I'll start off with a shameless plug for /r/MuseumPros, where museum professionals gather to chat, hoarding is socially acceptable, and nobody likes their nonprofit boards.

I've had several amazing finds in museums that I've worked in over the years. Original, unpublished photos of FDR and Hitler in Missouri State Museum, a cassette interview with notorious moonshiner Popcorn Sutton at The Mountain Heritage Center, and a 120 year old insect collection at Acadia National Park.

Then there was the time where I got to evacuate an entire historical and natural science collection from a constantly flooding, radioactive basement vault in western Nebraska. That was fun.

Or the time I got the bomb squad from the local army base called out to the museum because someone didn't mark the explosives as defused. Turns out one actually wasn't. My boss wasn't happy when they took the rare Civil War era Blakely shell with them to blow up, but they did send us an adorable letter saying that it was so much fun, and the oldest thing they'd ever blown up, and they'd be happy to come back if we ever had anything else for them to explode.

12 museum/archive/park jobs over the years. They all have their interesting stories!

Last year I curated my first real museum exhibition, so I'll talk about that! (Technically I did a couple of exhibitions at my last job, but as I was working alone there, and here had to collaborate with the exhibitions department and marketing and such, this feels much more significant.) The experience was rewarding but a bit exhausting.

The process of planning an exhibition is fairly lengthy. In this case, I believe I was asked to submit proposals for costume exhibitions in mid-2019 - the museum hadn't done one in a good many years, and everyone knew that was my specialization when I came in. It was tricky to come up with some as the database was in bad shape, with many garments unphotographed and only described in sparse sentences, and I didn't have the time to go through everything box by box and rack by rack. The proposal that was accepted was a look at clothing made by dressmakers etc. of New York State, as identified by labels - so inherently a more industrialized/commercialized idea of New York couture than, for instance, going "we know this was worn by a woman in upstate New York so it was almost certainly made locally."

I don't believe this was selected until early in 2021, when it was obvious that the loans/exhibition schedule was still going to be messed up and that there would be a hole that needed to be filled by an exhibition built totally out of our own collection. I wrote a "script", which is essentially all of the labels in one document, and this was passed back and forth among the exhibitions, collections, and curatorial departments for editing. The hardest thing was needing to simplify and simplify so that every visitor would be able to understand the concepts. (Which, to be honest, I thought was a little unfair as our art exhibitions often have rather stereotypical dense labels.)

Installation took two days, with five or six of us working to dress all the mannequins and enclose them in cases/put them on pedestals as necessary. The biggest issue was that many of the dress forms were too short, so their stands needed small blocks put under them to raise them so the skirts weren't bunched up on the floor. The blocks needed to be painted, in most cases, since they would be seen. This became a problem, but we managed!

You can watch my virtual tour of the exhibition here.

I've submitted a few more proposals since, as I've become more conversant with the collection - I really hope we could do one on historical undergarments, which I think could be very popular as Everyone Loves Corsets.

Let's talk about the Cairo Genizah! (This comment is an edited/updated version of a previous one I had already posted here.)

The concept of a genizah is one that is founded on a Jewish law which states that items upon which the name of God, or a verse from the bible, is written cannot be disposed of like regular trash- they must be treated as sacred and disposed of with reverence. Some people will do so by burying the items, which can include anything from a Torah scroll to a paper with a holy name scribbled on it. However, another popular solution was the creation of the genizah, which literally means "place where things are hidden away" (from the root g-n-z, "to hide away/store"). The genizah would generally be a side room, attic, or basement in the synagogue where any items bearing sacred text could be placed. Communal genizot were common all over the Jewish world, and some still exist today, though burial is currently more common. (Many communities would actually bury the contents of their genizot every few years, though some, like the Cairo Genizah, did not.)

As is probably obvious, genizot are literally treasure troves to historians, and especially in the case of the Cairo Genizah, which had been in use since the ninth century and was housed in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Cairo. While in many genizot only religious texts, such as prayer books and sermons, would be stored, in the Cairo Genizah there is a vastly more broad-ranging array of texts, including whole sets of correspondence. In some cases, even relatively mundane papers might contain biblical phrases or names of God. In other cases, scholars hypothesize that simply the fact that these letters were written in Hebrew script (Judeo-Arabic, in which writing was Arabic language in Hebrew script, was quite common) would be enough for them to be consigned to the genizah. So far, we already have two major ingredients for a historical windfall: the purposeful saving of mundane documents and their preservation in this room. Two more included the status of Cairo as a major stop on international trading routes which Jews frequented, which means that documents from Jews from countless other places also ended up in the genizah, and the fact that for centuries the community did not remove things from the genizah due to superstition.

