Blog Post 4: Museum Of Anthropology Response

During our class visit to the Museum of Anthropology, you will circulate through the museum and seek out contemporary artworks from a list that I will email to the class over the weekend. For each of the works on the list, take notes on the following details: important aspects of the artworks’ appearance, other works that are situated in proximity to them, curatorial documentation (i.e. the accompanying plates that list artist names, work titles, descriptions of the media of presentation, and in some cases summarizing thematic elements). You may also look for more information on these works using the MOA-CAT database, which can be accessed from terminals in the museum itself, or from the MOA website. Choose one artwork to focus on for your blog post.

Your blog post should do the following three things:
-briefly describe relevant details about the appearance of the work you’ve chosen
-comment on the contrasts and/or similarities between the artwork’s perspective on Indigenous identity and that reflected by the other objects that it’s located in proximity to. Here you need to be careful to differentiate between the works themselves, and the choices of the museum’s curatorial staff about how to present them.
-reflect on your own perspective as a viewer; does the work presume that you are aware background information that is already familiar to you or at least easy to understand and/or find details about, or does it presume a higher degree of knowledge than you have? Why do you think you do (or don’t) have this information?