out and about

I must admit I have become quite terrible at mid-week posts and there is some reason behind this. Mostly it is due to the fact that writing about how much I love what I am doing becomes tiresome to write and surely tiresome to read so my thought is to spare both me and you the reader. Also it is sheer forgetfulness and laziness - when I a get home at about 5:30, I catch up on facebook and emails, then make dinner, watch something on netflix or catch up via skype with a friend, read and go to bed by 10:30pm. Thrilling, I know.

As far as the internship goes, I am (surprise surprise) still completely enamored with it. My public programs supervisor is letting me create the docent training for next week and it is about the subtle differences between modern and contemporary art. I'm still researching the wallpaper but it's just for me now - the librarian thinks I should write an article about it. There are all manner of other projects I am deep into but really what has my undivided attention is my attempt to find a job/figure out what I want to do/where I want to live/whether any of that matters or if I'm willing to take literally anything available. This whole not knowing where I will even live in May is horrifying to me and realizing it is already mid-March, I am getting anxious about traveling to all the places I want to travel to in New England. Well quite frankly that is everywhere and is impossible, which I realize and am coping with.

I did finally get to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this past weekend and it was wonderful because they have things like an entire room devoted to John Singer Sargent and one devoted to Winslow Homer so yeah it was HEAVEN. Admittedly, it would have been grand to have someone to espouse my joy upon and squeeze their hand in excitement, but still good. Then the next day I had no plans as my brother and his girlfriend were continuing car shopping so I packed up my backpack, went into Boston, got some coffee, a croissant and sat in Boston Common. It was heavenly-I think all I will require in a place in which I reside a good coffee place with an adjacent park with benches. That is all. I blame London-some of my most treasured memories are getting up early, walking to ISH for breakfast and getting coffee to go then walking through Regents Park in the hushed foggy morning. I do so miss it, like an achy little hole in my chest. It's not so much the place but the freedom of possibilities that London afforded me. Ok it's definitely partly the place (I mean come ON London is so damn beautiful! Walking anywhere in Manchester feels like a punishment because it is so ugly), but mostly the opportunities available. I feel that in Boston and it's wonderful/awful because it reminds fiercely of my time abroad and the carefree time I spent there.

Anyway, once I finished my coffee I just wandered around Beacon Hill because it is all cobble stones, gas lamp posts, brick buildings and wrought iron - completely beautiful. Then I headed back to Manch for some thrilling cleaning and laundry.

tugboats

Another weekend has passed in a blur of delight. Saturday was wicked cold and rainy so I curled up with some coffee and finally applied for two jobs I found that I am actually qualified for - woop woop! Then I made some tea and read for pleasure, I still forget that I can just read any book I want whenever I want to *sigh* It's the little things you know? Anyway then I packed a bag and drove to Portsmouth to my supervisor's apartment to spend the night. We went for a walk in her neighborhood and it is official, New England has the most beautiful houses I have ever seen. They are all old victorians with rap around porches and one had a widow's walk and they are wonderful colors and the molding! Bah! My ridiculous excitement was perfectly reflected in Jane which resulted in a mutual gushing over the houses; a direct quote from Jane, "Break me off a piece of that house!" Basically we are old-house loving soul mates.

After the walk we had a Parks and Recreation marathon and she came to love Ron Swanson, as any sane female would. The next day we had brunch at the wonderfully hipster restaurant The Friendly Toast where the food is all of these ridiculous flavor combinations i.e. pumpkin pancakes with raisinettes (to DIE for and you would never guess). Then we walked to the ocean and I saw some tugboats and well the ocean which is such a wonderfully enjoyable thing to do here because it's so second nature to New Englanders but so note-worthy and exciting to a midwest girl. After stopping in a jewelry store where I got a compass necklace Jane drove us to Boston (seriously I will NEVER drive there-I would die) to go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum since it all renovated. It's a heavenly museum, but made even more enjoyable by Jane who used to be a tour guide there. All I want to do in my life is talk walks with people who teach me things, I could have stayed there for hours. Then we met up with her old roommates for dinner and I loved them and I formed another theory about differences in New England and the Midwest.