Often the claim is made that the genizah was "discovered" by Solomon Schechter, then of Cambridge and later of the Jewish Theological Seminary in NY, but this is not quite the case. In fact, by the second half of the nineteenth century, communal officials in Fustat were beginning to sell items from the genizah to dealers on a piecemeal basis. The Ben Ezra genizah (along with several other genizot) was also visited by a number of amateur scholars, such as Abraham Firkovich (who ended up taking many documents from a different genizah in a Karaite synagogue in Cairo) and Elkan Adler. Rabbi Solomon Aaron Wertheimer, a Jerusalem rare books dealer and scholar who wrote articles about his finds, sold/attempted to sell numerous fragments to universities, including the Bodleian Library at Oxford, recognizing their significance.

That said, it was Solomon Schechter, then the Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge, who ended up opening up the world of genizah scholarship. While originally he'd disregarded the genizah fragments which Wertheimer had attempted to sell to Cambridge and which had ended up at Oxford, in 1896 he was approached by two sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, who were scholars of Semitic languages who had made several interesting discoveries in their own right- and who had purchased pages from a dealer which they thought would interest him. Schechter examined them and discovered that they included pages of a Hebrew manuscript of the Book of Ben Sira, a second-century Jewish work, part of some Christian canons, which had previously been known to exist only in Latin and Greek. He was thrilled and notified his opposite number at Oxford, Adolf Neubauer- who then went digging in his own collection of genizah fragments purchased from Wertheimer, found his own pages, and beat Schechter to publication. However, it was Schechter who beat Neubauer to immortality- Schechter journeyed to Egypt with a letter of introduction from the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Rabbi Hermann Adler (who was also the brother of the aforementioned Elkan Adler), and, according to his later accounts, took almost 200,000 fragments out of the Ben Ezra Synagogue- though likely many fragments came from other genizot in Cairo, and possibly dealers as well. (Apparently, the rabbi of the Ben Ezra synagogue told Schechter to take whatever he liked, and, Schechter reported, "I liked it all.")

The study of the fragments from the Cairo Genizah quite literally revolutionized the study of medieval Jewish history. There is simply no other way to put it. Through fragments in the genizah, scholars have found everything from a full thousand-year-old copy of Rabbi Saadia Gaon's translation of the Torah into Arabic to a page of Maimonides's commentary on the mishna in his own handwriting to eyewitness accounts of the First Crusade to the first known sample of, funnily enough, Yiddish writing (from the 14th century). So many details of medieval Jewish life have been discovered through the responsa, correspondence, documents and miscellaneous papers found in the genizah that it sometimes feels like half the articles on the time period include "through the documents of the Cairo Genizah" somewhere in the title. The scholar S D Goitein wrote a six-volume work, A Mediterranean Society, entirely based on information gleaned from the genizah which goes through medieval Jewish life in North Africa and elsewhere detail by detail. (I used it once for a class project and it is not only dizzying in its scope but microscopic in its attention to even the smallest nitpickiest facts- absolutely fascinating.) Through marriage and divorce documents, business letters, amulets, medical prescriptions, rabbinic responsa, and more, the day to day life of these Jews over a period of hundreds of years was uncovered in vastly more detail than ever thought possible and totally changed the way that scholars conceived of the era. People like Maimonides and Rabbi Judah HaLevi, key figures in Jewish history, had their lives and fates fleshed out through the genizah's documents. It's genuinely hard for me to try to encapsulate the sheer massive amount of new info here.

Until today, scholars spend vast amounts of time going through genizah fragments, piecing them together, and, now, often publishing them online. It's absolutely amazing what they've been able to accomplish. I highly recommend checking out the Cambridge genizah collection, where you can search in English and see translated fragments. There's also the Friedberg Genizah Project, which aims to digitize genizah fragments from collections around the world in one place.

If you're interested in the Cairo Genizah, I HIGHLY recommend Sacred Trash, by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. It's a fascinating and highly readable account which was my own first exposure to it. There's also a new book by Rebecca Jefferson called The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt, which focuses in more on the people who have taken genizah fragments from Egypt over the centuries.

