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Category: Reviews (Page 1 of 7)

Going Batty –  A Review of Bats! At the Peabody Essex Museum

Those making their annual pilgrimage to the Witch City this year should make time in between the ghost tours and psychics to visit the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), located in the heart of Salem, Massachusetts. Though Boston-area residents are often familiar with PEM’s excellent exhibits and programming, visitors might be drawn to spookier attractions. However, one of PEM’s fall exhibits focuses on one of our favorite flying Halloween friends. Bats! provides a family friendly exploration of the often unjustly maligned and misunderstood creatures.

The exhibition was organized and produced by ExplorationWorks! and Build 4 Impact Inc. with assistance from The Dotty Brown Art & Nature Center.  Bats! takes an interdisciplinary approach which explores bats in art, science, technology, and cultures across the world. Exhibition curator and Sarah Fraser Robbins Director of the Art & Nature Center, Janey Winchell, states in an interview with PEM that most people know relatively little about bats, but that regardless of their opinion on or experiences with bats, “[…] once people are in the exhibition, they will discover things that relate to them in their own lives.” As a long-time nature nerd and bat lover, I had to see the exhibit for myself and the Peabody Essex didn’t disappoint! 

The exhibit is laid out in a non-linear fashion which helped avoid overcrowding in areas of the exhibit space and allowed visitors to explore at their own pace. The exhibit space is broken up by a series of temporary gallery walls, which created unique spaces within the exhibit while still allowing for wheelchair accessibility. Like many other visitors, I entered the exhibit and moved through it mainly clockwise. Ecological and biological facts on bats alternate with art and objects. I enjoyed that the exhibit text included abundant pictures of bats to illustrate concepts while visually pleasing.

Interactives are abundant in this exhibit and hit the rare mark of being engaging for all age levels. Some interactives are simple, such as flip boards for true and false bat facts and “bats around the world.” The bats around the world interactive is interesting and engaging but the text was small and difficult to read. The focal point of the exhibit is a live bat interactive featuring Egyptian Fruit Bats. The bats can be viewed from outside or by crawling in and looking up from inside a plastic bubble. Visitors of all ages enthusiastically crawled through the interactive. Grown adults without children were excited by the prospect of looking up from the tunnel at the bats. However, incorporating living beings into an exhibit always raises issues and questions. The bats weren’t very active and were all huddled together in the corner of the enclosure. True or not, this gave the impression that the bats are not pleased with their current situation. It also made it difficult for visitors to spot them. PEM seems to have anticipated some concern from visitors, including a label, “Frequently Asked Questions About the Bat Colony.” The label clarifies how the bats are cared for and where they came from…to an extent. The label states that the bats are from “Indiana Wild, a conservation and education organization.” I think it would be beneficial to clarify how that organization came to have the bats, whether they were seized from animal trafficking or born in captivity, and why it is not possible to release them. As a visitor, these were questions I had as I grappled with the ethics of displaying live animals. However, the impact of this interactive display cannot be overstated. Visitors connected with bats on a level that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. 

Another popular, but less controversial interactive is a table game which represents the threats to bats’ survival. Two partners must tilt a table to shift a ball through a maze, avoiding holes that represent challenges facing bats. This is a novel interactive unlike any I’ve seen in previous exhibits. The game is well designed, both fun and informative. I learned more than a few things about the threats facing Flying Foxes. For example, I had no idea that farmers internationally poisoned fruit to control predation of their crops! Other interactives include comparing human, bat, and bird bones on a magnetic board and making folded paper bats. The exhibit balances textual elements with interactives nicely, resulting in a dynamic exhibit appealing to visitors of all ages and experience.

The textual elements of the exhibit are just as engaging as the spectacular interactives. One section of the exhibit covered perceptions of bats across space and time, covering Africa, Asia, and the Americas. I overheard one visitor remark on the perception of bats in China, “Bats are considered lucky! I didn’t know that!” Other visitors enjoyed the section on bats in pop-culture, flipping through a series of posters featuring bats in movies and television. My personal favorite as a fan of folklore and history was the section on how European stigma and superstition surrounding bats formed. Spooky 17th century woodcuts of witches and demons with bat wings certainly felt appropriate for the season! “Which Came First the Bat or the Vampire?” explored the enduring connection between bats and European vampire lore. The labels explained complex concepts from culture, religion, and folklore at an accessible level which kept clear of judgment.

If the goal of Bats! is to challenge the stigma around the animal, it’s certainly a success. Two PEM interns acting as docents for the exhibit, Charlotte and Martha, stated that the exhibit has seen up to 1,000 visitors a day, with the lowest attendance still being 200. Charlotte, a student at Endicott College stated, “I generally hear positive feedback […] bats tend to be stigmatized and people’s perceptions of bats have changed positively.” Martha added that people can leave feedback on the exhibit in a notebook near the exit. Flipping through the notebook, I saw glowing reviews of the exhibit, exclamations of love for bats, and even fun bat cartoons! One visitor remarked, “10/10 recommend. respectfully want to boop the bats nose.” I can think of no greater endorsement than a nose boop! The exhibition, Bats!, attempts a multicultural and interdisciplinary exploration of bats in a relatively small package and it succeeds.


Bats! Curator Interview, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbJXURbdsec.
 
Peabody Essex Museum. “Bats!” Accessed October 22, 2023. https://www.pem.org/exhibitions/bats.
 
Peabody Essex Museum. “Meet Winged Creatures of the Night in PEM’s Fall Exhibition, Bats!,” July 31, 2023. https://www.pem.org/press-news/meet-winged-creatures-of-the-night-in-pems-fall-exhibition-bats.
 
Rubino, Tony. Love Hate Bat, 2019. Acrylic on canvas. Photograph by Madeline Smith. 
 

Article by: Madeline Smith

MA Candidate, History and Museum Studies

Tufts University ’24

 

 

Where was your last museum visit?

One of the assignments in my Exhibition Planning course is to share about an interesting exhibition that we went to see. Most of my classmates tended to share about the most recent exhibition that they saw, myself included. Whether in-person or virtual, as museums start to open up more and more it’s been wonderful to be in gallery spaces again.

For myself, my last visit in-person was to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts here in Richmond, Virginia to see the Sunken Cities exhibition. 

Photo: Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation

This traveling exhibition was the last stop before these artifacts returned to Egypt and it was focused on the ancient cities of Thonis-Heraclion and Canopus which are located under the sea, along the coast of Alexandria.

I really have enjoyed learning about underwater archaeology in the course of my studies at Tufts, and I had never seen an exhibition that included a focus on how these artifacts were excavated. With Sunken Cities, this was really one of the major aspects that the exhibition focused on. Visitors got to see footage of the excavations and learn about where these cities were and how much is left to excavate. There’s still quite a lot of work to do at these sites, yet there are already enough artifacts to have an entire exhibition! As a visitor, this was really exciting.

I would say the other major focus of this exhibition was the cosmopolitan culture of these ancient port cities, especially the religious ceremonies. An entire section of the exhibit walked visitors through the mysteries of Osiris, religious ceremonies that took place at a certain time of year.

image

British Museum, “The Mysteries of Osiris”

It was really wonderful to go and see this exhibit, and I’m looking forward to going to museums again as things open up now that we are getting vaccinated!

What was your last museum visit? Are there any exhibitions that you are looking forward to visiting in the near future? Feel free to leave a comment below!

Activate the space: A conversation with Flor Delgadillo

Image 1.  

Flor Delgadillo is 2nd year master’s student at the School of Museum and Fine Arts.  Flor Delgadillo is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, print, digital fabrication, performance, and video as her media. Delgadillo’s vibrant installations activate spaces using multiple methods of video display, surprising surfaces, and objects.  

In the interview Flor reflected on her artistic practice with a primary focus on the recent solo exhibit at SMFA, Mission Hills campus.  MORPHOLOGY, Delgadillo’s latest installation reflects on her diagnosis of epilepsy at the age of four. The artwork has sourced imagery of Delgadillo’s brain waves using an electroencephalogram machine (EEG). These waveform recordings of Delgadillo’s brain activity during sleep, are projected onto gallery walls. The artist was subjected to routine tests throughout her life. In the artwork MORPHOLOGY, Delgadillo reclaims her self-care by monitoring and isolating her own Theta, Gamma, and Delta brainwave activity during sleep. Her routine testing was done in Guadalajara which required constant migration between the U.S. and Mexico.  

 Sayyara  

Art is not what you see but what you make others see (Edgar Degas).  What is your response to Degas’s quote? 

Flor 

I very much resonate with the phrase because I think as artists, we often feel a responsibility to address certain things. I think that it’s important to allow the viewer to read what they want. Especially with issues of identity, race and gender, since those are individual experiences. I think that’s why I am able to use the body in the way that I do which is very much in like the tools that I use. That’s why I like to use different mediums.  

Sayyara  

How would you describe your core mediums?  

Flor  

Color, reflection and the body 

Sayyara 

What attracts you most about those mediums?  

Flor 

I think of color as a language and the body as a vessel to experience the sensory properties like light, color projection and reflection.  

Sayyara  

In the Morphology installation you used projection which penetrated through a cut out plexiglas form of human brain. Can you talk a bit about that? 

