Decorative Arts in Action at Winterthur

My first year in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture teemed with objects: I intensively studied a wide array of decorative arts, from a miniature porcelain teacup to a sizable Baltimore album quilt. 

A miniature teacup in Winterthur's collection, 1963.0782a

 

Baltimore album quilt at Winterthur, 2013.0010

As a second-year in the program, I am still immersed in studying objects that tell us about life in the past, but as an intern in School & Community Programs at Winterthur, I now have the exciting opportunity to translate my knowledge of the museum’s collection into on- and off-site programs and activities for a diverse range of audiences.  Since beginning my internship in June, I have worked with K-12 teachers, elementary-school students, museum guides, multi-generational families, adult visitors, and undergraduates at the University of Delaware.  

Teaching a young visitor about pollinators in Winterthur's garden at a Terrific Tuesday program in August 2015

Interpreting material culture for so many different groups of people has helped me develop a more creative and versatile vocabulary in talking about art and historic artifacts as well as a better understanding of the ways that people learn.  Most importantly, in my view, I have been able to facilitate experiences for people to learn about art and history, think critically and creatively, have fun and connect with others.

Fantastic Fridays is a good example of such a project.  In my role as an intern this semester, I have worked with a group of art conservation undergraduates at the University of Delaware to plan games and art-making activities for outreach on Fridays at the Salvation Army’s after-school program in downtown Wilmington, Delaware.  All of our activities are collections-driven, in this case drawn from two current exhibitions at Winterthur, Tiffany Glass: Painting with Color and Light and A Colorful Folk: Pennsylvania Germans and the Art of Everyday Life.  On Fantastic Fridays, we have taught the color wheel and color mixing through games like Color Scramble, Color Twister, and Color Basket Shoot; the agents of deterioration through games like Light Damage Tag; and about glass as an art material through several stained glass crafts, like the one pictured below.

Admiring a child's finished "stained glass" window, created from pieces of tissue paper and clear contact paper on a Fantastic Friday at the Salvation Army

I’m looking forward to continuing my internship working with and learning from people and decorative arts at Winterthur through the winter and early spring!   

Katie Bonanno is working towards an M.A. in American Material Culture and graduate certificate in Museum Studies and will graduate in May 2016.

 

Summer Internship at the DHS: Reconstructing Delaware's Reconstruction

This summer I’m working as a research assistant for Dr. Sheree Brown, Head Curator for the Center of African American Heritage at the Delaware History Museum. Currently, the museum is under renovation as are their two permanent core exhibitions: one on general Delaware history, and the other on Delaware’s African American history. In particular, the Center for African American Heritage Collection’s exhibition will draw on several key themes exploring the variety of African American experiences in the state from the colonial era to the present. 

I have completed several projects for the exhibition, working extensively with the collections at DHS. One of my most challenging tasks involves gathering material for our exhibition’s section on Reconstruction (1865-1876). Reconstruction in Delaware was markedly different from Reconstruction in the Deep South. As early as 1776, Delaware banned the importation of slaves, which led to a sharp decrease in the state’s slave population. At the outbreak of the Civil War, fewer than 1,800 slaves resided in Delaware while the free black population numbered nearly 20,000. Ultimately, concerns over the steadily growing free black population prompted the passage of increasingly restrictive black codes throughout the nineteenth century. In 1862, the Delaware General Assembly struck down Lincoln’s Compensated Emancipation plan to free slaves by one vote. Three years later, the state rejected ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. 

Examining Reconstruction in Delaware poses a significant challenge because there is little scholarly work on the topic. To date, J. Thomas Scharf’s History of Delaware (Philadelphia, 1888) and Henry C. Conrad’s History of Delaware (Wilmington, DE, 1908) provide the most comprehensive accounts of the period. Harold Hancock’s 1948 chapter in Delaware: A History of the First State also adds nuance to our understanding of politics in the post-Civil War period. Yet, this scholarship tends to focus on political history and pays little attention to the issue of race. In the 1950s and 1960s several historians took up the issue examining African American history between the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. Again their work pays little attention to the period immediately following the Civil War focusing more intently on the early twentieth century.

Why then is there so little work on this crucial period of Delaware’s African American history? It’s partly an issue of sources. The Freedmen’s Bureau records are a logical starting point for research on the subject, yet, the Bureau had a relatively limited impact in Delaware providing minimal financial support to African American schools. Moreover, the shared operation of the Bureau between Maryland, Delaware, and later Washington D.C. creates a paper trail that is tricky to follow. Looking through these records provides evidence of the regional branches focus on regions other than Delaware. One of the most valuable resources on the topic are the records of the Delaware Association for the Education and Moral Improvement of Colored People housed at the Delaware Historical Society. This collection contains the manuscript books maintained by this association for a nearly forty-year period.

