 Hi everyone this is Carol Henkel president. I'm very happy to welcome you again. This is our fifth lecture. I can't believe it. I want to thank all of you who have so generously taken time to respond to our feedback surveys. It really means a lot to us and I'm happy to say I've read them all. The board doesn't know yet what they say and by and large you're very very very encouraging and that means so much to us. I'd now like to take an opportunity to please introduce Michael Orlanski of our program committee. He's going to introduce today's speaker. Michael? Good afternoon. Today we're very pleased to welcome Katie Wood Kershaw, associate curator at the Shelburne Museum where she organizes exhibitions on American fine arts, folk arts, and decorative arts. Katie is a graduate of Smith College. She earned her master's degree from the winter turf program in American material culture and went on to earn a PhD in art history at the University of Delaware. Much of Katie's work at the Shelburne Museum is with furniture, textiles, and fine arts collections. Among her many current projects she's working on a book an exhibition on the life and work of the 20th century American painter Luigi Lucioni. Katie grew up in central Florida and currently resides in historic Middlebury, Vermont. In her spare time she loves to cook and also finds great joy intending to the early 19th century Vermont farmhouse that she and her partner share. The title of today's talk is American Stories from the Shelburne Museum, Rethinking Objects in a Virtual Era. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Katie Wood Kershaw. Hey everyone, thanks for that gracious introduction Michael. It's nice to virtually be with everyone today. It's really unusual. I mean I guess it's getting more usual these days to to sort of do this on the Zoom but I really miss seeing everyone so hopefully the next time we do this I can all be in person. So from here I'm going to start sharing my screen with everyone. See this, we'll run this from the beginning. Great. All right, I think we're all set to go. So today I feel really lucky to be here with everyone and one of the greatest joys of my job is being able to share Shelburne Museum's incredible collections with people and sort of take them on the road for folks who maybe aren't able to get to the museum or haven't been recently and for those of you who are local you probably have heard that it's it's been quite a season just not just for Shelburne but for most of our most of our cultural institutions this year given COVID-19 and the pandemic and everything that has happened and so I thought what I would do today is sort of I want to lay the groundwork first let you know that you know what we'll start a little bit by talking about sort of the reason that Shelburne embarked on this journey to create digital exhibitions and sort of some of the challenges and some of the really sort of highlights of being able to do that there were a lot of things that these new this new digital format allowed us to do that we haven't really been able to do in the past and so we're sort of using those as touchstones then I thought I would share some of the really incredible objects that we included in our first born digital exhibition it was called American Stories and it covered four sort of broad categories the first category dealt with the idea of home we also talked about sort of people travel and finally we finished up with community so we'll go through some of those objects today and sort of talk about some of the behind the scenes efforts that we all sort of came together and I wanted to share with folks who might not be able to visit the museum in person I should add that we were able to open up this season on a limited basis and the museum will be open for two more days before we close for the fall so we're open this weekend Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. we do require advanced ticketing but if you go to our website you can you know check to see if there are tickets available and if not we do take walk-ins so that's on a limited basis in terms of our sort of visitation but it's worth a shot if you haven't visited us so from here I thought what I would do I wanted to start with this overall sort of aerial view of the museum so this was shot in 1960 just as the museum was opening to the public so what you're seeing here this sort of edge down here this is the north end of the campus and if you visited us you know that this is where our hat and fragrance textile buildings are right over here is where the new Pearson library is so this is the sort of northern edge of our campus and all the way over here if you check out where my cursor is that is the sort of south end of the campus where we now have the parking lot and the visitor center and the big modernist building that we call the Fitzagallie Center for Art and Education. A couple things that I really love about this view you get the sense that the landscape was still developing but there have been some major changes that our museum founder Electra Habermayer Web instituted right off the bat. This down here you'll see the story Ticonderoga our our side wheel steamer that all sorts of people love to visit here is our lighthouse and there are a couple other buildings you'll recognize here's the covered bridge and route seven right here and this is stagecoach in which was one of the first sort of galleries in the American Museum that was really dedicated to the idea of American folk art which we'll talk about in a few minutes. So you might wonder when we were I guess it was back in March when the pandemic got real and we realized that many of our best leg planings for the exhibition season for our highest season usually were open from May 1st October 31st and we have all sorts of new things going on but we realized that we might not be able to open and that we might not be able to receive visitors especially in the numbers that we usually do during the summer when people come to Vermont and so we decided that we needed to pivot and one of the big challenges for the curatorial team was trying to figure out how to take this this incredible 45 acre outdoor campus and encapsulate it in a digital exhibition right it's a challenging kind of project and so we set to work we had some parameters so most of us began working from home in mid March and that meant that we we really relied heavily on our incredible tech support team and we got our VPN set up we made sure that we had