Experiences at the Chrysler Museum of Art

Friday we went to see the Hermitage Museums and Gardens near ODU as our little intern field trip. It is a little bit museum, a little bit historic house and I didn’t really know what I was expecting but it far surpassed whatever I was expecting. There were so many parts I liked for so many different reasons so I’m just going to talk about them all as I encountered them. 

The “gardens” part of it reminded me SO much of my grandmother’s yard. So that was kind of strange but I enjoyed that our tour guide kept telling us all the ways the gardens had been done incorrectly over the years and not sugar coating anything at all. 

Once we went inside I could have stayed there forever. The first room we were in was all this well cared for wood paneling and carving and it smelled AMAZING, like that special oil they sometimes put on antique wooden furniture to keep it looking shiny. Maybe this was just me but it was such a nice, calming smell. It was only lit by natural light and there were cases of really pretty things all around, like a monogrammed vanity set and cool silver tea sets. Also our tour guide, Colin, spoke at just the right pace and really knew what he was talking about. I really wanted to never leave that room but, alas, the tour went on.

And good thing it did because the amazing kingfisher headdresses were in the next room! Here is a close up (and if you like funny, museum-esque blogs you can also check that out on the link! It made me laugh at least). Anyway, isn’t that crazy?? All the color you see is made with tiny bird feathers pasted down like fabric. I mean, at first it totally looks like enamel inlay it is so solid and smooth (this is just further proof that I really need to find a good Asian art history class to take).

Most of the Sloane collection is Asian along with some Middle Eastern art and a collection of paintings. I think this makes the museum even more unique because it is both a fashionable 20th century house and a cultural museum. Additionally, the museum staff is apparently rather free to change and operate things as they wish without having to worry about restrictions placed by Mrs. Sloane in her will. That’s a huge blessing for any museum. 

Being in the house also reminded me of being in Barcelona and touring all of the historic Gaudi houses and learning about weird individual quirks the owners had that influenced the designers. One really strange thing about the house I still don’t fully understand is when Colin talked about parts of the building being moved all around. Apparently very few of the rooms are still in their original location? But how did they move them? Didn’t moving them around create the need for new door ways and the removal of old ones? I would have asked for more clarification but I didn’t even really know where to start and I felt like I would have needed to see plans. 

I did a terrible thing where I wrote a whole finished post last Friday and then neglected to post or save it before going on our Friday afternoon field trip and now it is lost forever. Tumblr why have you let me down like this where is your autosave. What’s worse is I also didn’t make an official post for week three sooo I will briefly recap all that has been happening here.

Lets see. So after the glass tour TWO Wednesdays ago, that Friday we went to see the Jean Outland Chrysler Library which is now housed at ODU instead of in the museum itself. As far as libraries go, it was pretty cool. I love libraries and work in one and even I have accepted that it is a challenge to make them riveting to others. BUT they had Jean Chrysler’s scrapbook journals from when she traveled over seas in their special collections storage and those looked like a lot of fun AND i got free books. Not even just free books, because there are a lot of crappy free books out there, but like never-been-taken-out-of-the-wrapper, recently published free books! My favorite is a collection of glass sculpture in museums. 

Then over the weekend I went home home to my family and watched my little sister graduate from high school before traveling back to go to Water Country and Busch Gardens on Monday. 

Last week we had an internship session with conservation which was neat but I already knew most of the information he shared with us. Mark did use a black light to show us old v.s new paint on one of the canvas and that was pretty amazing. I also got to steal a picture of some of the artworks out of their frames for work. The fellow talked to use about what she’d be working on recently before running to catch a plane for Amsterdam(?). I appreciated that part because its really helpful to meet people that are a step above you but still not finished with their training. Plus, I would really love to fly to Europe for conferences. 

Yesterday we had a tour of the Chrysler glass galleries with the curator, Diane Wright. I was pretty excited for this tour because glass is something I’ve become unexpectedly attracted to over the past view years. It started with taking a stained glass class in high school, which I fell in love with because the technique was so straight forward and neat but it made such pretty glowing pictures. Plus everything you can draw looks way cooler in glass than it ever will on paper. I interned in my teachers shop during high school but when I got to college I didn’t have any place to continue working with the medium so I just hoped that one day after college I’d be able to get back to it. 

Until my sophomore year my interest wasn’t really in glass, but just in the techniques of stained glass. But then one day every glass bottle I saw I wanted to keep. Even just beer bottles, I refused to throw them away. They were so pretty! And it just kept striking me how crazy it was that everything use to be sold in glass bottles and now they’re a rarity for anything but alcohol. So I kept them, and I made my friends keep them, under the guise that I was going to make art with them (yeah, ok, they’re all still in my basement against my mothers protest. One day they will be art, I swear). Then I traveled abroad to Barcelona last summer AND SO MANY MORE THINGS WERE BOTTLED. Not just alcohol but soda and even their water were regularly sold in amazing, unique glass bottles. So I kept them, and spent a stupid amount of my precious luggage weight on smuggling heavy glass bottles back to the states. So now I still regularly go out of my way to buy things that have cool bottles and have even weirded people out by asking if I can have their empty drink bottle, but I have managed to stop obsessively collecting every glass container I see. My coolest bottles I use as decorations in my room. 

The funny thing about my mother protesting my hoarding of bottles is that I’m pretty darn sure its her fault its happening. My mom has always loved a good piece of old glass. Our house is continually decorated with those pretty old medicine and liquor bottles you see in junk stores. We have them in every color, for every season. For Mother’s Day this year I bought her two big whiskey flasks that have aged into lavender. She also has a collection of glass flower frog pen holders (think glass paper weight with holes), and a collection of the glass insulators they use to use on power lines. So, yes, I think I have been subconsciously brain washed into liking glass things. That, or it’s genetic.

Alright, background now explained (applying here had nooooothing to do with the glass collection, obviously), back to the tour. One of my favorite parts of the whole gallery is the little case in the TV room with all the random, everyday glass objects in it because it makes me feel justified in my fascination with what is essentially, junk. The tour was amazing because it really helps me to have someone talk about things, even if everything they’re saying is written on a label somewhere in the room. Meagan told us on our run through the museum our first day that the glass galleries had changed drastically during the renovation and now displayed less than they had before. Which is crazy to me because I find the galleries overwhelming now. I love glass but having so much of it in one place sort of makes my eyes glaze over. Its all so pretty! So shiny! So much color! but I have a hard time taking in information past that. Having Diane talk about individual objects helped so much, and I feel like now I could go back in their by myself and get more out of it because someone showed me a good way to approach it. 

I asked some questions but I still have a lot more. We didn’t even talk about the whole collection, we just talked about bits a pieces and it still took an hour and a half. I asked how they date glass and she said it can really be a guessing game since its not as straight forward as dating a painting (which is funny cause I wouldn’t necessarily call that easy either). Wonder if my mom has any glass bottles worthy of a museum collection? Which brought to mind another question I didn’t get a chance to ask: How expensive is most of the glass collection? Tiffany Lamps and contemporary works are obviously pricey but what about the old German wine bottles? Or even the older crystal sets? It’s weird because we think of museum collections as being exclusively expensive things that normal people don’t and can’t own but that’s not necessarily true. When we toured the American galleries, Alex told us that they sometimes buy stereoscopic photographs for as little as $5 off ebay that are pertinent to the collection. So I thought that since the glass collection is a representation of the history of glass around the world there are probably objects in it that aren’t necessarily rare but are still important to the story of glass. 

Happy to report that life is still going well here at the Chrysler. Week Two was easy and fast since I took Friday off to go home and we don’t come in on Mondays (<3). Four day weeks are as good as they sounded like they would be. I’m much more productive with my free time (depending on what you’d call productive) and I also feel like it’s good motivation to be more productive at work too, since you know you won’t have to be there as long.

I have started my official project here at the Chrysler, which is working on the Chrysler’s Google Art Project. The street view of the interior of the museum is complete but that’s about it. So my job is to fill in all the metadata for all the art hanging on the virtual walls. Metadata is just a fancy way of saying information (ok, it’s a little more complicated but that’s the general idea), and includes the title, date, artist, size, etc. of a work. My first job is to collect all the metadata I can for each work and put it into a google spreadsheet so that the information can be uploaded to the website; it goes from looking like an overwhelming spreadsheet to this (click “details” in the left corner). 

My job in the Visual Resources Center at JMU is extremely similar to this, except, don’t tell anyone but this job is a lot easier. The Chrysler already has a beauuuuutiful online collection that has nearly every object on view in the museum cataloged in it. And not only is nearly every object searchable, but almost all of them have extensive documentation, including object labels available online. So for the most part my job just consists of copying and pasting information from one website to another.  

That sounds like so much fun doesn’t it? Well it is, because I’m essentially getting a very detailed virtual tour of the whole museum. So far I’m very familiar with the Chrysler’s collection of 18th and 19thc. American art. I can’t say I’ve ever been very interested in early American art (between the Revolution, founding a new country, and the Civil War, art was fairing much better in Europe at the time) but I am interested now. Which is why I love research oriented jobs like this one; they sort of force you to learn about topics that maybe you never would have paid attention to on your own. After you look at your twentieth early American portrait or the fifteenth random object decorated with George Washington (I mean, I knew we loved George Washington but I never knew we loved him THAT much) you start to see patterns and it makes you have a new level of appreciation for those objects. 

It is because of my similar research job at JMU that I now desperately want to see India. If you’re ever bored, visit the Archaeological Survey of India’s Google page. You can use “Museum View” to visit 272 historic sites around India, including many ancient temples that were carved into cliffs or entirely from living rock (try Ajanta Caves or Mahabalipuram) and then you’ll want to go to India too. 

I have almost survived my first week at the Chrysler Museum of Art. I really like it here. And I'm not just saying that because important people will be reading this.

