The Hermitage St. Petersburg – Moscow, Russia

The Hermitage is home to over 3,000,000 items/works of art  from the Stone Age to the 20th century.

With the possible exception of the Louvre, there is no museum in the world that rivals the Hermitage in size and quality. 

 The museum is especially strong in Italian Renaissance and French Impressionist paintings, as well as

 possessing outstanding collections of works by Rembrandt, Picasso, and Matisse. There are excellent Greek and Roman and its exhibits of Siberian and Central Asian

 art are magnificent. The museum itself is clearly a work of art as well.

The Lourve (Paris)

Literally, one of the world’s largest palaces. Though it has fewer pieces on display than the Hermitage, the sheer size and beauty of the palace has little competition.  It holds some of the world’s most well known pieces of art:  Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii; Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; and  Alejandro of Antioch’s Venus de Milo.

WORLD’S SMALLEST MUSEUM:

The World’s Smallest Museum, Superior, AZ    “Artifacts of Everyday Life!”

http://www.worldssmallestmuseum.com/

It is a mere 134 square feet under roof and subdivided into 10 glass enclosed display booths, 5 on each side of the tiny building. A walkway down the middle through the length of the museum leaves only 80 square feet to display artifacts.

QUIRKY MUSEUMS:

http://ucmmuseum.com/exhibits.htm

The UCM Museum (Abita, LA)

I LOVE THIS PLACE! Wow, I would love to own my own little eccentric museum like this. No, there are no famous works here, but what is here is very amusing, fun and enthralling to viewers.

“See handmade folk art animated scenes of Southern life by Louisiana inventor/artist, John Preble. With the help of over 50,000 found and recycled objects, Preble created his own fantastic worlds”

There’s an amazing marble machine, a 32 foot bass/alligator (Buford the Bassigator), The House of Shards, small model exhibits of Mardi Gras parades, car repair shops, and plantation homes.

This one is cool, yet creepy.  

Glore Psychiatric Museum, St. Joseph, MO

The museum shows how the mentally ill were treated before modern medicine.

A “coffin cage” 

YOU CAN MAKE A MUSEUM ABOUT ANYTHING! This gives me great hope. Maybe I will have some extra money to spend in the future and a plot of land and I can slowly assemble a museum of something interesting. Like an Awkward Museum. Yes! I want to do that. Jade’s Museum of Hair. Mmmh. The possibilities!

So basically, one needs a Ph.D. to be seriously desired as a curator. I know that my favorite subject is History, so I could obtain a Ph.D. in that subject, which would allow me to teach pretty much anywhere. I could also write, research, join or lead a research project with a university or something. That would be great. The only other thing I can see myself doing after I obtain a Bachelor’s degree would be to go to law school and get a law degree.  I think I will research all the things that one can do with a law degree for my next 9 weeks project. I saw a book online that said “300 Things to do With a Law Degree.” I really want to read that…. My dad REALLY wants me to get a law degree. He says that if he had it all to do over again that’s what he’d do. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t study anything only because my parents wanted me to. I am genuinely interested in becoming an attorney. But then there are so many tipes of law that you can specialize in; criminal law, business law, insurance law, even equine law. Obviously you can work for a law firm or start your own. But I think you can work for virtually anyone, I mean everyone needs a lawyer at some point. Maybe dad could hook me up with a government job. Man, to work in Washington DC in all the federal stuff would be da bomb. Library of Congress, The Federal Archives…but would I be only a behind-the-scenes type person for these types of jobs? That’s not really the type of person that I am. Hmm.

So if the curator thing doesn’t work out, I definitely have other options. So now my main question is: to earn up to a Ph.D. in history, or stop after a bachelor’s and go into law? I know I have a while before I have to decide this.

BUT, while I was touring Tulane, it occured to me that most of the students there were double majors. I had never really given any thought to double-majoring, but then I began to realize how much good that could do for me. But then there is question of what to major in? English, Political Science, Linguistics, Classic Studies, Archaeology… all of these things would be great. But what about Business…this doesn’t really appeal to me much, but what if it would help me to become more competitive for a museum job or law job or something? Political Science would be useful for law. English is useful for everything. Classic Studies and Archaeology would be really good knowledge to have for museum work. History and Classics was actually what my tour guide was majoring in. I just love language and words.