digital access and remote access to things like our object database and the curatorial team started working really in sort of close concert with our collections team which includes a registrar and all sorts of people who help us manage both our image collection and our objects in storage we also started working hand in hand with our educators who were helping dream up good ideas for educational programming that parents of kids who were working from home could use on days when everyone was sort of going stir crazy with the snow so we worked sort of to get things together one of the first things that we had to sort of think about was the fact that if we wanted to use an object for an online exhibition we had to have good digital photography of that object and in a collection where we have more than a hundred thousand objects um you know and and they range from American fine art paintings and sculptures to quilts to you know tools to furniture to vehicles we had to figure out where the good photography was and how that would translate to our online modules we were also working with a number of sort of strengths and weaknesses within our collection and one of the first objects that we opened up with when we when we opened our first chapter of the exhibition American Stories People was this extraordinary pastel by Marie Cassatt it is a portrait of Louisine Habermeier and her daughter Elektra and if you all know the museum you know that Elektra was our founder and Louisine was her mother when Elektra started collecting objects one of the things that really defined her collecting strategy was her deep appreciation for American objects and particularly American folk art her mother on the other hand who had been a suffragette and was active in all sorts of different causes her mother was deeply interested in French impressionism she traveled with Elektra extensively when Elektra was young introduced her to artists and dealers and really helped her understand what what art was she helped her daughter really develop this sort of refined eye and early on in fact in some of Louisine's collecting strategy she befriended Marie Cassatt and it was Marie Cassatt who introduced her to a number of French dealers who ultimately sort of got Louisine tied in with Monet and Degas and a number of the other sort of French artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that we think of when we think about the Impressionist movement so this is a great you know example of some of the really rich objects that we have in our collection some of the really rich fine art but it also is sort of unusual in that it's French art that was acquired by the museum in 1996 this was not part of the original collection so we have objects like this that are sort of outliers we also have objects like this incredible painting by John Singleton Copley of a gentleman named John Scali so this the painting that you see in this photograph was painted circa 1760 in Boston if you know anything about John Singleton Copley you know that he left Boston for London to go study at the Royal Academy after you know sort of teaching himself how to paint and observing works in the collections of fellow painters in New England like John Smybert when Electra began collecting Electra is in the polka dot address if you did not know who she was when she began collecting she was interested in so many different kinds of objects that one of the one of the things that she did was she developed a sort of bucket list of great American painters that she wanted to have represented in her collection and John Singleton Copley was really at the tip top of that list so when she acquired this painting it was really quite a coup she was excited about it and in 1960 there were a number of articles that were run on the opening of the museum and several photography teams came to take pictures of Electra and her collection so the painting that you're seeing here you know it's representative of a certain idea of what American art was and what you wanted to have in a museum if you were going to collect that kind of object and so she's very proud of it something that I especially love about this painting and really it's sort of the surround around it John Singleton Copley was known to have designed many of his own frames for his works and our incredible objects conservator Nancy Ravenel has done a lot of research to sort of think about this frame and she suspects that this is actually a frame that was designed by John Singleton Copley himself so these are sort of rare finds in their world and we feel really lucky to have a museum but it also you know when we think about current conversations today about representation in museums you know on the heels of COVID-19 there there was great there is great social unrest in terms of thinking about how museums can become more inclusive spaces how we can better represent our visitors and our constituents and how we can tell a broader multiplicity of stories within our galleries when when working with a collection like this we recognize that because Electra was collecting during the 1940s 50s and well 1940s and 50s she thought about objects in a slightly different way than we do today and so when we survey our collections particularly our paintings collection we don't have a lot of work by women artists they just weren't recognized when she was collecting and so it you know there are sort of blind spots that we have grappled with and that we've thought a lot about in terms of how to present materials today to audiences who frankly are requesting more of us which is great we have objects like this so this is a little folk art sculpture that I wanted to pull up today partly because Children Museum is known for its folk art collections and when Electra Habermayer Webb was collecting these were not the kinds of things that everyone was collecting there were a couple of her peers who were interested in this most notably a woman named Abby Aldrich Rockefeller who you may know because she was the person who assembled the collections down in Colonial Williamsburg so again you know this is sort of the era of a time when people are very interested in concretizing American history and in thinking about what that looks like visually and then creating these large outdoor museums like Shelburne or Williamsburg or Deerfield or Sturbridge Village that featured objects that sort of reminded visitors of their collective heritage. We also are really extraordinarily lucky to have objects like these