The Museum Project Part III: Inside the Addison Gallery

	What do you imagine are the differences between this photo of our visit to the Addison in the fall…
	… and now? - It was September. - They added a new part of the building. - The glass part.
Since the start of the school year, the Addison’s Education Department has been working on The Museum Project with the Kindergarten Prep class at The Children’s Place, a Bright Horizons child care and early education center located on the campus of Phillips Academy. The students have explored all types of collections in order to connect museum collections to the cultural value of their own collections and to learn how to communicate these values to others through classification, display, and interpretation. Click to read Part I and Part II of The Museum Project on Blog Addison. After exploring collections and exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archeology at Phillips Academy, and additional museums on family trips, we refocused on the Addison Gallery of American Art’s collection and building. To provide some context for their visit to the new Addison storage and gallery spaces, we introduced them to James Sousa, the Addison’s Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives, and fellow blogger. You all have collections of toys at home – Can you list every toy that you have? Can you tell me the location of each toy? The Addison has over 16,000 objects in its collection and my job is to know where they all are. After sharing photos of the Addison’s collections in storage, in crates, in trucks, and on airplanes, James explained another extension of his interest in organizing collections – his Star Wars collection. The students were fascinated with James’s personal collection and how he organizes and keeps track of all those toys! The following day, 11 students, 3 parents, 1 sibling, 1 babysitter, 2 teachers, and 2 student teachers took their experience and knowledge up the hill to the Addison. Joined by the Addison’s Education Department and Susan Faxon, the Addison’s Associate Director and Curator of Art before 1950, the students made astute observations and asked innumerable questions about the museum’s space and functions.
	- I see the new part, it’s glass.
	- What’s the white stuff? - What’s in the box? - We saw a picture of that! - Is there going to be water in there?
What’s different in this room than in the others we’ve seen? - The walls are a different color. - The ceiling. - The lights. - The lines with the shapes inside. - I see a pattern! Red, grey, blue, yellow. - I remember his name: Sol LeWitt.
What part of the building are we in now? - The glass part. What part can we see from here that we didn’t notice outside? - That part – It looks like a gate. - It’s metal. - My favorite room was the one with the shapes on the ceiling because the room was a rectangle and the ceiling was a different shape. - My favorite room was the one with the box in it because I want to see it turn into a fountain. The students were able to make connections between sorting and arranging their collections at home and materials in the classroom with storing, organizing, and exhibiting collections in the multiple museums they have visited throughout The Museum Project. In order to answer the numerous questions that have come up during many of our museum visits about how works are framed and hung on the gallery walls, Jason Roy, Assistant Preparator at the Addison, later came to visit Kindergarten Prep with a large box and a bag of tools. He unpacked, disassembled and then reassembled a matted and framed image of the students so they could see first-hand all of the steps involved. They were able to explore all of the hardware and tools, from D-rings and S-hooks to tape measures and levels. As the school year comes to a close the students will take all of their museum and cultural knowledge with them to kindergarten - and well beyond. And, the Addison and other museum staff will apply the students’ capacity for knowledge, endless curiosity, and observational skills to the development of future education programs. Posted by Jamie Kaplowitz Education Fellow

An Addison film connection

The Portland Press Herald features an interesting article about the upcoming film Wyeth, which is executive produced by Addison Board of Governors member Mary Kemper Wolf. Ms. Wolf mentions that she's considered filming in Maine based partly on the recommendation of fellow Board of Governors member Elizabeth Evans Hunt!

If you'd like to learn more about the Addison's striking Wyeth painting (see above right), Mother Archie's Church, check out the record on the Addison's fully searchable collections page by clicking here.


Posted by:

Samantha Katzen
Development Associate

Truck, Wait, Plane, Wait, Pint

Things are never dull here at the Addison. I recently served as courier to accompany an object we are lending to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, Ireland for their Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts exhibition. The trip was not nearly as long or complex as my adventures with our Coming of Age exhibition, but did have its challenges, and rewards, as well.

The object we lent was an ink on paper by Barnett Newman (see left). Thankfully, it needed only a small crate, a much easier package to deal with than the multitude of large crates I traveled with Coming of Age. I left with it on a truck from our art storage vault to Logan Airport's air cargo facility. I stood with our export and security representatives for hours in the cold warehouse, dodging the speeding forklifts, waiting for another shipment to come in that would share the pallet with my crate on the plane. As it turned out, that other shipment was canceled, and our wait had been in vain. However, my crate ended up traveling on its own pallet, an ideal situation for fragile artwork and a best case scenario for any museum Registrar.

Finally, the crate and I were on the plane for the red eye to Dublin. And red eye it was for I didn't sleep a wink on the flight. When I arrived just under six hours later, it was morning, and time for another wait in the cold outside Dublin Airport's air cargo facility. Well over an hour later, the crate was loaded on the truck and we made our way through the Dublin Port Tunnel, across the Liffey, and into the parking lot of the IMMA (see below).

I had yet another wait in the cold, this time in drizzle, for security to let us into the exhibition space. But finally, the crate was safe and in place within the museum. I still had one more wait, this time for 24 hours for the crate to acclimate to the IMMA's interior climate, before it could be opened and the object inspected and installed. I didn't spend that wait in the cold, however. After being awake for over 36 hours, I got a nice, long, uninterrupted night's sleep at my hotel (a true luxury for someone with an infant at home) and managed a moment to enjoy a pint of "fresh" Guinness on Irish soil.

The installation went smoothly with IMMA's fabulous crew, and then I was on a flight back home the following day. It was a fast trip, but I've gotten used to doing them once or twice a year. You have to take the good with the bad: wear warm clothes, learn to pass time, be ever vigilant, and of course, enjoy the pints when you can get them!


Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives