CAG on museums: The Tate Britain collections

The Tate Britain has been refurbished and it’s absolutely beautiful. It is a gorgeous riverside building in Pimlico, and the front entrance has been restored. The inside has a real art deco feel and is peppered with beautiful British art pieces in various corners and turns.

Rev Butler Woman 1949

When I visited the sculptor Alison Wilding’s works had just gone up in the Duveen galleries, and it was very interesting. She focuses on bringing different materials together and because of the natural light in the hall, contrasts of the materials, shadows, and colours were highlighted.

The Painting Now exhibition was also on and was a little different than the retrospective shows I’m used to seeing at Tate. Instead of focusing on the historic progression of one painter, it examined the work of five contemporary artists and what painting means today.

Gillian Carnegie Section 2012

Tomma Abts Zebe 2010

Simon Ling

Lucy McKenzie

Catherine Story Lowland 2012

Also taking a walk around the galleries highlighted some interesting objects from the permanent collection. My unknowledgeable approach to art half encompasses loving art that makes me chuckle.

Steven Claydon Joanna (An Unsubstantial Fraction) (Of Substance without Action) 2010

And then there was the weird and thought provoking collections…such as the Chapman Family Collection 2002 of various takes on African sculpture with the faces of the McDonalds characters and branding incorporated.

Blurry but creepiness captured

Hamburglar on the cross? Super weird

And of course I had to grab a snap of one of my favorite UK artworks, and somewhat name doppelgänger, Chris Ofili’s work No Woman No Cry.

CAG on museums: Kinloch Anderson and the Scottish Kilt

20th century book of all the clan tartans, incomplete

There’s nothing I like more than a little fashion and cultural history mixed together, and a wee stop to Kinloch Anderson in Leith really taught me a few things about the iconic Scottish kilt. The museum is located in the store and is very small, but encompasses some interesting tidbits of history and has a viewing window so that you can actually watch the kilt-makers create their handmade kilts.

View inside of the workshop

I found out that kilts actually did not come into popularity until around the 16^th century. For a brief period of time the checked tartans were outlawed between 1745 and 1782 in an attempt to break up the Highland Clan system, but when George IV visited Edinburgh in 1822 the pageantry of chiefs wearing their tartans for the King reignited their popularity and iconic cultural connections. This prompted families who did not have a clan tartan to want one of their own,  and the tartan become a symbol of kinship and belonging for Scots.

Sporrans, or the murse (male purse)

Typically there was a royal and a hunting tartan, which a tailor in the shop explained was really just to get a bit more variety in dress. Members of the Royal Family wear different varieties of the Scottish tartan as well. For the Royal Family many different tartans have been designed for them by Kinloch Anderson over the years. Because of their early connections to the Royal Stuarts (Stewarts) and Mary Queen of Scots, the Royals wear a variety of Stewart and Balmoral tartans.

From a contemporary fashion perspective, Kinloch Anderson has designed tartan patterns for some major brands which have become very iconic- Glenlivet scotch and especially Barbour.

CAG on museums: Working at the British Museum

The British Museum

As a California girl who has always dreamed of working at the British Museum, once I was there it did not disappoint. While working at with the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, I worked with some of the finest collections and some of the best minds in the museum world. Most days something very exciting happens like a special visitor comes to view the collection, or there is news of an exhibition that is about to be put on. This is exciting if you work in a museum at least. Other days, there is a bit more manual labour involved- but at least it’s in a storeroom that looks like the last scene in Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Me putting away a tiny tiny object

There are lots of visitors to the storerooms and the department, and especially visitors from the Pacific and Australia. The Pacific is my area of anthropological interest. The Pacific and Australian collections are a particularly well-used resource at the British Museum. We have many individuals, indigenous researchers, and groups who come to see a specific part of the collection within a week. Thinking through anthropology, issues of politics in the museum, and collections care on behalf of the public, means that though the Museum is an academic institution, a lot of the work must also benefit the source communities from whom collections originate to create access for wider audiences.

Torres Strait Island dance objects laid out for a visit

Last year when a dance group from the Torres Strait Islands came to our storage site to see dance related collections of masks, ornaments, drums and other related objects, many people in the group had varying responses to the objects that they saw.

Dance performance and acknowledgement of ancestors

After the group saw the objects, they asked to give an acknowledgment of the ancestors and give a dance performance. These kinds of interactions between living communities and their ancestors’ historic objects highlights the importance of access to collections in the museum, and continue to make objects important on a daily basis.