Academic literature on the topic 'Fine Arts Museum of the South at Mobile'

The Royal Institution of South Wales (RISW), one of the oldest scientific societies in Wales, was founded in 1835 and established the first museum in Wales - the Swansea Museum. The collections comprise geology, natural history, archaeology, and fine and applied arts. Associated with the RISW in its early years were Henry De la Beche, William E. Logan, and Lewis Weston Dillwyn; the Swansea Museum, being the only museum in Swansea that covers natural sciences and archaeology, thus has scientific as well as local significance. The building and collections are owned by the RISW, but for the past ten years the running of the Museum has been financed by the University College of Swansea. The University authorities...

This essay explores five exhibitions created for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Artmobile, the first mobile art museum in the United States. The mission of the Artmobile was to bring works of art directly to citizens throughout the state of Virginia from 1953 to 1994. In analyzing educational and exhibition materials, such as exhibition booklets, audio guide recordings, press releases, and speeches, this research examines the educational philosophies of each exhibition in relation to contemporaneous museum education literature. Applying Tony Bennett’s analysis of the impact of culture on the social to the creation of educational philosophies, this essay argues that while the mission of the Artmobile remained constant, there was a shift in the educational objective from the development of cultured citizens through art appreciation and the improvement of public taste to fostering individual visual literacy and encouraging visitors to make art historical and personal connections.

Abstract Islamic talismanic shirts from pre-Mughal South Asia form a stylistically cohesive subset within the larger corpus of Islamic talismanic shirts from the patrimonial-bureaucratic period. These objects have eluded sustained study due, in large part, to their wide geographical purview and dissimilarity from other period textiles. While these objects bear some similarities with talismans of smaller shape and disparate media, their form as garments has yet to be considered as integral to their function. In analyzing one of these South Asian shirts, from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, parallels between the arts of the book and the construction of armor highlight the apotropaic function of Koranic text when placed on the human body.

This article considers what an unstudied collection of Vietnamese handicraft owned by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History reveals about its collecting culture and, conversely, what the collecting culture discloses about the collection. I show how the collecting culture’s activities intersected with American State Department efforts to bring postcolonial South Vietnam into the Free World during the Cold War. Attention to the Smithsonian National Collection of Fine Arts’ exhibition, “Art and Archaeology of Vietnam. Asian Crossroad of Cultures,” also reveals narratives of power and knowledge associated with the collecting culture. Ultimately, these failed the collection by leaving it disregarded.

The article overviews the distribution of Neolithic pottery of the Standard Hassuna period in Upper Mesopotamia: from the foothills of the Taurus in the north to approximately the region of the Diyala river in the south; from the foothills of the Zagros in the east to the Balikh river, or possibly as far as the Euphrates river, in the west. In addition, the pottery of the Standard Hassuna (or the influence of this pottery tradition) is recorded in the hinterland of the Zagros. Based on the materials of the Yarim Tepe I settlement from the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the paper examines technological features of the Standard Hassuna pottery. They demonstrate a connection with the pottery technology of the previous periods of the Hassuna culture – Proto-Hassuna and Archaic Hassuna: the presence of an organic plant admixture (dung) in the pottery paste of a part of the vessels and the use of a two-layer slab construction. The innovations include the use of a light slip, as well as the improvement in the quality of firing, associated with the significant development of firing devices at that time. It is possible to assume the appearance of pictographic images on the Samarra pottery represented on the site as items of import.

Contemporary Muslim Fashions, September 22, 2018 – January 6, 2019 was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, shown in the de Young Museum and curated by Jill D’Alessandro and Laura Camerlengo, both curators at the museum, and consulting curator Reina Lewis, a scholar at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. The aim was to represent contemporary Muslim fashions. To this end, they assembled and exhibited a collection of garments from the most popular fashion designers of the day, chosen from a series of shows at modest fashion weeks around the world. Supplemented by key pieces that have gained traction in the news such as the Burkini™ and Nike®’s sport hijab, this exhibit elevated perceptions and highlighted a global view by showing designs from around the globe, honouring the African-American, Muslim-American, Arab, and South East Asian cultures and aesthetics. Supporting the sartorial narrative was a display of visual and multimedia art from hip hop music videos, film, Instagram feeds, photography, magazine covers, and prints. The multimedia “exhibit within an exhibit” complemented the sartorial narrative by providing a contemporary context for the clothing. It reminded the observer that the exhibit was not merely about fashion history or the evolution of modesty in dress but about a contemporary moment. The relationship between fashion and the body was explored through designs that cover the body and intentionally hide the often objectified and sexualized female figure to reveal a contemporary approach to fashion that is empowering.