Flor 

I like to think of the human brain as the battery of the body. I wanted to show that by transforming it into an objects/sculpture form, where transparency and the reflection was important. The light from the projector bounced from and through the plexi and was reflected across the room, floor and the walls. Much like, how brain sends signals to all parts of the body, the objects in my installation communicated with one another and together activated the space. Additionally, the projection was not static, as the viewer could see the movement of the line of brain activity juxtaposed with the image of the brain.   

For this reason, I think of this installation as a performance with the objects, images and the locations have been choreographed. Nevertheless, there was not an overchallenging amount of stuff in the room, which was intentional. I left the space open for viewers to respond to the installation by moving around it, however their body felt comfortable. I also intended to mobilize the peripheral vision of the viewers by ensuring there was something to look at regardless of the positions in the space.  

This is basically, a manipulation of the tools and imagery to test human reactions As a young child, my sleep was monitored, as part of the EEG test. In comparison, viewers of my work have the full control of the interaction, which is inherently not as invasive, as a medical test would be. 

Image 2.  

To some the light may be overwhelming, yet, others find the space meditative. Color is its own language.  

 Sayyara  

What makes you say the brain is the battery of the body? 

Flor  

Well, I think it’s arguably the most important muscle and it is resilient in its ability to function. I can’t help but think of it, as the battery that we depend on, as it ensures the overall functionality of my body.   

Sayyara  

My belief is that many people will enjoy being in this space because of its vibrance and liveliness. What do you think people can learn with Morphology installation?  

Flor  

As adults we are more encouraged to learn by reading and writing things on paper rather than using interactive activities. Morphology installation offers an active way of learning through observation and movement. Also, It reminds me of how I learned as a child through play, when I was permitted to move, react, interact, and make mistakes as and as a result creating my own meanings. This is what I want the visitors to walk away with, their own perception of the artwork.  

 Image 3. 

Sayyara  

Is there anything you want to add for a wrap up? 

 Flor  

The last thing that I will say is I find it very important to use play and humor in serious situations. This might be just my personal preference and coping mechanism.  

I think it’s important for us to grow as individuals while staying aware of our inner innocent children. I don’t want to say things get uglier, but as adults we’re no longer sheltered or blind sighted. Therefore, I like to approach certain issues with, I don’t want to say fun, but in a more vibrant way. Sometimes, I find it to be the only way to talk about important issues, which otherwise can be neglected. I think I’ll leave it at that.  

Note 1. EEG : An electroencephalogram (EEG) is a test that detects electrical activity in the brain using small, metal discs (electrodes) attached to your scalp. The brain cells communicate via electrical impulses and are active all the time, even during sleep. The activity can be viewed as wavy lines on an EEG recording known as Morphology (description by the artist). 

Note 2: Morphology installation is not currently on display however the video documentation of it can be seen below:

Stay tuned on Flor’s upcoming projects, exhibitions, pop-ups follow her account on social media.  

Instagram  – https://www.instagram.com/florsshow_arte/  

Information on former projects and be found from the website.  https://arte-flor-delgadillo.myportfolio.com/performance  

The interview was conducted by Sayyara Huseynli, 2nd year master’s student in the Museum Education program at Tufts University. Sayyara establishes connections between individual experiences and objects through engaging and interactive programing. 

 

Becoming (friends with) Jane: How Technology Can Create a More Intimate Experience

Last winter break, I was visiting my family in Virginia when my mom suggested we go see Becoming Jane, a traveling exhibition organized by the Jane Goodall Institute at the National Geographic Museum in Washington D.C. She had visited previously with her sister, and knowing my penchant for animals, figured that I would enjoy it. I was familiar with Jane Goodall and her work with chimpanzees, but I was eager to learn the details. What I did not expect was how immersive the exhibit would be and the impression it would leave on me.

Jane Goodall and David Greybeard.

We were first introduced to Jane through a fairly typical beginning-of-gallery-video which gives some brief context about her life and the makeup of the exhibit itself. At the end of the video, however, a chimpanzee swings from a branch and jumps out of the screen, inviting you into the exhibit and into Jane’s life.

After learning about her childhood and path to Tanzania to study chimpanzees with anthropologist, Louis Leakey, we entered a re-creation of her tent. It was just big enough to house her and her mother (who had to accompany her because it was unthinkable to allow a young English woman to travel alone) and outlined their early life in the bush, the set-up of their camp, and fights against malaria. Altogether, the tent put the visitor in Jane’s shoes and offered a peek into her experience. It felt, in a sense, like we had been transported to the Gombe National Park to live with Jane and study the chimps ourselves.

Holographic image of Jane Goodall telling stories to visitors.

On the other side of the tent, we were invited to sit around a camp-fire where a holographic image of Jane was waiting to share stories about the chimpanzees. She reminisced on her first friend in the community, a chimp she affectionately calls David Greybeard, and how she first gained trust with him. By doing so, she created a sense of camaraderie with the audience. I felt much more connected to Jane listening to her holographic avatar than I would have watching TV screen or reading a block of text. It felt personal and helped established even more of a sense of trust towards her and her work.

The crown jewel of the exhibit followed: a virtual reality re-creation of her first close encounter with David Greybeard. We shuffled into a room wearing 3D glasses, surrounded by a virtual jungle. The experience carried us to a clearing where David and another chimpanzee sat grooming each other. Despite some slight double vision and a climate controlled space, the experience was so immersive that it felt like we were actually sitting in the jungle earning their trust. I briefly considered moving to the Gombe to dedicate my life to primatology before remembering that even most suburbs are too rural for me. Regardless, the VR experience helped forge a connection with the chimpanzees that would carry throughout the rest of the exhibit and the weeks following.

VR experience with David Greybeard.

The next room had many interactive stations, like augmented reality binoculars to learn more about their observed behavior and tool use. There was a communication station where visitors could practice pant-hooting with the chimpanzees, something I was too embarrassed to try. Through a mixture of interactives, objects, and good ol’ fashioned text, the gallery highlighted the lives of chimps and interrogated our understandings of the concept of humanity. The exhibit ends by discussing the threats to chimps and a call to action for visitors to small changes to their lifestyles that can positively impact the environment.

Before Becoming Jane, I was an animal lover. I appreciated chimpanzees, but took no particular interest in them. Throughout the course of the exhibit, my fascination grew so much that I bought one of her books in the gift shop to learn more. I felt a connection with Jane, like she was an old family friend telling me stories. It can be difficult to create bonds between visitors and subjects, but Becoming Jane used immersive technology to tell engaging stories more successfully than I have ever seen.

Agecroft Hall: A Tudor-Era American Home

Summertime is often the season when I, as I am sure many of our readers as well, will go and explore various museums. Seeing as how I am from Virginia, this usually means going to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts or the (newly renamed) Virginia Museum of History & Culture. One of my absolute favorite hidden gems in Richmond, however, is Agecroft Hall. A beautiful Tudor-era English manor house that was brought over piece-by-piece in the early twentieth century from its original place in England, Agecroft Hall is a unique blend of early modern architecture with modern conveniences (such as closets and radiators).

Agecroft Hall

The tours that visitors are treated to at Agecroft are likewise an interesting mix of early modern English history and the estate’s twentieth-century history of how it made its way from England to the US due to the popular desires to have European-style homes. T.C. Williams, Jr., the man who purchased Agecroft and had it brought over to Richmond, actually wanted to create a kind of Tudor-style neighborhood surrounding Agecroft Hall (although this didn’t ultimately happen, Agecroft’s neighbor is likewise an early modern English-style home). Some visitors, I think, will be unsure of how to feel about a very historic English home being taken from its original grounds and brought over and adapted to fit 1920s standards of living; I know I at least was not sure what to think of this initially. However, Agecroft Hall was on the verge of collapse due to mining in the surrounding English countryside and had fallen into disrepair. So while extra closet spaces and radiators are perhaps not quite what is usually done in the maintaining of an historic house – indeed, nor is changing the entire floor plan, as Williams chose to do – at least Agecroft Hall was given a kind of second life as the home-turned-museum in Richmond, Virginia. This choice was also not made without much thought and care – Agecroft Hall only left England with the approval of Parliament after a debate.

For me, it is also so interesting to think of how much conservation and preservation work has developed from the time when Agecroft Hall was brought over to the US to today. I think that while the methods perhaps are not what would have been done now, that the spirit of wanting to ensure the survival – at least in some capacity – of a historically significant building is something that is in common between past and present efforts.

Gardens at Agecroft Hall, modeled after the gardens of Hampton Court Palace

The museum also is such a wonderful opportunity to learn about and experience these kinds of historic houses that usually one would have to fly overseas to Europe in order to see. As my area of focus is early modern England, you can imagine my delight when I first went to Agecroft Hall. The majority of the museum is staged just as an early modern home would have been in its day, giving visitors an idea of what life in a manor house like Agecroft Hall would have been like for both servants and the family. Rich tapestries and wood furniture darkened with age; portraits of Elizabethan courtiers; a curiosity cabinet; herbals and King James I’s treatise on the evils of witchcraft; and, most exciting of all, a pardon with Elizabeth I’s own beeswax seal. These are only some of the wonderful artifacts on display at this fascinating historic house and I know I can’t wait to go visit again as soon as I can.

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