Always the Bridesmaid

Title: Brudkrona (Bridal Crown)
Material: Silver, Garnets, Pearls, Turquoise
Creator: Solve Hallquist
Year: 1952

The American Swedish History Museum has one bridal crown on display.  It was worn by the creator's wife, Margaret Hallquist, for the couple's wedding in 1952. Mrs. Hallquist gave her crown to the museum as a gift in 2002. It is on display along side the couple's wedding photo in a silver frame also designed by Solve Hallquist.

Bridal crowns have been work in Swedish weddings since the Middle Ages. They were a symbol of purity and virginity.  Similar bridal crowns were also worn in neighboring countries like Norway. The crowns were often made of precious metals and decorated with jewels, making them very expensive.  Wealthy families could afford to commission a crown, but peasant girls often rented the crown owned by the local church. If was very important that the bride be a virgin and deserving of the honor of wearing the crown, although in some instances if the bride offered a bribe or new gilding of the church crown, the priest would allow a pregnant bride to wear it. Brides that did not wear the crown were ridiculed.

Bridal crowns fell out of favor as other American and European wedding traditions were adopted in Sweden, such as wearing a white wedding dress (another symbol of purity) replaced the traditional black two-piece dress.  Visitors may be interested to learn that there has a been a resurgence of the bridal crown tradition in Swedish American weddings as bride wish to make their wedding unique or include aspects of the family's Swedish heritage in their ceremonies. Today, bridal crowns can still be rented for use on the special day.

Some visitors may be opposed to the crown as sexist, but I think that era has past. Other may think it would be more appropriate for the museum to display an older crown, rather than a modern interpretation from the 20th century, but that would be difficult for the museum to acquire.


I could not find any information about facility rentals at the museum, but given its space and onsite kitchen, it would be easy for the museum to host weddings.  Brides holding the ceremony at the museum could even rent the crown for use, but that may also cause problems for the museum given the value of the object and that fact that it was a gift.  

Death of a Queen

Title: Queen Puabi's Golden Headdress
Material: Gold, Lapis Lazuli, Carnelian
Creator: Likely Palace Goldsmith
Year: 2550 BCE

Queen Puabi's headdress is part of the Penn Museum's collection of objects from ancient Iraq. It is on display as part of the Iraq's Ancient Past exhibition.  It is part of an exhibit element titled "Rediscovering Ur's Royal Cemetery."  It is on display with other pieces from the 1920 and 1930's expeditions to the Middle East including a lyre found in the tomb. The walls around the objects are decorated with enlarged  newspaper prints from the period detailing the archeologist exploits and advertisements for the traveling exhibitions of the artifacts.

The headdress was acquired when the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology co-sponsored a excavation in ancient Ur, now part of modern Iraq in 1922. The expedition was led by C. Leonard Woolley. During the first phase of the dig, one hundred local workers, under Woolley's direction, unearthed a massive burial tomb. Woolley mistaken identified the woman in the burial as Puabi although her name is probably pronounced "Pu-Abum."  He believed she was a queen because of her elaborate gold headdress. She may have been the wife of the king of Ur at the time, but there is no mention of her husband names, so she may have been one of the few female rulers of ancient Mesopotamia. Buried along side Puabi in her tomb were her servants, whom Woolley believed had drunk poison and peacefully died beside their queen in homage.  Woolley's last excavation in Ur took place in 1934, and the artifacts in the Penn museum are so important because no other excavation have taken place since.

The Penn Museum has a program for school groups called "Cemetery Sleuths" in which students identify burial objects from the mock coffin. They use deduction to figure out if the grave belonged to a man or woman and whether the person was rich or poor. Students also identify the objects, the materials they are made from, and the possibly use of each object.  Information on the excavation of Queen Puabi's tomb in included in the Power Point presentation to supplement the hands-on activity.  A program in which students design, fabricate and wear their own headdress is another possible activity the Penn Museum could design around this artifact.

Illumination

Title: Book of Hours
Material: bound manuscript on parchment
Creator: Unknown
Collection: APS collection
Year: possibly 1475

A book of hours was a common devotional prayer book from the Middle Ages. The books contained the list of feast days, excerpts from the Gospels, the Office of the Virgin Mary, psalms, a litany of saints, the Office the Dead, Stations of the Cross, and other prayers used at Catholic Mass. Though the books started out without embellishment, as the Middle Ages wore on wealthy personages were able to purchase books with elaborate illustrations of letters and in the margins of pages.  These illustrations, drawn by monks, were called illuminations.  By the end of the Middle Ages, after inventions of the printing press, books of hours could be mass produced with illuminated patterns made from woodcuts. 

