Museum Studies Fieldwork: Woodmere Art Museum
Semester: Spring 2025
Praxis Course: HART 420 Museum Studies Fieldwork
Faculty Advisor: Monique Scott and Sylvia Houghteling
Field Site: Woodmere Art Museum
Field Supervisor: Amy Gillette
Praxis Poster:
HART_PascaleLowell_Revised
Further Context:
I’ve had such an incredible experience at the Woodmere Art Museum this semester. During my time at Bryn Mawr, I’ve really come to love Philadelphia, and as a center for display of local Philadelphia artists I learned so much about the scene during my time working with Woodmere. I was supervised by their curator, Amy Gillette, with two other students from Bryn Mawr. Woodmere is opening a new building in October of 2025 (Maguire Hall), and as such needed to catalogue the labels that were usable, and where pieces would need more information. I spent the first month or two going through the catalogue and marking off what was complete and what was not. I enjoyed the low-pressure achievement aspect of this, where accomplishments were being made without my having to take very many risks or challenge myself, which was a comfortable place to start, and helped me to get familiar with the format and expectations for museum labels. I did struggle, however, with the repetitive nature of the task, and by the time we finished I was certainly ready to work on something new.
From there I moved on to writing. My first project was a biography, which intimidated me less than the labels. For that, what was required was to find out the facts about the artist available online. To provide art interpretation seemed much easier to mess up. I was concerned by the fact that a label possesses a kind of appeal to authority and therefore could be taken by the public as the ‘be all end all’ of analyzing a specific piece. To avoid worrying about this for a bit I started with a bio instead. What I had hoped would be a simpler task turned out to be much more difficult, as I was faced with the need to cram the entirety of a person’s life into only one or two short paragraphs. I completed it, relying heavily on the artist’s own biography found on their website. From there I wanted to try something new, so I delved into label writing.
Woodmere holds quite the collection of works from talented muralist Violet Oakley, whose pieces I had really loved viewing when I visited Woodmere. I opted to start with her works, not only because I enjoyed her style but because I identified with her. She was a Bryn Mawr graduate, and very likely a queer woman who spent her life living with Edith Emerson, an artist who dedicated her life after Oakley’s death to preserving her memory. She served as Woodmere’s director, contributing greatly to their extensive collection of both her and Oakley’s works, spurring the museum to focus not only on Philadelphia artists but women as well. Part of what is going to be displayed in the new building are several drafts created by Oakley for a boy’s school of various religious scenes. I loved the colors of her study for Young David in his fight against goliath and found it much simpler to provide interpretation when I could compare between the study and the final mural. As my first attempt I struggled to condense what I wanted to accomplish into something as short as it needed to be. I continued on from there with several more of Oakley’s studies, which served as such a great introduction to label writing.
When I moved on from that group my largest problem became decision paralysis. I spent way too much of my time scrolling through the endless document attempting to select pieces to write about I felt confident enough in, with enough material on the internet that I could base my interpretation on something solid. I completed a few labels this way but struggled with how long each one took me. In a meeting with the publicity team Amy mentioned offhandedly that “labels aren’t kidneys” which I tried to keep in mind when writing from that point on. I got less precious about my interpretation and tried to have faith that art was powerful enough to convey what it needed to. My labels served as a guide, but I also needed to trust the visitor to know that art is so deeply subjective.
With this in mind I began to be drawn to the more abstract pieces of the collection. I loved learning about how interconnected the art scene in Philadelphia was and is, especially in the abstract art movement. So many of Woodmere’s artists learned from Arthur B. Carles, a talented portraitist who turned towards abstraction as he moved through his career. It was fascinating to look at all these pieces made by a host of different artists, each so wildly different but all citing Carles as an incredible teacher of theirs. His focus on color as a basis for composition serves as such a strong foundation for abstract art, and I loved being able to look at so many pieces through that lens.
I’m so grateful to have gotten to learn so much at Woodmere this semester. Amy worked so hard to make sure we all got the most out of the experience, arranging meetings with different teams to talk about varying career paths, and meeting with us in person frequently. I plan to continue working with them on labels this summer, and I’m so glad to get to keep interacting with such amazing art. My writing skills have developed, and I’m proud of my ability to say what I want efficiently. It’s also been such an incredible experience as a fine arts major, as nothing is better for making art than looking at lots and lots and lots of art. I’ve gained so much knowledge about art structures and gotten to hear about the lives of so many artists, each with their own paths. As someone who found their way to making art towards the end of high school it was so comforting to see how many talented people found a love for creating late in life. Thank you so much to Bryn Mawr and to Woodmere for an absolutely amazing semester!