“YOU KNOW YOU’RE LIMITED WHEN IT COMES TO HAIR STYLES WHEN ONE HAIR ON YOUR HEAD MOVES AND YOUR WHOLE BALD SCALP SHOWS.”  –Anonymous

INTERESTING AND UNUSUAL MUSEUMS:

Kenneth G. Fiske Museum of Musical Instruments (Claremont, CA)– this musuem contains over 1400 musical instruments from all over the world–including the first Grand Piano.

The Salem Witch Museum (Salem, MA)– brings you back to Salem 1692 for a dramatic overview of the Witch Trials, including stage sets with life-size figures, lighting and a narration.

The DiscoverSea Shipwreck Museum (Fenwick Island, Delaware)–  has one of the largest collections of shipwreck and recovered artifacts in the Mid-Atlantic. It contains about 10,000 artifacts from local and worldwide locations, including an intact blown-glass hourglass from a 200-year-old shipwreck (the world’s deepest wooden wreck) at the heart of the Bermuda Triangle.

Money Museum (Colorado Springs, CO)– This is America’s largest museum dedicated to numismatics (the study of collecting coins and metals). Their collection contains over 250,000 items from the earliest invention of money to modern day, with items including paper money, coins, tokens, medals, and traditional money from all over the world.

Museum of Bad Art: Too Bad To Be Ignored (Boston)–if you have trouble determining whethe a work is “good art,” this museum will help to show you those that definitely are not. http://www.museumofbadart.org/ One passage on this website states: “The pieces in the MOBA collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry to works of exuberant, although crude, execution by artists barely in control of the brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent.”  Haha! 

Lucy in the Field with Flowers. The Museum Of Bad Art was founded the night Scott Wilson pulled this painting from a trash pile on a Boston street. It is the cornerstone upon which the entire institution was built.

 ”Mama and Babe” (or, “Jade and Kaytlyn Minus Makeup”) 

  (“Amelia; Corey and Molly”)

http://www.mnh.si.edu/

I have been to Washington D.C. twice, and both times I have visited this museum and I hope to do so again in the future. I was ages 9 and 12 when I went, so my knowledge of history at those points were only what I had absorbed from my dad’s frequent history blabs, which rarely strayed from World War II related topics. I actually thought it was called Warwartoo until I was probably 13. Nonetheless, I was fascinated by this museum and was nearly driven to the brink of homicide by my mom and brother’s continuous cries for me to “hurry up!” Of course,  images of the humongous realistic elephant in the middle of the first floor and the nearly gaudy looking Hope Diamond stick out most in my mind, along with the dinosaur bones and the aquarium-like exhibits.

GROUND FLOOR: The Art of African Exploration, The Evolution Trail, and a strange amount of birds.

FIRST FLOOR: The Hall of Palentology (huge, awesome, mostly real dinosaur bones!). Exhibits studying the cultures and peoples of Africa. “Going to Sea”– an exhibit studying the ages of sea exploration and sea art and literature. The Sant Ocean Hall–a gigantic hall exploring biological, anthropological, and geographical aspects of the sea.

SECOND FLOOR:  Written In Bone: Forensic Files of the 17-Century Chesapeake (they have real skeletons of America’s early European settlers). A Western Cultures Hall (the Iceman is on display here–a mummified man from the Neolithic age who was found buried beneath snow in the Alps). Hall of Bones, Reptiles, Insects, and Amphibians. Hall of Gems, Geology and Minerals. (Seriously, most of the precious gems here are at least the size of my fist.)

I really want to work at this museum! I know there are a ton of other people who want to as well, but I remember from The Last Lecture: brick walls are there to keep out the people who don’t really want something. I would love to live in Georgetown and then just drive to DC to work at this museum…that would be perfect. Hopefully one day!

http://www.nmnh.si.edu/rtp/other_opps/otherintro.html

^ this link gives info on intership and job opportunities with this museum.

FIVE NEW VOCABULARY WORDS:

Acculturation– The process by which a culture absorbs the traits or customs of another culture with which it is in direct contact.

Annealing– In copper and bronze metallurgy, this refers to the process of heating and then cooling the material to remove stress from hammering.

Religious syncretism– The blending of religious indigenous beliefs and practices with those introduced by outside groups.