So the two women (?girls? what do you call a 30 year old?anyway...) and Jane are all 30ish and either single or dating someone. The only married women I have met out here are 40+ and those women have young children. You can imagine that when I mentioned that most of my friends are married/engaged that they were baffled. Now I just thought that I happen to have friends that are getting married, but now I think it is a cultural difference. As in girls/women (really we need an inbetween term) in the Midwest get married/have families earlier than girls/women out here. Now that I write that down it actually seems like a conclusion I should have come to sooner as it is stereotypical that women in cities would be more career driven/less family oriented. It's just weird to be so surrounded by it. Also I just discussed this at length with a woman who's cubicle is near mine. I am continually fascinated by the subtle differences from the Midwest when so many things are simultaneously so similar.

The snow has come

This has been a strange week. A giant snow storm started yesterday and is still going. This would have caused me to be near panic attack levels but the head of public programs lives close to me and offered to cart me about. She is literally my hero.

Since she is driving me to and from the museum I go along with her to drop off her 3 year old daughter (Emmy) at daycare. The first morning we walked into the room and her best friend ran over, looked up at me and said "Are you Emmy's grandma?" I mean I know I have some white hairs but grandma? Not aunt, or neighbor or babysitter or anything age appropriate?! I suppose it was just my old soul shining out through my eyes.

Besides being mistaken for an old lady I have done nothing of note this week. Every project I started would quickly stagnate and leave me looking confused or at a dead end. I blame the snow. Post-Christmas snow is a waste. The magic is gone and there is no point but it makes driving deadly. Also it makes me nervous because, like I said it makes driving deadly.

That's all I've got. See strange week.

to Harvard I go

My last post was written on the bus to Boston to visit Rachel, but also to spend a few hours of the morning in the Houghton Library at Harvard because I got permission to see William Blake's work "The First Book of Urizen". I was so excited that I barely slept the night before. Ok I feel like some brief back story is needed to explain my giddiness.

Backstory: I spent last semester vigorously studying William Blake in my art history seminar class. You see Bill was not just a poet, as you probably know him ("Tiger, tiger burning bright" and all that) but an engraver of epic proportions. Those poems weren't just prose but an explanation of the mythology that he created to explain his artistic philosophy. He then fused both poetry and engraving (well technically it was this etching process that he invented) to create these radiant illuminated books. Basically he was this wonderfully eccentric whackball visionary, whom I love excessively as his basic artistic philosophy is beautiful. Instead of believing that there was one all powerful god, he thought that god was actually something called Poetic Genius, that it is found in every person and that to reach it we must experience art to transcend our human limitations. Awesome right?! Seriously I could go on and on, but I will spare you.

Are you getting why seeing one his works would make my head explode from happiness? Oh and I forgot to mention my 25 page paper/20 minute presentation was on "The First Book of Urizen". I know! It is fate that I live within driving distance of one of the 8 editions (Blake printed them all himself) in the world in a public collection. So I got the special permission to see it. Upon arriving at the library I had to present two forms of picture ID, lock up my backpack and hang my coat as nothing but a notepad or laptop are allowed into the Reading Room. I get in there and find out that the curator I had been conversing with wasn't there yet and no one can get it out but her so I hung out for 40 minutes. Then this guy brought it out for me. All the pages are individually mounted in a folder with a piece of plastic and he just put them down on the table to let me look at at my leisure. YEAH. I couldn't believe it-I would have been happy just to look at it from afar. To be afforded the privilege of picking each one up in it's folder was more than I could bare.