I successfully navigated the tolls (turns out you don't have to stop for them or anything) and was here for my first day over thirty minutes early. The first day wasn't much to talk about. We did lots of procedural things and learned about rules and security. I'm still really award walking past security in the mornings (do I stop, do I not stop, do I say hi). I got a niffy security badge that lets me get behind the scenes of the building (I'm already certain popping out of a door right into the middle of a gallery will never get old).

I've gotten to sit in on several meetings that let me see even farther behind the scenes. The best parts are when something comes up that is exactly like things I've discussed in past museum classes.

For example, the Chrysler, like so many other museums, is now facing the problem of social media. When understood and used correctly, social media is a god send for businesses and institutions alike. Unfortunately, social media has developed extraordinarily fast and is continually in flux so few people are truly experts. For an institution, it can take a whole department to run and update 5+ social media sites effectively. Most institutions don't have that because creating a whole department out of nothing is expensive. Not to mention most museums are already understaffed because of a lack of money.

Sitting behind the scenes of the meeting addressing the need to hire multiple new positions but only being able to pick one was the highlight of my week. It wasn't the happiest of meetings but I felt like that was a better picture of the true struggles a museum, especially a small one, face all the time. Luckily, I was pretty prepared for it not to be the prettiest picture and nothing has scared me away yet.

I'm really happy to be at the Chrysler because of its size. I thought that would be a plus when I applied but I feel rest-assured on the matter even after just one week. The smaller staff size means that I'm really going to get to see and hear about parts of every department and how they interact during my internship. I also feel like it means that every department is more dependent on its surrounding department; people carry more than one hat. Lots of things need to work at the same time for everyone's job to go smoothly.

When I first discovered this article on Facebook, I really didn't imagine it would be so juicy and exciting. The Museum of Contemporary Art is a neighboring museum to the Chrysler and we're visiting it one Friday as part of our "intern outings." I even know one of the artists in the show, a recent JMU grad.

I love and hate this article because it really shows how little the art world has be able to change things in the past 25 years. In 1989, the Corcoran Art Museum in D.C. had the exact same problem with the Mapplethorpe exhibition they tried (and failed) to host. Conservatives in the city shut it down because they were offended by his work and its subjects, as the commission board member in the above article is similarly offended now. Artists and other members of the community were mad that the art museum backed down and didn't hold the show (in their defense, the majority of their funding was at stake). I was really pleased to see the MOCA director standing up for the artist and even calling the whole situation "fulfilling" their mission to "spark dialog".

The funniest part of situations like these is that when conservatives label such "offensive" paintings or exhibits a problem, more people end up seeing the art than would likely have seen it in the first place. Ryden is getting a free publicity boost.

I’ve never had a blog before. I’ve thought about it many times because they seem fun but they’re intimidating. Who would I want reading it? My friends? Complete strangers? How do you get complete strangers to read your new blog? 

So here I am; I haven’t even gotten to my internship and I’m already being pushed out of my comfort zone. 

My name is Madison and I’m 21 years old, about to start an internship at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA. During the school year I attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA and I originally lived in Waynesboro, VA, just 30 minutes south of JMU. I grew up in a small town and go to school in a small town so living in Norfolk will be different but I’m excited (wait, what do you mean I have to pay a toll to get to work). 

I’m a rising senior currently studying art history with a concentration in museum studies which is how I ended up here, but I also have a studio art degree in the works. It never ceases to surprise me how different two things that are so related can be, and how different the people interested in them can be as well. One time, upon discovering I was interested in pursuing a career in art history, my metals and jewelry teacher told me, with obvious surprise, “well, you’re a pretty good maker for an art historian.” For an even better comparison between the two we can look to my finals last week. I spent 50+ hours and $200 dollars on my metals project, but only 12 hours writing my 12 page final paper for my art history class. My grade for each was the same. 

Despite the fact that mastering two different majors is making my life much harder now, I love both too much to give them up and I believe mastering both sides of this coin will make my skills that much more valuable down the line. 

As an artist, I work with lots of craft based mediums, like embroidery, book arts, metals and jewelry, and stained glass. When I return home after July 1st, I will be working in a stained glass shop as an intern for the rest of the summer. I found unexpected success with oil painting this semester at school and it won me my first art award in a juried show. 

As an art historian, I work in the Art Departments Visual Resources Library (VRC) helping to catalog information to accompany the digitization of the school’s old slide library. I hold a second job in Carrier Library as a preservation assistant. There, I help to extend the lives of books by repairing things like torn pages or completely replacing spines and covers. I get to work with the general library books, as well as the Special Collection books.

During the school year I’m really busy all the time. While it’s both exhausting and frustrating it is also extremely rewarding. Besides my two jobs and five classes, I am in the Kappa Pi Art Honors Fraternity and the Marching Royal Dukes (one of the nation’s largest college marching bands). I marched in the Macy’s Day Parade as a freshman and it is a whole story unto itself (I swear to you that the whole parade is run and marched by people with zero sleep). Last summer I studied abroad in Barcelona, Spain and had the time of my life.