The art collection of István Marczibányi (1752–1810), remembered as the benefactor of the Hungarian nation, who devoted a great part of his fortune to religious, educational, scientific and social goals, is generally known as a collection of ‘national Antiquities’ of Hungary. This opinion was already widespread in Hungarian publicity at the beginning of the 19th century, when Marczibányi pledged that he would enrich the collection of the prospective Hungarian national Museum with his artworks. But the description of his collection in Pál Wallaszky’s book Conspectus reipublicae litterariae in Hungaria published in 1808 testifies to the diversity and international character of the collection. In the Marczibányi “treasury”, divided into fourteen units, in addition to a rich cabinet for coins and medals there were mosaics, sculptures, drinking vessels, filigree-adorned goldsmiths’ works, weapons, Chinese art objects, gemstones and objects carved from them (buttons, cameos, caskets and vases), diverse marble monuments and copper engravings. Picking, for example, the set of sculptures, we find ancient Egyptian, Greek and Ro man pieces as well as mediaeval and modern masterpieces arranged by materials.After the collector’s death, his younger brother Imre Marczibányi (1755–1826) and his nephews Márton (1784–1834), János (1786–1830), and Antal (1793–1872) jointly inherited the collection housed in a palace in dísz tér (Parade Square) in Buda. In 1811, acting on the promise of the deceased, the family donated a selection of artworks to the national Museum: 276 cut gems, 9 Roman and Byzantine imperial gold coins, 35 silver coins and more than fifty antiquities and rarities including 17th and 18th-century goldsmiths’ works, Chinese soap-stone statuettes, ivory carvings, weapons and a South Italian red-figure vase, too. However, this donation did not remain intact as one entity. With the emergence of various specialized museums in the last third of the 19th century, a lot of artworks had been transferred to the new institutions, where the original provenance fell mostly into oblivion.In the research more than a third of the artworks now in the Hungarian national Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest could be identified, relying on the first printed catalogue of the Hungarian national Museum (1825) titled Cimeliotheca Musei Nationalis Hungarici, and the handwritten acquisition registers. The entries have revealed that fictitious provenances were attached to several items, since the alleged or real association with prominent historical figures played an important role in the acquisition strategies of private collectors and museums alike at the time. For example, an ivory carving interpreted in the Cimeliotheca as the reliquary of St Margaret of Hungary could be identified with an object in the Metalwork Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (inv. no. 18843), whose stylistic analogies and parallels invalidate the legendary origin: the bone plates subsequently assembled as a front of a casket were presumably made in a Venetian workshop at the end of the 14th century.There are merely sporadic data about the network of István Marczibányi’s connections as a collector, and about the history of his former collection remaining in the possession of his heirs. It is known that collector Miklós Jankovich (1772–1846) purchased painted and carved marble portraits around 1816 from the Marczi bányi collection, together with goldsmiths’ works including a coconut cup newly identified in the Metalwork Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts (inv. no. 19041). The group of exquisite Italian Cinquecento bronze statuettes published by art historian Géza Entz (1913–1993), was last owned as a whole by Antal Marczibányi (nephew of István) who died in 1872. These collection of small bronzes could have also been collected by István Marczibányi, then it got scattered through inheritance, and certain pieces of it landed in north American and European museums as of the second third of the 20th century. Although according to Entz’s hypothesis the small bronzes were purchased by István’s brother Imre through the mediation of sculptor and art collector István Ferenczy (1792–1956) studying in Rome, there is no written data to verify it. By contrast, it is known that the posthumous estate of István Marczibányi included a large but not detailed collection of classical Roman statues in 1811, which the heirs did not donate to the national Museum. It may be presumed that some of the renaissance small bronzes of mythological themes following classical prototypes were believed to be classical antiquities at the beginning of the 19th century. Further research will hopefully reveal more information about the circumstances of their acquisition.

As the global pattern of severe weather intensifies, complex disaster-related appraisals are becoming increasingly more common. Post-disaster appraisals are particularly challenging due to several key factors: (1) the large number of objects in each appraisal, (2) the diversity of the objects and (3) the limited time frame for completion. Due to these complicating factors the methodologies that were once central to the structure of valuation are crumbling and new metrics are being formed to accommodate these labyrinthine post-disaster jobs. By way of a single case study undertaken post-Hurricane Sandy, this document explores the process of redesigning appraisal methodologies, of approaching uncommon historical objects found often in these now less exceptional cases, of identifying "value signifiers" for those objects and ultimately of reimagining the very core of what it means to appraise fine art.

The museums, nowadays, facing to many challenges in religious objects exhibition. Especially, in the current context of Covid-19 pandemic and cultural change, regular methods of the museum exhibition expose many limitations. Through a case study of ghe ngo (the Khmer’s Nagar boat) exhibition at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME), this paper discusses some principles dealing with the religious objects in the museum, and outline some modern display methods that can contribute to improving the display efficiency of ghe ngo exhibition towards the museum sustainable development. Trưng bày hiện vật tôn giáo vốn đặt ra nhiều thách thức đối với các bảo tàng. Đặc biệt, trong bối cảnh Covid-19 và biến đổi văn hóa hiện nay, các phương thức trưng bày truyền thống thể hiện nhiều mặt hạn chế. Qua trường hợp ghe ngo của người Khmer đang được trưng bày tại Bảo tàng Dân tộc học Việt Nam, bài viết này thảo luận về việc ứng xử với hiện vật tôn giáo, tín ngưỡng trong bảo tàng, và một số phương pháp trưng bày hiện đại nhằm góp phần nâng cao hiệu quả trưng bày ghe ngo của người Khmer hướng tới mục tiêu phát triển bền vững bảo tàng.