Now I thought I knew what to expect because on blakearchive.org all of the editions are scanned in so you can see them in detail. But the old adage holds true-you just have to see it in person to truly appreciate it. Upon holding the pages a hairs-width from my nose I could see just breath-taking details. The lines as thin as hairs, vibrancy of color and even the texture of the ink were plain as day and completely non-existent in the images online. About 5 pages my excitement had reached a point at which my hands were shaking and my breathing was bordering on hyperventilating right at that point which you just want to scream and run around just to get some of this anxiousness out of my system. It was around this point when the curator came by to see how I was doing and I stared at her in a daze of joy. I think she was a bit taken aback by my level of enthusiasm and the fact that trying to explain to her how thankful I was for her allowing me to see it that I was crying just a little. She responded by telling me I could even move the plastic out of the way and gave me a magnifying glass to see better. I feel she was a kindred spirit of my art history nerdiness.

Anyway I stayed for an hour and then left to meet up with Rachel. We then went to a place called "Upstairs on the Square" for lunch. It was delightful. Then we took the T to the North End of Boston and walked on the Harborwalk. It was sunny and gorgeous except for the 40mph wind which made it impossible to feel my appendages after an hour or so. But these things matter naught when one is surrounded by a beautiful city and good company. It was fabulous to catch up with Rachel and be regaled with some Boston factoids that she has gleaned from her 5 months living there. After 2 hours we made our way to a starbucks to warm up with some coffee on our walk to Mike's Pastry for cannolis.

After that we took the T back to her place, regrouped and met up with her boyfriend for dinner. We went to this lovely restaurant/bar called Saloon. It is done up to look up a prohibition era pub with beautiful wood paneling, the bartenders wear suspenders and the waitresses wear black pseudo flapper dresses. The food was incredible, but more importantly the drink list was an extensive selection of whiskeys and scotches. Seriously a very good time. I will be back there.

Then today we went to breakfast at a place called Three Little Figs, a greek restaurant. All I can say is I had a lavender biscuit that was to die for. I am now obsessed with lavender bakery and will be attempting some recipes soon. Then I caught the bus back to Manchvegas and proceeded to grocery shop, make scones, do dishes and zone out in front of the tv.

Twas a very fine weekend and I hope to keep up this level of wonderment in the weekends to come.

Give me another project!

The post is coming to you via the Boston Express bus as I am headed to Cambridge to see Rachel for the weekend-so excited to explore!

Now to share what I have learned about myself this week-I am most content when I have so much work to do as to almost put over the edge into a crying heap, but it doesn't. Let me explain with the story of my Friday.

When I got to my desk on Friday I had these tasks to complete by end of day:

-finish numbering and sorting the 50 pictures of the galleries and sync them to the building plan to create a visual guide to the spaces in the museum for a contemporary artist that is going to be doing something at some point in there

-get my curator supervisor a copy of an exhibition catalogue from 2006 that seemed to somehow not have been catalogued in the library

-find a picture of Frederick Macmonnies sculpture "Pan of Rohallion" (which we just bought a bronze cast of) either in its original location at the Rohallion estate or of the cast in the courtyard of the MET and email it to a different curator for the wall plaque

-go over all the membership information that I assembled for the development department to find a way to organize it

Although there are a lot of bullet points there, I got all of this done by 10:30am and got a bunch of new stuff:

-retake half of the pictures of the galleries because once on a computer they turned out to be slightly blurry (I may have had too much coffee giving me the shakes....oops)

-after finding the catalogue, it turns out it didn't have the info needed so I had to make a photocopy of the exhibition checklist from the registrar

(the picture I found of Pan was good-woop woop!)

-create an excel spreadsheet of the membership info so that comparisons could be made

-help with folding and stuffing a mailing that development is sending out (sidenote: when I started helping with this, I wasn't paying close attention and didn't realize that the letters I was folding and stuffing into addressed envelopes were also addressed so they had to sync up. YEAH. So I stuffed 50 or so which had to then be unstuffed, sorted and re-stuffed. After fixing this I bowed out and went back to the spreadsheet)

Again I got all this done (really the spreadsheet was the hardest part because I am an infant when it comes to excel-it just doesn't do what I want because I don't know how to make it do anything). I even had time to slip away from my desk and go to the newly set up "tea station", yeah that's right the public programs women whom I love teamed up with reservations and set up a station with mugs and easily 20 varieties of tea. It will be my new haven when I mess up stuffing envelopes. I haven't even mentioned my ongoing projects i.e. the wallpaper notes need to be typed up, I need to assemble all articles of Sam Gilliam (artist), edit my writing about Marisol, research the Bauhaus and the new Macmonnies sculpture. I am a busy girl.