two portraits so if you've visited the museum you've probably met Nancy and William Lawson so these are two portraits by William Matthew Pryor that were both painted as a pendant pair say that ten times fast in 1843 in Boston so William Matthew Pryor was known as an itinerant artist who painted all over New England and who had this great strength and that he would paint to a series of different price points. The Lawsons were prominent members of Boston's abolitionist community and they were both very active in a religious group where William Matthew Pryor was also active so they probably met each other there the group was called the Millerites and these paintings are really extraordinary for a number of reasons first when these paintings of the Lawsons were created the Lawsons were free Blacks living in Boston and if you've been to a museum that has a great collection of American art you've probably noticed that there are not that many portraits of Black Americans from this period part of that has to do with the economics of portraiture you know it's an expensive thing to have your portrait painted. Another aspect of why we don't have a lot of these objects sort of in our cultural history is that you know you could be held accountable as an artist for painting someone who didn't look like you and something that's really remarkable about these two portraits is that if you see them in person in our galleries right down here in the lower right hand corner of Nancy's portrait and in the lower right hand corner of William's portrait you'll notice that William Matthew Pryor signed his name on the front of the canvas and he didn't do this for all of his paintings and so it was this very sort of vocal admission of support for these two people who were prominent within their community and it was it was a sort of active kinship which as a curator I really love I mean as a human being I really love that so we have portraits like this in our collection that we were really eager to share it was interesting you know when we think about mounting digital exhibitions they allow us to do a lot of things that are in person shows do not and one of those things is you know we can reach people across the country with our objects now you don't have to visit in person and while I will always argue for the in person experience the kind of breadth and reach of a digital project has been really wonderful these digital projects also allowed us to bring out a number of objects and bring attention to a number of objects that are challenging to display for whatever reason so the seven portraits that you see on your screen now they may look a little funny to you they're actually some of some of the things that most intrigued me when I started the museum almost five years ago so these are all grizzly portraits on oil cloth and they're all portraits of major Native American leaders and personalities from the 19th century and these these portraits would have been created so you notice that they're sort of a grizzly or black and white palette for most of them some of them have a little red but they're not full color like you would expect a regular sort of portrait to be and you also notice that sort of yellow background on them the purpose of that yellowing so usually linseed oil or some other kind of oil was used to treat the cloth that this was painted on and it would result in a a certain level of translucence in the cloth these portraits in theory traveled around and would have been used in a sort of traveling stage show where someone an orator or a historian or an entertainer would have gotten up and put these on the stage and there would have been they would have been sort of in frames and there would have been a flickering candle or oil lamp behind them and with the sort of flickering light from that light source the figures in these pictures would almost appear to move when period audiences watched them right you know you hear stories about them and you would see these works so a couple years ago one of one of my colleagues Corey Rogers worked with Nancy Graffin on our conservator to get a couple of these set up in light boxes so that we could display them in the galleries there's a tremendous amount of work that goes on to do that and we couldn't do with all of them so for for our online exhibition we were able to sort of bring these out and talk about them a little more easily than we could in the galleries which was nice it also allowed us to get at some questions of you know what kind of representation of Native Americans first nations do we have in our collection and how can we sort of bring more attention to these kinds of objects we also have portraits like these and Michael kindly kindly mentioned earlier that I've been working on a project that focuses on the work of American 20th century realist Luigi Lucioni so these two works are currently hanging in web gallery they came to the museum as part of the artist the quest after he passed away in 1988 and they are extraordinary portraits in person but one of the reasons that I really enjoyed being able to use them for our American Stories project was they give a really interesting view of what it was to be an Italian American immigrant in America in the early years of the 20th century so Lucioni immigrates via Ellis Island he was born in northern Italy in the sort of foothills of the Alps he comes in 1911 by Ellis Island his father who was a coppersmith and is represented here on the right was what came over earlier and then Lucioni came with his mother and sisters Alice was one of his sisters in 1911 by 19 by the late 1920s he had visited Vermont at least once in 1930 he started spending summers here and he forged this really lovely relationship with Electra Habermeyer Webb where he actually came and stayed in one of the buildings on sort of on the property of the Burke House so Electra Habermeyer Webb's Shelburne residence he would come and paint over the summers so these objects both hold an object or that they hold a very close place to Shelburne's heart but they allow us again to start untangle those different threads of what it meant to be American and in America during the 20th century and how that related both to the state of Vermont and to a sort of larger national conversation. Another thing that these online exhibitions a lot of us to do was to bring together objects that we might not have been able to get into a gallery together at once so if you are familiar with our collection you know that the