Pastoralists– Groups whose subsistence activities center on the care of domesticated animals.

Praxis– A reference to customary practice or conduct as opposed to theory, convention, habit, or custom.

 Me and my lil’ bro in DC.

“5000 Years of Art.”

http://www.metmuseum.org/

Founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens, Met’s permanent collections contain over 2 million works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and Modern Art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. A number of notable interiors, ranging from 1st century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met’s galleries.

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metropolitan_museum_of_art/index.html

SUPER FAMOUS WORKS IN THE MET:

  <– Madonna and Child: Duccio purchased  in 2004 for $45 million!   Van Gogh    Degas

 Manet 

This museum has at least one work from probably any famous artist you can think of. Picasso, Rembrandt, Matisse, Pollock, Monet, O’Keefe, Panini, they are all there.

This museum looks amazing, I cannot wait to go to tour it when I go to NYC over New Years. Kaytlyn said she would go with me if I went to see a Cirque de Soleil show with her.  Molly too. It is so huge!

FIVE NEW VOCABULARY WORDS:

1. Aperture: a small, narrow opening through which light is focused. Found in cameras, microscopes, and other devices, apertures are often adjustable so as to increase or decrease the amount of light.

2. Byzantine: a religious style of art developed in the eastern part of the late Roman Empire. Colorful and ornate, Byzantine art is characterized by its use of mosaic and by its flat, graphic style.

3. Conceptual art: works of art in which the idea is equally if not more important than the finished product. Conceptual art can take many forms, from photographs to texts to videos, while sometimes there is no object at all. Emphasizing the ways things are made more than how they look, conceptual art often raises questions about what a work of art can be. Conceptual art is also often difficult to collect or preserve as it can be the artist’s own experience that is the work of art.

4. Kitsch: Used to describe items that are overly decorative or sentimental, kitsch may also have negative connotations—meaning tastelessness or bad taste in art. Things generally considered to be kitschy in popular American culture include ceramic figurines, black velvet paintings, rhinestones, and glitter. However, what is kitsch in one cultural context may not be in another.

5. Lenticular: a printed image that shows depth or motion as the viewing angle changes; of or relating to a lens.

 
The Getty Center, in Los Angeles, is one of two locations of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The J. Paul Getty Museum started from the oil millionaire’s private collection and was housed for many years in a a Roman-style villa in Malibu, which is now the Getty Villa. Today’s Getty Museum occupies 750 acres of land in the Santa Monica Mountain foothills. The Getty Center includes an art collection so large it takes four exhibit pavilions just to show part of it, and the complex includes nine buildings in total.

The museum’s permanent collection includes “pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts; and 19th- and 20th-century American and European photographs.” The Center, which opened on December 16, 1997, is also well known for its architecture, gardens, and views (overlooking Los Angeles). Besides the Museum, the Center’s buildings house the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Foundation.
 http://www.getty.edu/museum/exhibitions/
The artwork in the Getty Center in LA has a particular strength in Greek and Roman art of the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD. The collections of bronze and marble sculptures, Greek and Roman gems, Hellenistic silverware and jewelry, Greek vases and ancient glass are some of the best in the world. There is a drawings collection that contains 700 European drawings from the 14-19th century, with many from the Renaissance and France. There is an amazing illuminated manuscripts collection, and of course almost a thousand European paintings dating from 1300-1900. There are 9 collections of European and American photographs.

FIVE NEW VOCABULARY WORDS:

Docent- A volunteer trained to share information with visitors in a museum

Primary source - A firsthand document such as a diary or a letter or an official record such as a birth certificate.

Secondary source - A document that is written based on a primary source such as a biography, a textbook or a magazine article.

bailiwick – a person’s area of interest or knowledge.

hebetudinous- dull-minded; mentally lethargic

…and a bonus word:

callipygian- having beautifully shaped buttocks.

(More information about museums and the curators!)

http://www.ehow.com/how_12539_become-museum-curator.html

This website says that one should get a Ph. D. if one aspires to work in a natural history or science museum. I am 100% sure that I want to major in history, and getting a Ph. D. is something I would love to do. So maybe I should do that…then I can be a professor or author if the museum thing falls through. (Those are two careers I would love to have simultaneously.) Oh! I just remembered this listening to a Christian radio station about this woman, Dr. Katherine Millard (spelling?), who gave the radio host a tour through Washington D.C. called something like “The Christian Heritage Tour,” and she basically went through the Smithsonian and gave proof of how deeply rooted in Christianity our Capital is.  I need to look her up.  Even though she is not a curator, her job sounds mas estupendo.

