Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Accessioning And Managing The Petersburg Area Art League Collection, Janelle Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1960s, the Petersburg Area Art League (PAAL) has obtained works of art for its permanent collection through purchases, private donations, and through the local art show, the Poplar Lawn Art Festival, later known as Artfest. Recently, however, the organization has decided to become a non-collecting institution in order to focus on its mission to promote the arts in Petersburg through gallery shows for local artists and educational programs. While PAAL’s staff members share a love of art and a dedication to the local community, they have not been trained in professional standards for handling museum collections as outlined …

Comunication With Islamic Material Culture: A Case Study Of The Room 34 In The British Museum, Mohamad Meqdad

Faculty & Staff Publications

Communication inside the museum comprises three active agents: curator, visitor, and material culture. The process of making meaning results from the interaction between these agents. Each one of them is independent and measuring the success of any exhibit depends on the degree of their engagement. Therefore, three meanings come up here, an organisational meaning, an interactional meaning, and a representational meaning. Each one of these meanings is tied to one agent, the organisational with the physicality of the exhibition, the interactional with the visitors, and the representational with the curators. The result of this triangular interaction is the communication or …

Universality And Its Discontents: The Louvre And Guggenheim Abu Dhabi As A Case Study In The Future Of Museums, Catherine R. Skluzacek

Art and Art History Honors Projects

The contemporary museological community faces increasing competition in the global marketplace to prove its relevance. Accordingly, franchises of leading institutions will now appear in Abu Dhabi, UAE, that approach this problem by presenting art in a comparative international perspective rather than as fragmentary narratives of disparate cultures. Furthermore, shifts in state financial support and the purposes of collecting within museum institutions have led to the adoption of administrative policies like those used by multinational corporations. This new model of museological practice presented by the Louvre and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi resolves the paradox of protecting cultural diversity within universal museums.

Beyond The Business: Social And Cultural Aspects Of The Atlanta Life Insurance Company, Alisha R. Winn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation research is an examination of the social and cultural dynamics of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company (ALIC) in Atlanta, GA. During the Jim Crow era (and post Jim Crow era), the ALIC provided economic mobility through employment, home loans, life insurance, and community solidarity. The company was one of the largest and most successful African-American financial institution in the country during the 20th century. It was founded in 1905 by Alonzo F. Herndon, a prosperous black barber and entrepreneur who rose from enslavement to become by 1927 the wealthiest African American in Atlanta. Renamed as the Atlanta Life …

"The Last Full Measure Of Devotion": The Battle Of Gettysburg And The New Museum In Schmucker Hall, Bradley R. Hoch, Gerald Christianson

Adams County History

Schmucker Hall offers an unprecedented opportunity to interpret the role of religion in the Civil War and the American expenment in democracy. In particular it can give palpable expression to major themes in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address concerning the battle itself, the conflict as a time of testing, the sacrifices of those who fought here, and the hope these sacrifices bring to the young nation for a new birth of freedom.

Built in 1832 and named for an abolitionist and founder of Gettysburg Seminary, Samuel Simon Schmucker, it is the original structure on the oldest continuously-operating Lutheran seminary in the …

Designing A Digital Ecosystem For The New Museum Environment: The Virtual Museum Of The Pacific, Jennie A. Lawson, Peter W. Eklund, Peter Goodall, Timothy Wray, Vinod Daniel, Melanie Van Olffen

Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences - Papers (Archive)

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a social media platform for a digital ecosystem, which enables a variety of user communities to engage with the Pacific Collection of the Australian Museum. The success of the system depends on facilitating the development of culturally relevant folksonomies and encouraging a conversation between online communities. In this paper we explore the relationships between stakeholders, folksonomy and taxonomy, to reveal the design strategies which inform this digital ecosystem. Our analysis defines the scope for the social tagging component of our information model and discusses how users might interact with objects (in terms of …

A Kachina By Any Other Name: Linguistically Contextualizing Native American Collections, Rachel Elizabeth Maxson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Museums collect and care for material culture, and, increasingly, intangible culture. This relatively new term for the folklore, music, dance, traditional practices, and language belonging to a group of people is gaining importance in international heritage management discourse. As one aspect of intangible cultural heritage, language is more relevant in museums than one might realize. Incorporating native languages into museum collections provides context and acts as appropriate museology, preserving indigenous descriptions of objects. Hopi katsina tihu are outstanding examples of objects that museums can re-contextualize with native terminology. Their deep connection to Hopi belief and ritual as well as their …

The Curatorial Muse, Michael J. Kowalski

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

An appreciation of the tension between the predicate, "to curate," and the subject, "the curator," is essential to understanding the convergence of creation, criticism, and administration in the graphic arts of our time. Curators were ideally positioned to step to the fore when the idea-versus-object dichotomy began to collapse in the work of Duchamp. The roots of activist curating can be found in Western Classical culture. The prevalence of conceptual art at the end of the twentieth century, combined with the explicit denigration of physical craft by artists, created a void into which activist curators moved. The curator's role as …