portrait in the center here of Louisa Ellen Gallant Cook painted in 1838 is it's one of our sort of prized folk art portraits it's great for a number of reasons and one of the things that I love about this work is that it was actually located it was found by a high school English teacher named Guy A. Bagley in the Peterson, Massachusetts town dump and I believe it was found hang on I can tell you this in 1952 so he found this and Mr. Bagley had seen another familiar picture at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and that familiar picture that he'd seen is actually this one over here the object on the far left of your screen so he saw some some formal characteristics that were the same he brought this to the attention of of Max and Carolic who was a collector and dealer at the time and Carolic eventually sold the painting to a lecture having my web another sort of interesting link to this is on the right of your screen you'll notice the portrait of Louisa's sister and that is owned by the Tara Foundation for American Arts currently in Chicago and so these digital modules allowed us to think broadly across time if you've been in the museum to one of our exhibitions in the in the Pettigalli Center you may have noticed that often will bring in loan objects for exhibitions and loans during the pandemic were not happening we had planned for some major loan exhibitions this past summer that logistically just became impossible both because of social distancing and because museums were shut down departments were shut down and people were working from home so these kinds of opportunities on the computer allowed us to do some good work to share objects and create a little more context with our digital visitors the second module of the exhibition online that we went through was all about travel and I'm taking this back to one of our French paintings this is by Claude Monet it was a it's a painting that he executed in Amsterdam the reason that I I bring it up is because it's both about the idea of travel right so infrastructure travel like being far away it also holds the distinction of being counted as the first Monet that was brought to America and this of course came through Electra's mother losing half a minor it recently traveled up to Denver so it gets a lot of time on the road but it really it's a wonderful and sort of representative picture in our collection because it really does get at those those really sort of cosmopolitan threads that underline much of the collecting that contributed to the strengths in our collection so this object it's it's one of my favorites it normally lives in the Electra Habermire Web Memorial building in the parlor and it's it's just a great piece in person we also have this incredible tie at the collection to our collection of historic vehicles and the shot that you see here these are two carriages that are displayed right now in the round barn so just to the let's see the west of our visitor center one of the most interesting things about the formation of our museum was that it was really rooted in this collection of historic vehicles that the web family gave to Electra Habermire Web well Electra Habermire in 1947 so they had this huge collection of incredible vehicles they didn't know what they were going to do with it and she said you know if you'll give them to me I'll start a museum with them and so it's a sort of unusual place I think to start a museum another really interesting thing about this image the Concord coach that you see the big yellow coach that you see on the left of the picture you can sort of think of these Concord coaches as like the Greyhound buses of their day they were used to transport people all over the country these are also the kinds of objects that it's really challenging to get into a gallery right so it would be very difficult in terms of sort of condition and space to hang that Monet painting next to this Concord coach but through the sort of virtues of technology we were able to bring objects together that we might not otherwise have been able to this is another really lovely picture this is in the lower level of the round barn and this is one of our sleighs in the collection that I think is particularly elegant this was manufactured in Montreal and I just love the sort of rich velvet you can sort of imagine someone riding along in this carriage you know with a big fur blanket and just sort of taking in the countryside so as Michael noted I grew up in central Florida and so getting used to Vermont and learning how to really make the most of all the seasons here has involved a lot of insulating layers so you know I was talking just a few seconds ago about the issue of you know how challenging it can be to bring certain kinds of objects into a gallery this is definitely one of those objects so I don't know how many of you out there this is this is what I really miss having a live audience but how many of you out there are training buffs but we have a lot of people who come to the museum for really really very interested in trainings we have a fabulous group of folks who take care of our training collections and what I love about the local locomotive 220 there's there's sort of there's a lot to look so this this picture was taken probably in the mid-1950s it was a promo shot when the museum was opening and these sort of new objects were being installed this lives out on the west side of our campus just west of each lodge next to the train station and it holds the distinction of being the last working locomotive and let me see if I can get this right the last working steel 10 wheeler used on the central Vermont railroad so it's it's sort of extraordinary it was known as the locomotive of presidents because of its use on special trains carrying people including Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt so the central Vermont Railway donated the locomotive 220 to the museum in 1955 and it's been part of the fabric of our institution ever since we have paintings in our collection too that relate to issues of sort of the railroad in Vermont how transformative rail was for the state's economy and its very identity something that I love about this painting so for those of you who know Vermont painting Charles Lewis Heidi he was practicing during the middle of the 19th century he painted all sorts of notable landmarks in the state here you see the distinctive silhouette of Mount Mansfield in the distance and one of the really cool things about this picture is you notice that the train so the train is running down here it's clearly a steam locomotive and it is running past these fields of wood that have been cut down so I don't know how many of you know a lot about trees in the state I've been learning a lot this year and the idea of sort of a forested Vermont during the mid-19th century many of our forests were cut down and those all of that wood was used as fuel and in many of Heidi's paintings he gets at this kind of tension between the idea of technology and all of the good things that technology could bring to the state of Vermont but also the sort of corresponding tension and what all that new technology took away in terms of natural beauty and those kinds of things so you know our collection again it would be very difficult to see this painting next to the locomotive 220 but in the context of a virtual world we could do it which was terrific so we have other vehicles right uh earlier today in that big overview the sort of 1960 shot of the campus you could see the Ticonderoga in the distance and this picture I just love because it's a real it gives you this idea of our founder Electra and just how tough she was and how committed to big ideas she was as she put together her her dream project so she's standing here on the railroad sort of rails that were put in to actually move the Ticonderoga Ticonderoga two miles over land from Shelburne Bay into the museum property and a great story about this is that during the winter so they moved it over the winter because of course the ground is frozen and so the boat would be less likely to list during the winter but there was this freak thaw in February and everyone was very concerned the boat sort of started to keel over a little bit um and thankfully it it didn't go too far south but um there were definitely some moments of stress there another thing that the online exhibitions allowed us to do that we don't usually do is we worked in teams for many of these projects and my team consisted of an educator one of our preservation specialists who has a background in carpentry um and a number of other folks uh and our preservation team was able to create some online modules that actually address uh you know the the ongoing treatment to objects like the Ticonderoga um he also put together a really interesting module on brick masonry uh relative to a couple of our buildings on campus um but these kinds of new perspectives you know because we had to be very creative in terms of using good photography you know using knowledge that most of us you know had in our brains already um it was almost like it was almost like when you get to the end of your refrigerator and you have to go shopping but you you don't want to go to the grocery store today right um so you try to figure out what you can make with what you have on hand um there were days when developing this exhibition felt a little bit like that and while it was challenging it was also uh really instructive and forced us to use our sort of creative muscles in new ways which I think was good for us we have again great paintings that complement objects like the tie um we have a really strong collection of marine paintings this is one of my very favorites by Fitz Henry Lane called sunrise through mist um but again there's this sort of contextualization inside our gallery spaces that works with the landscape outside um and since we couldn't have people on campus early on we decided that this was one of the best ways to bring those kinds of objects together this is another object that you may have missed uh this is a punch bowl um and it's known uh sort of sort of at the museum as our Hongdae so what was a Hong the Hong's were these trading areas in china um they were located in major port cities like Canton um and what you're seeing here actually is a sort of artist representation of what the international offices looked like at the Hong now these international offices were occupied by traders um you would you would arrive you would come in you would negotiate with uh the people who were selling all sorts of goods you would place your orders um here you see a little American flag um and most of these flags that were posted represented the different nationalities where people were situated you can almost think of them as like trade embassies uh in the late 18th century so this object these Hong balls were generated generally as um sort of souvenirs so think of them as very high-end souvenirs that you could take home if you had been on an incredible mercantile voyage and and sort of traveled back um this exhibition also uh you know we were encouraged to sort of use a variety of different kinds of objects um from different collections so uh one of the major areas that I spend a lot of time with is our textile collection um and this quilt is a really wonderful object so it's eye catching on the front for sure you know you get this sort of big idea of patriotism with the stars and the red white blue color scheme but if you take a look at the back uh you will notice that it actually the back of this bed cover has been assembled uh using six different commemorative handkerchiefs um and you may recognize some of the places there uh I mean it says so I guess in our label but um these were Centennial uh they were souvenir handkerchiefs that were collected in 1876 at Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition um so you'll see here this building in the very center um that was Memorial Hall that was the building that was constructed in Fairmont Park to house most of the finance collections for the for the exposition um you can think about this entire quilt as a kind of travel seat in here um and you know if we were to install this in the galleries it would be really hard to see both sides of it but online we could present both of these and really provide some good context we could also have objects like these um more work a day every day kinds of things that sometimes don't rise to the occasion of a fine arts exhibition right so the three objects that you see here are actually pockets um we have an applique pocket on the far left in the center there's a pieced pocket like it's p-stand applique and on the far right there's an embroidered decorative pocket with some ruffles around the edges so think of these like purses for women in the 18th and 19th centuries whereas our clothes today many of our clothes have pockets sewn in because we wear more tailored kinds of garments these were objects that you would actually lace up into your clothes and they would hold you know everything from a little bit of money to um to a watch that kind of thing um so they would sort of go on the body but I I love these because they really represent a kind of movement and travel that we don't always think about that we don't always see um and in the context of a gallery space they might be lost uh so we're able to give them a little more attention in this format the same with this basket uh so this basket actually has an extraordinary provenance it was it's known as a salish carrying basket we think it was probably created by a member of the salish nation um and the idea of the basket is that you know for many uh itinerant native groups these are the kinds of objects that you store uh foodstuffs and other kinds of objects in over the long winter um this object interestingly came to us because it was included in Louis Comfort Tiffany's collection at Laurelton Hall in Oyster Bay and so there's this sort of weird you know connection between our collecting at the museum um and how these objects were collected by other people and sort of the various ways that links back um we were making a real effort in our collection to take another look at our Native American collections and to sort of try to think about ways that we can integrate these um with broader conversations broader thematic conversations in our exhibitions so the third chapter of the exhibition uh the digital exhibition was all about the idea of home um and i'm going to move sort of quickly through some of these many of you may know about the brick house this was a lecture at amire webs residence out on shilbert farms um the interiors of this house are extraordinary they are still filled with all sorts of incredible objects i love this shot of the hall because you get not only all this incredible peter hollow wear over here you have these great rugs all of these sort of patterned curtains these toby jugs over the doorway you get an idea that this was a lady who really liked to collect and in a lot of ways she used the brick house as a kind of object lab for what she would later do with the museum um this is a shot of the dining room and again you get that sense of sort of pattern and scale and decorative aspect these were elements of decorating that uh elector brought to the collection itself at the museum and so you sort of see echoes of this especially in places like this pernus house so if you've visited the campus you know that we have a collection of buildings on top of everything else um pernus house was decorated by a good friend and advisor of uh electorate's named Catherine pernus murphy and the interiors look something like this so colonial all that kind of thing again lots of hollow wear big case pieces those kinds of things um we also have buildings on campus like settler's cabin uh this is an extraordinary piece or extraordinary sort of building that was recreated on site um it was actually built in the 1740s or sorry in the 1840s in charlotte but we interpret it uh to sort of the identity of of a french canadian settler in the 1790s and so it's where a lot of our educational programs happen um this this object in the context of a show gave us some opportunities for really good sort of educational uh projects that we could put together and send out for parents who are working with kids who are at home um we have other objects like this that sort of you know get at the idea of um let's see sorry i just pulled up the questions for a second um to sort of get at the idea of how we furnish the home mary consox comp stocks bed rug uh which was was found uh in a house basically on the property out of children farms so it was made very very locally um but it uh is sort of wonderful from the perspective that it's really hard to hang in a gallery it's a very heavy object um so we could use the image online in a way that we couldn't in person we have a few other objects things that go in the home like this wonderful stand by la mule bishop who was a charlotte native this wonderful sofa that was created in middlebury in the 1830s um pictures like this that we did a lot of work on in terms of thinking about how to reinterpret to the public um so for those of you who are familiar with edward hicks edward hicks was known as being a sort of great folk painter he created things like the peaceful kingdom i think that's probably his most most notable uh composition but penn's treaty with the indians was a very popular theme of his too there are at least 10 known versions of this work um and in the context of sort of rethinking objects in the current age we did a lot of thinking about how we could reinterpret this object in a more expansive kind of way right um penn's treaty with the indians is supposed to commemorate a treaty that happened at shacken maxon in philadelphia or just outside of philadelphia on the lisa hickam um it was supposed to be this sort of great treaty that brought together uh english books and the delaware native americans who were sort of there but it's probably a myth and uh it's probably a myth in the same way that sort of the first Thanksgiving um or uh john smith and and pocahontas is um so it's one of those convenient myths that we tell to help to sort of couch a national story um so i'm going to move through a couple more of these you know the the sort of last section of the exhibition was all about community and it allowed us to bring out really wonderful objects like this quilt top um this is maybe one of my favorite objects in the collection in that it is just extraordinary to see in person we included it in a show called ink and icons um that was in our hat and fragrance textile building two seasons ago um and if you take a look closely at these sort of blocks this is the center dedication walk um and what that reads i know it's difficult to see is aliza noble and john noble but for being without end the vowed love we take grant us oh god one home at last for our demon's sake and it dated 1847 um one of the great things about this quilt is that uh we know that it was created as a sort of gift for aliza and john noble on the occasion of their marriage and it was signed by their friends and family um so all of the sort of wonderful inscriptions in the center of these blocks this is another one that is sort of a favorite this little tool block um the name in the center of that reads william noble and it's it's really sort of a nice piece when we think about how the idea of community gets represented in objects i was going to talk a little bit about our shaker shed but we can save that for the questions if you have it um i wanted to end on this object so we can get to some questions and uh this is one of the hook drugs in our collection it's a rug by a woman named molly naitovi uh it was executed in 1942 and uh it ended up winning this incredible prize um so molly when she exhibited this i won the first grand prize award at the woman's day 1942 national needlework exhibition um and it's a rug that portrays a victory garden so as we've been thinking about sort of ideas of community especially in the face of all of the things that our country has been facing this year um it seemed appropriate to think about the idea of victory gardens in community and how these things sort of get represented in the objects that surround us so that was sort of a sort of brief um view of the four different chapters of american stories that we put together um it gives you an idea of the kinds of objects that we included and some of the challenges that we encountered while while doing the exhibition i think what i'm going to do now is i'm going to open up the q and a and i'm going to see if i can do this right um and i'm going to read some questions and do my best to answer them um so let's see i'm looking in the questions and answers so uh i have a question from jan zatzman orlansky she says do you foresee that henceforth post-covid museums will be doing more digital exchanges of art rather than the risks and expenses of transporting large pieces of art that is a really great great question jan and um yes the answer is yes in fact the major exhibition that i was working on for this summer uh was a show that was was called i site and insight and it was all about the idea of vision and American art um we had a number of loans from 15 different institutions that we were supposed to bring in for that exhibition uh and when everyone went into lockdown in march it became clear that it was not going to happen um so the show has been delayed uh and i'm working with uh another curator at the museum caroline mower to sort of reimagine what that show might look like down the road um and whereas before in the before times we used to just think about our our physical exhibitions um we've approached this from a kind of bifurcated perspective uh we are both focusing on um being able to create an in-person exhibition where people can social distance and all those kinds of things we are also bulking up our online modules um and so we're sort of thinking outside of the box you know with blue ship kinds of objects that might be too expensive or impossible to bring to vermont um i know right now i've been thinking about a couple of really big campuses by american painter thomas akins but i would love our visitors to be able to see um but they just they don't move uh because of the condition of the actual campuses and so yes this i think has really transformed the way that we're going to think about these kinds of programs um and exhibitions moving forward um so let's see um there's a question from kathleen ryan uh kathleen writes i'm curious about the very bright white of the collars and cuffs in the portrait of the boston abolitionist couple how has this white endured time wear and soil kathleen that's a great question uh so often the bright white that you see um and i'm not a conservator but i have a lot of conversations with nancy rapinell our on-staff conservator about these kinds of things and often in the mid 19th century that bright white was achieved through the use of lead white pigment um so a mineral that you um you know you would use for highlights if you were an artist that kind of thing it holds up remarkably over time i suppose you wouldn't want to lick it right uh just like lead paint on the wall um but in paintings it really does hold up and uh one of the extraordinary things about lead white paint is that it has a way of uh over time if it's if it's painted underneath another color it will sort of burn through and that shadow that we end up getting uh is sometimes called pentaminty um so it's it's the sort of shadow of what is underneath coming through over time the the sort of color washes on top um it's not something that an artist sort of expected you to see but uh over time that's just how the materials change so i have another question here um from kathy pilowski she says thank you for the new display display for embroidered samplers how do they do is virtual objects oh kathy i'm glad that you've been to see our new display um so uh a couple let's see a couple seasons ago we decided that we would up our our sort of display and uh the care that we're taking with our collections of embroidery and uh when we did that we decided to construct some new cases that would allow us to unframe many of our embroidered samplers and things like that and show these objects in conditions that were really much better for the objects themselves um that space in the hat and fragrance buildings uh that you've been to also allows us to store all of these objects together in a way that um when we bring in student groups or things like that it's it's really much more convenient for sort of pulling objects out and seeing them in person which is wonderful um so as virtual objects they're challenging one of the reasons that samplers are difficult to exhibit in a virtual virtual way is that you need really really high quality photography of them if you don't have that because of the way that the weave pattern of a background fabric and the stitch stitching sort of details look on your screen often these things sort of pixelate and they become really hard to display if you if you don't have a high enough resolution and so one of the challenges one of the reasons that you don't see much embroidery in our online exhibitions is that we just don't have great photography of those of those objects um so that's something you know one of the things that we did a lot of thinking about this year after we sort of you know really worked through this sort of rush to get online content and resources up for our you know members for our neighbors for anyone who was interested um we started to think about how we plan for the future and there are a number of things that we we have sort of done to try to strengthen our resources moving forward one of them our collections team has been working around the clock to book both photography shoots and to work with the curatorial