I'm going to copy a post I made some months ago about the Stalin Museum in his hometown of Gori, Georgia:

It's based in Stalin's hometown, and the house he was born in and lived the first four years of his live, is outside, encased in a marble structure. The museum was built in the 1950s, and while it closed in 1989 for a while, it's been open again for some years.

And it looks and feels exactly like I suspect it would have in 1957. It doesn't so much as praise Stalin, but it doesn't promote the idea that he was a great figure and leader. Gifts sent to him (from the Soviet people and international communities), the poems he wrote as a youth (he was actually not bad at it), and his work desk, and even the train he took to the Tehran Conference, are all prominently displayed. What is not included is any mention of ethnic deportations, dekulakization, or anything related to the Great Terror, his conflict with Trotsky and other Bolshevik opponents, or anything that he did that led to the deaths of millions.

I also found the colouring (it's got dark wooden walls and dim lighting) to be really appropriate, as is the quiet, emptiness of it all (Gori is about an hour drive outside of the Georgian capital Tbilisi, and the only reason foreigners would venture there is for the museum).

But I can't ignore the giftshop, because of course the Stalin Museum has a gift shop (which is ironic for so many reasons). And like any tacky museum gift shop, Stalin's likeness is plastered on anything you can think of: playing cards, shirts, coffee mugs, magnets, even ceramic bottles of Georgian chacha (best described as a grape vodka, only way stronger).

I've been there three times now (I think that many), and when I get back to Georgia, I'll be sure to visit again. The money (which was something like 10 lari, about $6 US at the time), was not much, and it goes to the Georgian government, not any Communist group or anything.

When I was 23, The National Gallery of Art in DC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY, The UCLA/Hammer Museum and The Huntington Library all added my artwork to their permanent collections (within the span of 3 months). I wonder if I’m one of the youngest people for that to happen to.

A day late, but I wanted to add some more info about the objects found in the Late Babylonian "museum" of En-nigaldi-nanna at Ur, which I briefly discussed a couple weeks ago in this comment.

Nowhere that I found on the internet describes the objects in much detail, and the wikipedia pages haven't been improved much in the eight years (!) since I last did some reading on this, so I dug through my old notebooks and found some stuff, taken from Leonard Woolley's 1935 Ur of the Chaldees, pages 199-204:

• A round-topped limestone relief of the god Ea of Eridu, shown in the old Sumerian style pouring two streams of water out of a vase, with fish swimming up and down the streams, found in front of one of the side doors of the antechamber - Woolley attributes it to the Third Dynasty of Ur, 1700 years older than the building, and thinks it was re-used as a decoration above the doors.

• Found crushed under a fallen brick, a hundred "slithers of ivory, many of them minute in size and as thin as tissue-paper, the ivory having rotted and split into its natural laminations: so delicate were they that they had to be hardened with celluloid before they could be picked up from the ground. When put together, the fragments took shape as a circular toilet-box decorated with figures of dancing girls carved on it in relief." Described as Egyptian in style and attributed speculatively to the craftsmen of Sidon or Tyre, Woolley notes that that it was broken and riveted in antiquity.

• In a room at the front of the temple courtyard were a number of "school exercise" tablets, fragments of syllabaries and dictionaries, one labeled "property of the boys' class."

• The next room was evidently the main chamber of the museum, and contained a large black kudurru boundary-stone covered with carvings and inscriptions, delineating a property and land claim from the Kassite period, ~1400 BCE. Next to the stone was "a fragment of a diorite statue," an inscribed part of the arm of a statue of "Dungi, who was king of Ur in 2280 B.C."

• Also in that room were: a clay foundation-cone from a king of Larsa ~ 2000 BCE, clay tablets of the same date, and "a large votive stone mace-head which was uninscribed but may well have been more ancient by five hundred years."

Woolley says they were baffled by the range of dates represented by these artifacts until they found: "a small drum-shaped clay object on which were four columns of writing; the first three columns were in the old Sumerian, and the contents of one at least were familiar to us, for we had found it on bricks of Bur-Sin, king of Ur in 2220 B.C., and the other two were fairly similar; the fourth column was in the late Semitic speech. 'These,' it said, 'are copies from bricks found in the ruins of Ur, the work of Bur-Sin king of Ur, which while searching for the ground-plan [of the temple] the Governor of Ur found, and I saw and wrote out for the marvel of beholders.'"