At some point amidst taking pictures and photocopying and researching, I realized that I wasn't overwhelmed or worried about getting these things done. Instead I was invigorated with the amount of things that needed completing and cranked it out. I think it has to do with my competitive nature-I see the giant to-do list as a challenge and can't wait to start defeating it. I know, it's twisted. It's like when I was 10 chapters behind in Business Law reading 2 weeks before the exam a year ago and read them in 1 week then studied my notes the next week. It's a personal challenge that makes me super motivated. Or maybe it's that I love the feeling of accomplishment when I finish everything. Whatever the reason I certainly do thrive when I am so loaded down with tasks as to flirt with the edge of disaster and weeping in the fetal position. From what I can tell, this is a good thing because working in an arts organization guarantees I will often be in this environment of borderline project overload. As long as there is a coffee maker I can't imagine a better fate.

Interested in 19th century French Wallpaper?

If your answer is 'yes' then I am your girl.

If your answer is 'no' then I am definitely your girl because I will make you LOVE it because it is super friggin cool.

This newfound fascination in said wallpaper is due to my most recent project (add onto my ongoing 7 projects), which is to learn everything I can about a piece of 4 panel wallpaper called "vue de lyon" (view of lyon, a city in France) that was made in 1823 in Paris. Here's what's so cool about wallpaper in the 18/19th century - it was hand printed with woodblocks on hand made paper. Even cooler - this series of wallpaper likely took 3000 individual woodblocks that probably took about 2 years to carve. So cool!

With this basic information acquired I spent the entirety of yesterday in the registrar (aka where the records of EVERYTHING are kept) reading the giant file on this piece of art. Now I am about to launch into the harrowing tale of what a day researching in the registrar is like. It is this wonderful/frustrating/complex adventure that is like a living an episode of Sherlock or Doctor Who but without near death experiences or monsters. You see in theory, the file contains literally every document pertaining to the piece, any article referencing the piece and all manner of other odds and ends. In reality it contains a whole of it, but with the passage of time, different people working there and lack of focus preserving documents early on has resulted in a lot of gaps in information.

In other words, my goal is to piece together the story of this wallpaper from bits of information gathered in the past 90 years. Basically what happened is I began reading the letters on top and from the information in those letters questions arose. I kept reading, some are answered but more questions formed. I asked the registrar about a bit of it and she proceeded to pull out 2 d-ring binders and another folder to search through. Having sifted through those, I am now paused as I need to find out how in depth I need to go.

Anyway, I love it. It's frustrating not having the information easy to access, but if it was just a matter of typing stuff into a computer it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. This way I get to read newspaper articles from the 20's and letters written between socialites, curators, french curators, etc. Also I'm learning all this crazy specific stuff about wallpaper, which I never would have studied otherwise and about how records are kept in museums.

Oh and something completely unrelated to wallpaper that this project is teaching me is about new england culture. There is an incredibly strong sense of pride in ancestral roots/the objects in their family lines/place. I brought this up to the registrar because the wallpaper file is packed with letters from people who moved into the house that the wallpaper came from, wanting any information we had on "their" wallpaper. It's like they moved into this historic home in Vermont, found out this priceless wallpaper used to be there and think it is somehow partially theirs. The registrar even said that she lives in a town in massachusetts (everything is town based) and that she isn't considered to be from that town because she wasn't born there. She just lives there. These new englanders are super proud of their birthplaces. And why shouldn't they be? New england is wonderful and historic.

Researching my brains out

I know, I know, I'm behind again so we shall begin with a quick catch-up.