team to decide what objects we should get new photography of um so in the old days we used to have this big collection of transparencies so four by six transparencies and those transparencies can be scanned so it's basically a photograph right those can be scanned on a scanner and you can scan them at a high resolution but over time the photographic emulsion of those actual transparencies ages and it tends to go pink and so after a certain number of years there's not much you can do in terms of salvaging those photos unless you go in digitally color correct and that of course affects the color that you get in in your sort of final final objects so I'm going to go I'm going to stop share from here and make sure that I've got all of our questions but I see some more in the chat let's see oh here we've got some more questions here all right so let's see the next question that I've got oh here is another question so um does the museum sometimes decide to downsize or eliminate certain objects or collections if so how might such decisions be made that is a great question um so we do any any museum collection as part of a sort of healthy museum collection museums go through a process called deaccessioning now you may have heard about this in the news every now and then you know we will sort of call through a collection and we will make decisions about objects that don't necessarily fit the museum they may be objects that we can't display for some reason um our the point of our collections at our museum everything that we have we want to be able to display and if we can't if you know there's a quilt that has a really incredible provenance or history associated with the object that we know isn't going to hold up over display often we'll try to find a better home for that object where it will be used um in a in a better way uh where it will it will have and will be made available to more researchers those kinds of things um and so yeah we actually we have been thinking about um the sort of careful process of deaccessions we do a little bit every year um not not sort of big objects in general but um any collection sort of goes through this now in the news you've heard a lot about deaccessioning um particularly with museums that are deaccessioning bigger works of art that might be used to um that might be used that the funds from those purchase purchases might be used to then purchase new works of art for a collection that diversify an institution's holdings um and that's something that we're seeing with a lot of institutions these days there's another headline that has made the news recently about deaccessioning um the Association of Art Museum Directors also known as AAMD recently put out a statement that allows museums to for the next two years um or 18 months I suppose that allows museums to deaccession works um if they need to for their for their operating budget this is something that a museum in the past could be centered for but because of the unforeseen um sort of conditions around COVID and all of all of what's been going on in terms of economics in the country um they have sort of lessened those restrictions um that is not to say that Shelbert's planning on anything like that but um that is something that's going on that you may hear about in the news um so let's see there's another question here from Beth Wood um Beth says does the museum have any plans to incorporate or feature more diversity in the future especially African Americans in its collections exhibitions or programs um so that is a good question Beth uh we actually have a diversity equity access and inclusion group at the museum that has been working for the past six months or so to sort of assess where we're at at the museum in terms of um our programs our collection our outreach our staffing um and to sort of make some recommendations for how we can do better um one of the things that we've become known for at Shelburn is um you know we have these incredibly rich permanent collections um that's sort of the center of what I work on um but we often bring in traveling exhibitions with more contemporary work and we're looking at those as our sort of opportunities to think about how to expand on the narratives that are already present in our permanent collections um but you know newer objects that might cause us to think differently about those old objects um also uh you know working with contemporary artists who um might have had less representation in the past right so those kinds of things we are actively thinking about now the interesting thing about working on what we call museum time is that things tend to happen slowly um we generally plan our exhibitions two to three years out so right now we are fully booked through the end of 2022 and into 2023 and so as we start to make these kinds of changes in many museums you may see it take a little while for these things to materialize at the same time we're thinking about ways that we can invite community members to help us sort of broaden the perspectives that we have in some of our permanent collection installations um and so it's uh we're conscious that there's no one right fix for all of these sort of challenges that we are navigating together um but we're making a real effort to think about the ways that we can sort of stay true to our institutional mission um while also you know shaking things up in terms of giving audiences the things that contemporary audiences expect to see um so let's see Beth also asks how did the museum decide which buildings it could safely open during the pandemic but the museum being closed for so long during the pandemic did the staff have to take any extra measures to care for the buildings or collections yes uh we we took lots of lots of precautions so if you've been to campus you'll notice that um there are only a handful of buildings that have been open this season um they were buildings that we knew we could one keep clean they had good ventilation um and they were buildings where we knew people could safely socially distance um so all of those kinds of things uh really affected how we were thinking I see that carol is back um do we have to have one more question or are we about done really quick okay all right so uh let's see um oh I think this is it actually no I think that's it I think that was our last question oh wonderful that was perfect Katie what fun you brought treasures of Shelbur museum to us in our living rooms what fun thank you so so much thank you all for having me of course