In 1866, the Delaware Association was founded to support African American schools throughout the state. The Delaware Association made quick progress and established thirty-two schools between 1867 and 1876.  Members included both African Americans and whites hiring both African American and white teachers to staff its schools. The organization closely monitored the progress of the schools, keeping track of attendance, curriculum, and finances. Despite these efforts, the Delaware Association faced numerous challenges to its efforts to improve opportunities for African American education.  

Image of a financial statement for the Delaware Association. These records document income and expenditures for the association's schools.

Among these challenges included incidents of violence at African American schools particularly those located in Kent and Sussex counties. Throughout the spring and summer of 1867, the association received a steady stream of letters from both black and white teachers reporting assaults at their schools. In early April, Mary Douglass, a teacher at Laurel, provided the association with a report of an attack upon herself and a fellow teacher. Nearly a month later Sarah Evans, teacher at Georgetown, reported the repetition of assaults upon herself and requested an alternative placement for the upcoming school year. The executive board later denied her request for relocation.

A press release reporting of assaults on teachers at the Delaware Association's school in Georgetown.

Financial troubles continued to plague the Delaware Association, which maintained its schools largely through private donations and tuition-generated income. The Freedmen’s Bureau briefly provided financial assistance to the association’s schools between 1867 and 1868, but after that, its financial support waned. In the winter of 1868, General O.O. Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau pledged $5,000 in support of the construction of a high school for African Americans in Wilmington. The following October, Howard made a trip to Wilmington to announce his backing of African American education in the state.

Shortly after Howard’s visit, however, the Bureau’s support of the Delaware Association schools decreased as it shifted its attention southward. Correspondence between Freedmen’s Bureau officials and the Delaware Association reveals the unstable relationship between the two organizations. Meeting records from the winter of 1869 document a series of exchanges between association trustees and Freedmen’s Bureau officials following up on the Bureau’s promised financial pledges. By the end of the winter, their total financial assistance was significantly less than the amount previously promised forcing the Delaware Association to look elsewhere for support.  

Finance Committee report documenting an exchange between Delaware Association trustees and Freedmen's Bureau official, General H. Day. 

Although the Freedmen’s Bureau’s partnership with the Delaware Association was brief, the organization continued to thrive, establishing thirty-nine African American schools in the state. The association set the foundation for later efforts to transition towards state supported black schools in Delaware. In 1875, a law passed by the Delaware General Assembly began taxing African Americans to support their schools. Although this income proved insufficient, the Delaware Association provided additional financial support while lobbying for increased state aid to black schools. Ultimately, the organization’s efforts marked the first steps in establishing state-supported African American education in Delaware.

Bibliography:

Archival Sources: 

• National Archives and Records Management, Records of the Field Office for the States of Maryland and Delaware, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1872. The records for Maryland and Delaware have been digitized and are available through FamilySearch. 
•  Delaware Association for the Education and Moral Improvement of Colored People Collection, 1866-1909. Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, DE.  

 Secondary Sources: 

• Delaware: A History of the First State. Edited by Henry Clay Reed. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1947. 
• Conrad, Henry C. History of Delaware. Wilmington, DE: 1909. 
• Hancock, Harold. "Reconstruction in Delaware," in Radicalism, Racism, and Realignment: The Border States during Reconstruction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. 
• Livesay, Harold. "Delaware Negroes, 1865-1915." Delaware History 13 (October 1968): 87-123. 
• Munroe, John. "The Negro in Delaware." South Atlantic Quarterly 56 (Autumn 1957): 428-444. 
• Scharf, Thomas J. History of Delaware, 1609-1888. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards and Co., 1908.  

By Anna Lacy, M.A. Student, Department of History  

 Delphi, Decoys, and Day Baskets...Oh, My!

My internship for the summer started with two weeks of classes as part of the University of Delaware’s DelPHI program. During the two weeks the DelPHI participants are taught how to make their research projects more accessible to the public. We went through classes that taught us how to compose press releases, how to give TV interviews, and how to utilize social media to spread information about our projects and ourselves. 

            After the DelPHI institute I began my internship work at the Upper Bay Museum in North East, MD. I am filming oral histories with the current decoy carvers who volunteer at the museum, and hope to make the interviews into a short documentary that can be shown at the museum. Conducting the interviews has been a good experience, and it has been wonderful to learn about the craft and lives of the men at the museum. Editing the footage has proven a bit more of a challenge since I really have no experience with the IMovie editing program and also have a lot of footage to whittle down.

 I am also in the process of putting together a new exhibit in the museum that will showcase hand made baskets from the Day Basket Company that is located in North East. The board members at Upper Bay were trying to find a different type of object to display other than decoys and hunting gear, and asked if I would be willing to help plan the basket exhibit. It has been wonderful so far, I had the opportunity to go out to the shop and meet with Karen Jackson who now owns the factory with her husband. She was able to provide a good amount of information about the history of the Day Basket Factory, as well as, photographs from the 1940’s and 1950’s of people working in the shop. She also loaned the museum some of the raw basket making materials that will hopefully be worked into the exhibit. 

Along with the new exhibit an opportunity has also been given to the museum and I to utilize the atrium space at the museum studies building at 77 E. Main St. in Newark, DE. The exhibit is still being discussed, with the possibility of bringing in old hunting boat as part of the display if logistics can be figured out. If the exhibit comes to fruition I hope to have completed by the fall.

Inside the Decoy Shop: The Period Room at the Upper Bay Museum

Standing inside the Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum in North East, Maryland, in late January, I could not decide where to start our Museum Studies SWAT team Decoy Shop project.

Where would you begin?

Should we work from top to bottom, or should we tackle one corner at a time? At the suggestion of one of my colleagues, we carefully plucked a wooden duck decoy from a worktable and started with artifacts displayed on that surface. Our eight day project to inventory, clean, photograph, and catalogue the period room--or a museum exhibit room created to evoke a specific time and place--at the Upper Bay Museum had begun. (Other SWAT team members catalogued the other collections displayed throughout the Museum.)

What can we learn from the Upper Bay Museum Decoy Shop period room?

University of Delaware Museum Studies Director Kasey Grier examines
decoys at the Upper Bay Museum prior to the begin in of the SWAT project

The Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum is an installation curated by Upper Chesapeake Bay residents who make decoys, or imitations of ducks or other animals hunters have used to lure their prey at least since 400 BC, and who hunt and fish in the region known as the Susquehanna Flats in the Upper Chesapeake Bay.

The Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum in North East, MD

Unlike many period rooms, though, the Shop interior was not copied directly from archival documentation or taken in its entirety from an original shop. Rather, the shop is a conglomeration of decoy-making related objects from several makers. Museum curators likely drew inspiration from a variety of sources, including twentieth-century interior photographs of other decoy shops in the region as well as the personal experiences Museum curators and local practitioners have had with decoy carving.

Steve and Lem Ward inside a decoy carving shop around 1918
(From Joe Engers, ed., The Great Book of Wildfowl Decoys, 2000)

Upper Bay Museum curators arranged the artifacts to evoke the interior of a working mid twentieth-century decoy maker’s shop on the Upper Chesapeake at the tale end the height of market duck hunting but during the continuation of sport duck hunting. This interpretive choice offers a different type of historical authenticity than do other methods of creating period rooms (no single method of which I find "right" or "wrong"--all are all fascinating and informative).

Tyler catalogues one of over 25 shotguns made and used
between 1850 and 1950

The Decoy Shop is unique in that it is one of only a handful of workshop period rooms in American museums. (In contrast, countless domestic period rooms championed in the early twentieth century by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York--fill museums throughout the country today.) Others workshop period rooms include a Decoy Shop exhibit at the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum, the Dominy Shops (furniture and clockmaking) at the Winterthur Museum, and the Wright Cycle Shop at Greenfield Village. European examples include a recreation of a sixteenth-century jeweler's workshop, based on a 1576 engraving, on display in the Museum of London's show about the Cheapside Hoard.

The Museum of London Jeweler's Period, as reported by the Associated Press

The Upper Bay Museum and its collections embody rich interpretative value relating to the interconnectedness of the region’s cultural and environmental history. To that end, the Museum’s Decoy Shop period room plays a unique didactic role that could not be achieved by a traditional gallery display featuring rows of workbenches and tools. Instead, by furnishing the Decoy Shop with a variety of objects associated with the craft and related industries, the period room display provides visitors with an opportunity to explore the relationships between decoy-making tools, decoy parts, the spaces and places where decoys were made, and the people who made them, as determined by Upper Chesapeake individuals with ties to the profession and hobby of decoy carving and duck hunting.