The book is on display in the Tempus Fugit: Times Flies exhibit is a prime example of the Medieval art of illuminated manuscripts.  Although the family that commissioned this work is unknown, the book was donated to the APS by German textile merchant Detmar Basse Muller in May of 1806.  The Chicago based visual artist Antonia Contro included several books in her exhibition, Tempus Fugit, to show how humans interpret and record the passage of time. This book of hours is an example of a lost art and a technique of book making (using vellum or sheep skin sheets).  It is on display in the last case of the exhibit with a contemporary sheet of vellum and a video of pages flapping on a tiny screen.  Until you see this video, the visitor is unaware that the sounds playing in the gallery of pages fluttering corresponds to this video. Other objects on display from the APS collection include a book by Joseph Priestley,  a glass tube used for electrical experiments owned by Benjamin Franklin, a piece of petrified wood, Cromwell Varley's illustrations of comets, a stone dodecahedron, and a ticket to Charles Darwin's funeral.

 

As a history major and Social Studies teacher, I was very familiar with illuminated manuscripts prior to visiting the exhibit. I saw the book of hours on display as a beautiful historic artifact.  It wasn't until I read Antonia Contro's Artist Statement that I realized that she chose the object not only for its aesthetic qualities, but to show how humans record time differently today.  The books shows how time was recorded by human beings not by machines. She says:

 

"Time is at once about mortality and infinity. Illuminated books of hours, breviaries, and prayer books of the middle ages gave structure to devotions, feasts, and holy days.  They offered instructions on when to plant and to reap, when to pray, in penitence, and when to celebrate.  The dispassionate mechanical replacements of modern, secular time-the ticking clock and glowing LED-fall short of providing the comfort of order and purpose to our daily lives, and the assurance of eternal salvation." (I have to agree with her. Today, especially on the East Coast, everything is just so rushed. No one takes time to enjoy events.) 

 

Anyone interested in rare/historic books or Medieval history would be interested in this object. I would be particularly interested in seeing other pages beyond the page spread that is open for display.  Unfortunately, the spread on display is only a facsimile as the original had to be removed for preservation purposes.

 

During our tour of the gallery with Associate Curator of Museum Education Lisa Karena Weidman, she discussed how members of the APS did not appreciate the artist curated exhibit and that it was unlikely that the APS would stage such an exhibition again.  This has less to do with this specific exhibit element than the fact that the artist did not include any labels explaining the exhibition (there is a artist statement available which is quoted above) and that there are no seats in a gallery that is intended as a space of deep contemplation.

 

APS has an "art cart" available for visitors in the gallery which includes print outs of large illuminated letter and coloring instruments. There is also a educator's guide for middle and high school teachers available for the exhibit on the APS website.  The educators guide includes an activity in which students research Jewish, Mayan, Chinese and Muslim calendars and illustrate student planners for every month as a book of hours is illuminated.  I did a project like this in my 6th Grade Social Studies class in which we illustrated a calendar of important events in our lives (this was part of a unit on the Middle Ages in which we got to create our own fiefdom and the calendar was to be followed by the serfs on our land).  Development of a similar book created as a cumulative portfolio would be an excellent culminating activity during a study of the Middle Ages in either high or middle school Social Studies or Language Arts.   

Megaloceros giganteus

Title: Irish Elk Skull and Skeleton
Material: Fossilized Bone
Creator: Donated by John Abell/Displayed by designers of Academy at 200 and Art of Science Gallery Collection: The Art of Science/Academy at 200
Year: Late Pleistocene Era/2012

        The Irish elk skull is on display in the Art of Science Gallery. When the gallery was reinterpreted, the museum staff was unable to move the large and heavy skull. So, rather than move it, the skull was incorporated into the exhibition as an art piece. There are panels with a description of the skull, photographs of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ life-size sculpture and a painted plaster model by Charles R. Knight along with Shane Stratton’s 2010 charcoal anatomical study. A fully articulated Irish elk skull is also on display as part of The Academy at 200 exhibition. The Academy at 200: The Nature of Discovery exhibition also includes a grooved brain coral, cast of a marine reptile fossil, 400 lb meteorite, specimen jars, mammal skulls, fish bones, fish bones, shark teeth, and a giant clam.
      The Irish elk skeleton was donated to the museum by John Abell in 1853. I was unable to find more information on Abell, but I did find the copy of the donations to the museum from May 3, 1853 which lists the elk skeleton. The skeleton was taken off display and loaned to the Rutgers Geological Museum, but returned to the museum for the bicentennial celebration earlier this year. It was missing some teeth, so sculpted and painted teeth were molded to complete the skeleton.
       A study of the Pleistocene era and similar extinct creatures would enhance the study of the Irish elk skeleton and skull. It would also be beneficial to know that the ancient elk is related to similar species living today, such as reindeer. The popularity of the animated Ice Age films, could also spark childrens’ interest in the fossils. As with the films, the fossil skull and skeleton could be used to educate visitors about climate change and extinction. Museum educators could create a link in visitors minds between the extinct elk and its endangered cousins today.

      An opposing view may be that the Irish elk skull should have been moved to make more gallery space for the Art of Science Gallery. I think, however, that the reason the skull is an important exhibit element in the gallery is because it shows some of the difficulties curators and exhibit planners encounter when trying to reinterpret a space. This is a perfect example of a problem I have seen as other museums and which I believe was handled well.