MUSEUMS (Post #5, Inspiration 2 of 3)

Museums provide a unique interactive experience of getting up close to things we usually only see in books, newspapers or on the television. The perception you get of something from a second-hand source is often completely different to the one you get when you see something with your own eyes.


10 Inspiring Museums on Instagram
Link here.


21 Reasons Why Museums Are Great
Link here.

Tokens at the Foundling Museum in London

The exhibition is entitled Threads of Feeling: 18th Century Textiles left with Abandoned Babies at the London Foundling Hospital.  There is an on-line slide show of the fabric samples.

"These trinkets are transitional objects - severed umbilical cords - that embody the grief of separation".
"...sentimental objects, which seem to evoke larger narratives of loss and grief..."
 - The Tokens, Christopher Turner, Cabinet Magazine

Sometimes a token was broken in half, so if the mother returned she could match her half of the token with the token left with the child.  Seems as if this process was most often used by women who were illiterate.

An Introduction to the Tokens,  Janette Bright and Gillian Clark

"Tokens were left as 'identifiers' - they were not gifts for the children, keepsakes or love tokens, as has often been stated. They were official 'documents,' easily recognisable items that could be used to prove the identity of an infant if the parent or parents found themselves in circumstances to take it back. Since the tokens were first put on display in the 1860s, these small but speaking methods of identification have been giving life to individual moments of separation and loss. Yet having been removed from their admission records, these compelling scraps of personal history were themselves orphans. Now, thanks to eight years of painstaking work by Janette Bright and Gillian Clark, many of these tokens have been reunited with the children to whom they belonged, revealing the circumstances surrounding their arrival at the Foundling Hospital." -text and image from the Foundling Museum.

If no token was left with the child, a swatch of fabric would be cut from the child's clothes.  One half of the swatch was kept with the child's paperwork and the other was given to the mother.  I found the images above on the Textile Treasure Seeker blog.

Image source is History Guide.

Some other information I collected:
The hospital was established in 1741 for the maintenance and education of exposed and deserted young children.  Children baptized and renamed.  Wet nurses paid well for keeping their babies alive.  Two-thirds of those died.  Over 16,000 children left between 1741 and 1760, 152 reclaimed.  Children left - illegitimate, poverty, rape, not married or simply unwanted.  Also found a foundling hospital in florence Italy, built 1419 and approx. 375,000 children were abandoned.  Rather than murder children, women could leave at hospital and therefore not have sinned. After the Civil War, poverty, immigration, inadequate housing and financial depression triggered the abandonment of children.  More info found here, The New York Foundling Hospital.  In the little research I have done on these three locations, it seems as if London was the only hospital that had tokens.  

Hanging Specimens

About 3" x 5",  felt and clay.

Biodiversity Hall, Museum of Natural History, NYC

Museum

I think artists curating and exhibiting their work alongside museum collections is interesting.

"I support anything that brings new perspectives to museum collections, and nothing has been more successful at re-contextualizing collections than exhibitions organized by artists at numerous museums (which I’ve written about previously, on Jan. 31, 2011 and Jan. 3, 2009). No one has more invested in museum collections than artists, for whom they function as primary textbooks. And artists are free from the conventions of art history and the ethics of curatorial practice. The British Museum asked Grayson Perry to address its collections, and I’ve never seen an artist do a better job of it.

Perry turns out to be a wonderful teacher in The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, which has been extended to Feb. 26, 2012. In displaying a selection of his large, figured pots alongside his choices from the museum storerooms, Perry sidestepped questions of technique and style (which he has obviously studied seriously) to concentrate on the objects’ uses. In doing so, he gave currency to a motley selection of objects, produced by anonymous craftsmen (hence, the exhibition’s title) over several thousand years of civilization.

He ignored obvious masterpieces in favor of objects that were mundane and occasionally fragmentary. Some were used as reliquaries, others were associated with shamanistic rituals and a number were pilgrimage souvenirs. He related his own transvestism to objects used in ceremonies of sexual role-playing, and ended the exhibition with his own, extravagant version of objects meant to accompany the dead on their journey." Andrea Kirsh, The Art Blog. Link here.

Pay As You Go Urbanism

[Image: By San Rocco].

"Even divorced from their political context, though, these images are provocative illustrations of another phenomenon: that is, the museumification of urban space, particularly in Venice, a city steadily losing its population.

The idea that we might someday see the urban cores of historic European cities simply abandoned by residents altogether and turned, explicitly, into museums, surrounded by pay-as-you-go turnstiles, does not actually seem that far-fetched."