Cataloguing decoys at the Upper Bay Museum

Visitors view the Shop interior from one vantage point behind a door or from behind the Shop’s two windows. There is plenty to see. The shop is filled with hundreds of objects associated with decoy carving as well as with hunting, fishing, and boating in the upper Chesapeake more generally. The objects are displayed on shelves, on the walls, and on the floor. Objects range from workbenches to piles of nails. Primary object groups include: large pieces of work furniture; containers filled with supplies and tools; hand tools such as files and spoke shaves; completed decoys as well as decoys in various states of completion; a few items associated with the H. L. Harvey Company (active from about 1880 to the mid twentieth century); and miscellaneous items associated with fishing and hunting such as a life preservers and boat parts. In addition, the Shop "complex" also includes two workbenches installed just outside the shop.

Museum Studies Staff Assistant Tracy Jentzsch vacuuming an early twentieth-century life vest at the Upper Bay Museum
(Learn how your museum can borrow the vac and other supplies!)

In the process or leading the group that documented and catalogued the shop contents, it occurred to me that, even though we carefully removed and replaced each artifact, the Shop looked slightly different--a bit more tidy and spruced-up--when we were through with our work (before photo at left; after photo at right). We did, after all, dust every object and display surface; vacuum using a HEPA vac; sweep; wash the windows; secure objects using cotton twill tape where there had been duct tape...and more (all of which will help ensure the longer-term preservation of the objects). Even these slight, non-interpretative changes made the shop look different. What are the effects of more evasive interpretation changes on period rooms? How does one strike an appropriate balance of preservation and work-room-like authenticity?

 

In the case of the Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum, authenticity derives from workshop dirt, the objects' provenance (or history of ownership and use), and the identities of those who put them there. The Shop contents were made and used by several Upper Bay decoy carvers, a layered history that highlights continuities and change over time as it relates to decoy carving in this region. Some upper Bay decoy carvers represented here include Standley Evans (1887-1979; active 1919-1933) (used the decoy horse inside the shop); Horace D. Graham (1893-1982; active 1955-1978) (used the auto-sander inside the shop and shaving bench outside the shop as well as the many miscellaneous workshop contents distributed throughout the shop), and Paul Gibson (1902-1985; active 1915-1985) (used the painting table and paint brushes on display).

Nicole Belolan cataloguing Paul Gibson's painting worktable inside the Decoy Shop

Despite the fact that hunting waterfowl in the Upper Chesapeake was limited to sport (rather than market hunting) after 1918, decoy carvers—such as those represented inside this Shop—continued to provide decoys for sportsmen into the mid-twentieth century. Some of the decoy carvers represented inside the Shop were hobbyists; others made decoys for a living. All of them used store-bought tools in combination with handmade tools made using a mix of reused and new materials, suggesting the fact that many decoy carvers engaged with (and continue to engage with) their craft as skilled do-it-yourself artisans or tinkerers. For example, the Horace Graham auto-sander was made with used wood and a washing machine motor:

His shaving bench features repurposed moldings:

Many of the supply containers were made from recycled mid-twentieth-century food containers, examples of which can be seen lining the Shop shelves in the photograph below. Anyone who has ventured inside a contemporary workshop has probably seen similar examples of reuse.

And of course, there are the decoys. The unfinished duck decoy parts, some of which are displayed inside this basket, were made by the following individuals, several of whom are still living: Mike Laird, J.E. Gonce, Bill Streaker, Jeff Muller, Vernon S. Bryant, Joey Jacobs[?], James Frey, and Bobby Simons:

Hardly a static exhibit meant to evoke one time period, the Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum embodies the continued local interest in and practice of the craft of decoy making.

What could be more authentic than that?

To learn more about how your museum can apply to the UD Museum Studies SWAT project, visit our web site.

In preparing for my work at the Upper Bay Museum, I found that C. John Sullivan's Waterfowling on the Chesapeake, 1819-1936 (2003) provides readers with the best historical context for duck decoy use. Those with a theoretical bent might enjoy Marjolein Efting Dijkstra's The Animal Substitute: An Ethnological Perspective on the Origin of Image-Making and Art (2010).

Nicole Belolan is a Ph.D. Candiate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware. She is also a graduate assistant for Sustaining Places, an IMLS-funded initiative that is dedicated to providing hands-on, practical resources for small museums.