My inclination is to say that the reason for my lack of reporting on my days for the past week have been that nothing of great excitement or interest happened. That is simply not true because everyday is a wonderful little mini-adventure in which I get new projects and find out fascinating things in my research. Therefore the reason I have been absent is laziness. I just didn't feel like writing. Simple answer and now I can't remember anything in particular that seems worthy at this time to write about, if something comes to me I will report on it later.

In order to not be completely dull, I will share stories from my weekend. I spent Saturday morning at a coffee house, as I am on a quest to find a favorite one that I will always go to. This is one is not the one. It was really hot and smelled like onions/cooking food and now my clothes smell like that. The coffee was wonderful though. I stayed there for a few hours writing letters and such. Then I had been told that northern Manchester has beautiful homes so I went for a walk, upon which I realized I have a terrible sense of direction and clearly was NOT in what is considered the north side because the neighborhoods were very plain. It was a beautiful day at least. Then I went home and grabbed lunch before walking over to the supervisor of public programs, who I found out lives just a 10 minute walk from me. Along with her 3 year old daughter we went for a 2 hour walk and she showed me a bunch of walking trails near our houses, which is extra wonderful since this neighborhood has no sidewalks. Not fun to walk in. Then Sunday I went to a bakery over by my house that yelp.com suggested and it was heavenly. Made to order doughnuts? Delightful. Then I went on another short walk around that neighborhood. After that I had an excessively lazy day in which I skyped with a few people (just what I needed - I'm getting a bit tired of always talking to new people. It's wonderful to see familiar people) and watched a documentary on Pixar studios-super fascinating. That's all.

Now onto today: I got to present my research on Joachim Wtewael's Apulian Shepherd to 50 docents in a powerpoint lecture and I absolutely loved it. I would have to say that aside from presenting my Blake paper at the art history symposium, this was the single most satisfying thing I have ever done. I just want to teach people about art!

It did start off a bit of a bad note - I spelled 'Shepherd' as 'Shephard' on the title slide and one woman raised her hand and pointed it out. I didn't quite know what to say because well who cares? In the grand scheme of things this is an inconsequential detail. Anyway, I said "well just pretend you don't notice that" and went onto the next slide. From there it went fabulously well. I got hammered with questions and had answers, for the most part. It was just incredible to present all of this information that I spent a week gathering and manipulating into a comprehensible format to an audience that actually gave a shit. So fun!

Then when it was over, the woman who corrected my spelling came up to me and apologized for doing that saying it was incredibly ungracious of her. I told her not worry about it as I didn't take any offense (if there is one thing I have learned about docents it is that they are super particular people and will notice EVERYTHING that is possible to criticize but it isn't personal). Well then she went on to say, "one word of advice, though, it's always good to have someone edit your work before you present it" YEAH. Let it die lady! I mean not only had I looked at this powerpoint a dozen times and not noticed it, Jane had as well and she didn't notice it either. Jeepers.

The rest of the day was spent working on research projects for Nina. You know I am a bit hard on the curators, but I really do like them, especially Nina. With her in particular, though, I am incredibly intimidated by her intelligence and get incredibly anxious thinking that I am wasting her time by asking her questions or giving her the wrong/not detailed enough information. This anxiety is increased by the fact that she never tells me why she needs certain information. Just yesterday she sent me an email listing out 3 different things she wanted me to look up and tell her what information I could find. Well that's great, but to what purpose? That would inform the research I am doing. Of course do I ask her why? No friggin way. So this minor miss-communication is completely mutual. I just haven't yet figured out a way to ask "why?" in a way as to not waste her time with a lengthy explanation or make me seem like an idiot. Another point of anxiety - I desperately want to make sure she doesn't see me as a silly college student. So that's been fun. Mostly the result is me beginning my research or writing, updating her on the where I'm at, discovering a bunch of things I either don't need or there are a whole lot more I need to find and resulting with me back in the registrar office re-reading everything. Tis a bit frustrating, but it's getting better as I increase the thoroughness of my note taking.