." Harriet Prescott Spofford, (Art Decoration Applied to Furniture)
"I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven"
Samuel Johnson
Course Goals:
At the end of this course students should be able to:
Identify and Describe objects in terms of their physical properties, including materials, construction, age, and design.
Recognize the many different layers of meaning and relevance that are embedded in objects.
Use different research methods to pursue specific interpretive strategies (ie. what is the most interesting of the many stories one can tell about this object?)
Convey those stories to different audiences (ie through writing, presentations, and exhibitions geared to both popular and academic audiences)
Some quotes about things and the power they have in our lives:
"Say it, no ideas but in things!" William Carlos Williams
"'Thoughts' and 'things' are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other...But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are." William James, "Does Consciousness Exist," (1904)
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
"Show me thy furniture, and I will tell thee what thou art." Harriet Prescott Spofford, (Art Decoration Applied to Furniture)
"I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven"
Samuel Johnson