The Grapevine

2011 Annual General Meeting of the Museums Association of the Caribbean

          As I mentioned in my post on Thinking About the Country House, there has been a great deal of interest in this subject area over the last two years or so. Present excitement is reflected in television shows like Downton Abbey which portray upstairs/downstairs divides and socio-economic themes of Britain in the early twentieth century. Such is public interest in these elements of country house living, that many houses open to the public feel the need to show their ‘secret’ rooms and dark domestic quarters for a short time each year.

          There has also been a flourish of interest in the grander apartments, perhaps to counterbalance the austere or the uncharacteristic calm of the kitchens, pantries and nurseries. Restored pieces of furniture are celebrated and entire rooms have been in receipt of funding in order to return them to a key moment in their history. This sort of activity has eventually led a few British academic institutions to consider the thought processes of country house owners in creating their homes. This has in turn prompted debate on the wider position of the country house, in Britain particularly, through themes of trade, politics and even military presence.

          The University of Warwick’s three year project on The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 is one of these resulting debates. The main purpose of the project is to explore the significance of the country house in an imperial and global context by uniting relevant houses, families, and material culture by means of one detailed study. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Professor Margot Finn, in the Department of History at Warwick, the project ‘seeks to work in collaboration with family and local historians, curators, academics and other researchers to illuminate Britain’s global material culture from the eighteenth century to the present.’

          It has become quite a large undertaking, and so far the project team have amassed a great deal of material to present on their website. Arguably, some of it is rather more general country house reference material, but nonetheless, for anyone interested in British country houses, this is a must-see.

The project has five main objectives:

i) to produce a series of interlinked case studies,

ii) to situate the Asian goods that furnished Georgian and Victorian homes,

iii) to illuminate the ways in which material culture helped to mediate wider historical processes, 

iv) to assess the ways in which Asian luxuries incorporated within British country houses expressed regional, national and global identities,

v) and to integrate academic and museum-based research on the global genealogies of British country house interiors.

         It does sound very long-winded for anyone outside academic study, or with a general interest. What the website for the project can do, however, is provide a platform for further reading. For example, over the term of the project there will be a series of published studies on individual houses. The first ‘went live’ this week – Swallowfield Park, Berkshire. With separate sections to leaf through, and a full PDF of the case study to download, there is plenty to get into. Crucially, the study is comprehensive enough to include histories of architecture, family, design, and fine art. There are several pages to navigate through, and the illustrations are wonderful! Especially as the house is now owned by Sunley Heritage, a company which converts country houses into luxury apartments.

Swallowfield Park, Berkshire. (From the East India Company at Home project website)

         Clearly there are a lot of minds working on this project, and a lot of thought has gone into making this fully accessible. It may be academic, but this has not made it exclusive or entirely high-brow. I would even suggest that many more academic institutions could take heed of this method of promoting similar research, as it would definitely benefit those hungry to discover more about specialist areas of heritage study. 

Links:

East India Company at Home (full link) http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/research/eicah/about/

The East India Company today http://www.theeastindiacompany.com/

Swallowfield Park on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallowfield_Park

Sunley Heritage – Swallowfield Park http://www.sunleyheritage.co.uk/SP_index.cfm

Geffrye Museum, London. The Histories of Home and the Warwick project http://historiesofhomessn.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/the-east-india-company-at-home-1757-1857/

SYMP: POLO S: Reorienting the Visual Culture of the Early Americas @ UPenn

SAVE THE DATE:

POLO S: Reorienting the Visual Culture of the Early Americas

Friday & Saturday, April 13-14, 2012
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies
University of Pennsylvania 3355 Woodland Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104

Organized by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, History of Art, University of
Pennsylvania.

In 1936 and 1943, the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres García made
two related drawings both of which depict the continent of South America
from a southern perspective. With the cardinal direction of “Polo S”
written across the top of the continent, the artist implored his
modernist contemporaries in the Southern Cone to reconsider their
perspective on the geographic location of the contemporary avant garde
impulse. By invoking Torres García’s radical move, this international and
interdisciplinary conference takes as its mission an exploration of the
theoretical, regional, methodological, and subjective problems encountered
by scholars who are currently working on the “early” visual and material
culture of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and South America. It
is therefore an attempt to identify the shared challenges that researching
and writing about objects produced in these locations prior to 1850 might
present in a moment of de-centered intellectual discourse, not unlike the
one that Torres García critiqued in the middle of the last century.

Keynote:
Marcus Wood, University of Sussex

Participants:
Amanda Bagneris, Tulane University
Dennis Carr, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Mónica Domínguez Torres, University of Delaware
Maurie McInnis, University of Virginia
Charmaine Nelson, McGill University
Regina Root, College of William & Mary
Tamara J. Walker, University of Pennsylvania

The symposium is funded by grants from the University of Pennsylvania’s
Mellon Initiative for Cross-Cultural Contacts and the Terra Foundation for
American Art, and is supported by the History of Art Department, Africana
Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Arthur Ross Gallery.

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/events/2012-04-13/polo-s-reorienting-visual-culture-early-americas

CIVIL RIGHTS DISPLAY FOR BROWNSVILLE STUDENT VISITORS

"The Chief"'s avatarWolfsonian-FIU Library

This Friday morning, thirty-four Brownsville Middle School students came to the Wolfsonian with their social studies teacher for tours of our galleries and a library presentation. As the students were studying civil rights, we had laid out a wide variety of materials of the subject in advance of their arrival. When queried about what they knew about the civil rights movement in this country, most of the students quite naturally talked about the struggle in the 1960s and mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King. My own presentation and display of materials was intended to introduce them to the earlier struggles and much longer history of civil rights agitation in America set against the background of the First and Second World Wars.

Although we might have begun earlier, our own discussions of civil rights began with the First World War and the campaign to recruit African Americans as soldiers. Woodrow Wilson’s administration…

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Linsanity’s Yellow Peril

Glenn Nelson's avatarThe Buzz: Glenn Nelson

During the hours before the “chink” references at ESPN, I was convinced that many Asian Americans were willing to overlook Floyd Mayweather, Jason Whitlock, the New York Post’s “Amasian,” and myriad other public indignities in order to experience something so joyous and so spectacularly surprising as Jeremy Lin that even we, the people who are like him, have been conditioned to never have expected it.

Less than a week ago, in trying to explain what Lin means to Asian Americans, I wrote on ESPN.com that his feel-good run in the NBA would be a test of ”an Asian American’s ability to take the bad with the overwhelming good.”

We couldn’t be allowed to have even a fleeting, rapturous moment without the bad-good equation being utterly turned on its head by such a torrent of racially motivated indignation and political-correctness backlash that feels, in some ways, like open season has…

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Stepping Into The Shadow Of Racism

brotherpeacemaker's avatarbrotherpeacemaker

The March 2012 cover of FHM Philippines showed a very Caucasian looking, Filipino actress and model Bela Padilla appearing to emerge from a group of very dark, very African looking black models accompanied with the caption, Stepping Out of the Shadows.  The cover photo was immediately met with a backlash from readers and social media who argued, rightly so, that it was racially insensitive.  The social outrage was so strong that it prompted the local publisher to issue an apology and scrap the edition with a promise to print a new cover featuring Ms. Padilla.  A statement from the publisher said that in their pursuit to come up with edgier covers they will strive to be more sensitive.

An online petition on Change.org calling for the publisher to apologize for the cover saying that people of African descent have been unjustly stigmatized as embodying darkness ever since the era of…

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