Anyway, this website also states that most people who want to be a curator usually have to work their way up the curatorial ladder. I think it would be a good idea to start out as an assistant curator, that way you will gain experience and learn if you really want the job as a head curator.

http://www.princetonreview.com/careers.aspx?cid=48

“It’s all so fascinating and beautiful that you can find yourself touching history,” wrote one respondent. 

Yes! This is exactly how I imagine myself feeling as a curator.

“Satisfaction and responsibility are usually high in this profession at all levels, with the exception of those curators who find that they are unable to spend enough time with the art they love because of their obligations to do publicity, fund-raising, and grant writing.”

I know that the fund-raising portion is a huge part of being a curator…but that’s all I know. Grant writing is another huge part of this job.  More info needed. This site says that the most unexpected part of being a curator is managing a large staff. I do have some sweet leadership skills….Curators’ duties include creating exhibitions, acquiring works for the collection, meeting with and educating trustees, labeling exhibits, accurately and carefully keeping track of inventory, and, at times, overseeing research on collection pieces to make certain the integrity of the piece is maintained (such as dating tests for fossils or X-ray analysis of paintings to determine origin.) This pretty much sums up the curator’s job apart from the fund-raising stuff.

This site says foreign language skills are very important. Yay for my nearly-fluent-in-Spanish-self! I do plan on becoming completely bilingual. Being bilingual, espicially in the work field, is very useful. If I minor in art history, criticism, and conservation, (focusing on the conservation part) hopefully I will learn about conservation/restoration techniques and some museum studies. This is obviously important knowlege to have if you work in a museum.

“Curators become historians, critics, college professors, museum educators, and museum directors. A notable few become independent consultants and independent researchers, but significant achievement in the field is required before these opportunities become available.”

 Yessss! All of these jobs are on my “Jobs-I-Would-Love-To-Have” list. So if I work my way up to earning a Ph.D. in history, then I will have all of those options. Then maybe I can go on to law school later…if that still appeals to me.

So I have a pretty good understanding of what the roles of the curator are now and what it takes to become one. Now I will just go on to research the three museums that I have chosen.

I have always loved art– creating it, studying it, and just marveling at it in all of its forms. To me, a day could hardly be spent in a better way than strolling through a museum and observing artworks of all kinds. For these reasons, and the fact that college is just around the corner, I have decided to study three major museums, The Getty, Metropolitan, and The Museum of Natural History, and the role of the curators within them to see if being a curator is a career I would like to have one day.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-museum-curator.htm

The website above defines a curator as one who manages the collections in a museum. That is simple enough to understand. They organize and plan the displays and catalog collection items. This may include traveling to obtain desired works and items for the exhibits if they work for a large museum, and being able to determine an item’s authenticity and worth. This article states that writing and business skills are also needed in this job because grant requests, contracts, and fund raising materials may need to be written. Knowing how to work with a database is also crucial. It is essential to have a graduate degree in history, art history, archaeology, anthropology, or another related field (depending on the type of museum you want to work in) as well as work experience in a museum to obtain a job as a curator. These jobs are very competitive.

From what I’ve already learned from this article, being a museum curator is definitely appealing to me. Apart from the fact that I love history, art and museums themselves, I would love to be able to travel around to obtain and handle special artworks for an exhibit that I designed. The thing is, I don’t know which field I would choose to study, or if I would rather work in an art museum or a natural history museum. Both history and art history have special places in my heart. That is going to be tough to decide if I choose to follow this career path.

FIVE NEW RELATIVE WORDS:

1. Curator: a)  the person in charge of a museum, art collection, etc.

b)a manager; superintendent.

2.  Archivist:  a person responsible for preserving, organizing, or servicing archival material.

3. Conservator: a person who repairs, restores, or maintains the condition of objects, as paintings or sculptures in an art museum, or books in a library.

4.  Database: a comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access, generally in a computer.

5.  Anthropology: the science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind.