#johnson museum

In January 2018, I decide that I was going to visit a new museum each month; one that I had never visited before. This proved to be challenging at times. I had already gone to every museum in Chemung County and many others throughout the state. During the winter months, I also found it was difficult to find a museum open when I had the time to visit. But now, at the end of the year, I can happily say I have achieved my goal. I visited history, art, and science museums, historic sites, and a zoo and I enjoyed every single one of them.

January - The Curtis Museum, Hammondsport, NY

February - Museum of the Earth, Ithaca, NY

March - Roberson Museum and Science Center, Binghamton, NY

April - Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum, Sanibel, FL

May - Hanford Mills Museum, East Meredith, NY

June - Iroquois Indian Museum, Howe Cave, NY

July - Finger Lakes Boating Museum, Hammondsport, NY

August - Brick Tavern Museum, Montour Falls, NY

September - Schoharie Crossing State Historic Site, Fort Hunter, NY

October - Hyde Hall, Cooperstown, NY

November - Utica Zoo, Utica, NY

December - Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY

 A New Museum a Month - December Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Thursday, December 20, 2018

I finished up my year of visiting a new museum each month in Ithaca at the Johnson Museum at Cornell. I have heard  good things about the museum and was glad to finally get the chance to visit. The building itself is a work of art fashioned of concrete. The museum website has wonderful info about the structure.

We entered through the lobby in the wing and proceeded downstairs to the temporary exhibition galleries. The exhibit entitled Moon had East Asian prints and a wonderful piece that included light and sound by artist Sarah Brayer. Pleasures of the Night, a student project, explored nighttime activities under electric lights and Object Lessons combined the art and history of photography.

My favorite temporary exhibit was Xu Bing: The Character of Characters, a five-channel animation. The panoramic video is 18 minutes long and I could probably have sat and watched it two or three times.

The Visible Storage Gallery was another highlight of the lower levels of the museum. The space contains hundreds of pieces arranged by geographic region and type of artifact. There are several tablets throughout the space where visitors can enter the accession number of an object and learn more about it. I have always loved open study storage!

Moving up to the first floor, we saw 19th century and modern American and European art and contemporary art. I liked seeing the 19th century art hung in salon style.

That was a really nice contrast to the display of the modern and contemporary works.

The second floor was filled with a little bit of a wide variety of works from medieval art to 17th century Dutch art. As a classicist, I was particularly interested in the ancient Greek and Roman pieces, though, I will admit that I was a little disappointed by how few were on display. But the museum obviously has a huge, diverse collection and I realize they did not create the exhibits expressly with my own preferences in mind.

The fifth floor was, in my opinion, the most impressive space in the museum. Not only does it showcase the museum’s broad collection of Asian art, it offers fantastic views out over the Cornell Campus and Ithaca.

The art was arranged by region and included a wide variety of materials from ceramics and wooden statuary to textiles and prints on paper. My favorite thing was that there was a mix of historic and modern pieces displayed side-by-side showing how the artistic traditions of a region continued into newer works. In the Chinese section, for example, a wood and gesso statue of Nanhai Guanyin made during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) was displayed near a ceramic piece entitled Fashion and Mao made by artist Suo Tan in 2007.

Our class’s trip to the Johnson Museum was informative because we didn’t just zip from room to room trying to absorb as much as we could for the sake of time. We instead thoroughly examined just a few pieces of art. I was particularly drawn to the first piece we saw, which was Mickalene Thomas’ Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires (2013). 

When Priscilla and I observed this work, we asked ourselves - why did she make it a collage? Even their bodies are kind of split - they’re together but it looks like they could easily come apart or be forced apart. Their facial expressions - they don’t seem happy but they don’t seem like they’re in pain either. Their bodies are comfortable with each other. It also looks like they have a need to be together. We also looked at the cutouts surrounding their bodies, which, looking at the type of print Thomas chose, are rather noisy patterns. I wondered if the cutouts could perhaps represent some sort of clutter, and we eventually came to interpret them as society’s objection to the women’s sexuality and race. 

Our guide then told us to keep in mind a 3-step process when examining any work of art, which was 1) Look at what is in front of you - just examine, don’t do anything more or less. 2) Analyze: Look for patterns, any repetitions 3) Interpret: What do you make of the patterns you’ve observed? What do they mean? In following this process, our class collectively examined this work again. We focused on the two bodies, wondered what type of body language being represented, and came to a broad but concrete agreement that the two women’s body language was pointing to a critique of institutional racism. 

“The preservation of casts over centuries introduces an element of recreation and alteration on its own. Note, for example, an excerpt from the curators’ note for Seated Hermes from the Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum: 'black painted finish applied during recent restoration, after an earlier botched attempt to render the original bronze.'

“When I first entered the Bartels Gallery, I immediately gravitated towards the rich, luxurious black casts, struck by the deepness of the sculpture’s absorption of color. Yet, the striking characteristic that drew me in is a product of restoration, not of the casts’ original composition. The transformative power of such alterations further elevates the role of the invisible restorer.”

Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell LibraryEarly Cornell students in a drawing class learned to sketch by studying plaster cast replicas of classical antiquities. The use of casts as a learning tool is the focus of a new Johnson Museum exhibition.

'Cast and Present’

Drawing on Cornell’s collection of plaster castsof classical art – the brainchild of Andrew Dickson White – “Cast and Present: Replicating Antiquity in the Museum and the Academy” opened last weekend at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Annetta Alexandridis and Verity Platt, associate professors in the history of art and classics, curated the exhibit.

The exhibition, on display until July 19, gives visitors an opportunity to envision Cornell’s cast “museums” of yesteryear, while asserting their ongoing value as learning tools in the digital age.

“Cast and Present” honors Cornell’s sesquicentennial by returning to the university’s deep roots in teaching from objects. It examines the origins of cast making, the early use of casts in drawing academies and the 19th-century phenomenon of assembling casts for study and appreciation, and questions the understanding of what is an original and what is a copy within a museum context.