University Place

How Museums Care for Collections and Carry Stories

Thank you all for joining the Sheboygan County Museum in celebration of National Preservation Month.
We are honored to collaborate with Badger Talks, a program of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, connecting communities throughout the state with UW staff to spark conversations and engage residents.
This evening, we are joined by Professor Sarah Anne Carter to explore the importance of preserving material culture for both our community and our collective experience.
Dr. Carter is the executive director of the Center for Design and Material Culture, and an associate professor of design studies in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses on historic interiors, the material culture of childhood, and material culture theory and methods.
She previously served as curator and director of research at Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, where she collaboratively curated many museum exhibitions and led Chipstone’s think tank program in support of progressive curatorial practices.
An author and editor of numerous material culture histories, her newest book project is entitled Museum Feelings: An Emotional History of the American Museum.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Carter today.
[all applauding] Thank you.
– So thank you so much, Tamara, for that lovely introduction.
And thank you all so much for inviting me here today to deliver a Badger Talk.
It’s really quite meaningful for me to be here in Sheboygan because the last time I was here at this museum almost a decade ago, I had the great pleasure of seeing this object that has stuck with me now for almost 10 years.
And I actually get to talk about that today.
I got to do some research on it, and so you will know that object when you see it in a little while.
It’s been really fun this week getting to know that thing a little better.
It’s wonderful to be with all of you.
So as we begin, I wanna acknowledge the place where I’m really privileged to work, which is Madison, or Teejop, as it is also called.
And I wanna just take a moment to share with you UW’s commitment to understanding basically how the colonization that we all still live with today informs our shared future of collaboration and innovation.
And this is a plaque that’s on Bascom Hill.
And it’s really important to think about how this history of colonization that we live with informs this shared future of our collaboration innovation with the Ho-Chunk Nation.
And today, UW-Madison respects the inherent sovereignty of the Ho-Chunk Nation, along with the 11 other First Nations of Wisconsin.
And in particular today, standing here in Sheboygan, that means acknowledging the Ho-Chunk, the Potawatomi, the Menominee, the Oneida, and the Ojibwe people along the southwest shores of here at Lake Michigan.
So my talk today is part of a very special Preservation Month series here at the Sheboygan Historical Society.
Your wonderful curator, Tamara Lange, will be talking next week about how you physically care for collections here, okay, how you physically do that work both here and at home.
And today, I have the job of talking about how we intellectually care for objects, okay?
I have the job for talking about the stories that we care for when we care for collections.
And this is a topic that’s really been at the heart of my career for the past two decades as a curator and now as a professor and center director at Madison.
So in my talk today, I’m arguing that the intellectual and cultural care of objects, in effect, carrying the stories embedded in things through time, allows objects to help us connect past, present, and future.
And it’s a vital part of collections care work.
And this is work that we can all be part of, okay?
We can all do our part to support these stories in our communities.
By caring for objects, museums care for stories.
And I believe really firmly that by caring for stories, we care for people in our communities, okay?
And so caring for objects and caring for people are actually connected.
And I truly think of material things, like the treasures in this collection, I think of them as time travelers creating an opportunity for a rooted, community-based connection across time.
And I really wanna thank Tamara for very generously helping me access and research three fascinating objects from your collection that will be woven into my presentation today.
So as I said, I come to you from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and from the Center for Design and Material Culture.
I’m a professor in the School of Human Ecology there.
And I run the CDMC.
The CDMC, Center for Design and Material Culture, is a place that really strives to be a hub for material culture and design, both on campus, nationally, and also internationally.
So we really root our work in the study of material things and in the design and creation of meaningful objects, connecting people and things in lots of different ways.
Our center is also home to the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, which is an absolutely amazing textile collection of more than 13,000 objects.
And this collection has been around and been part of UW for more than 50 years.
And we just recently did a full inventory of the collection.
And when you look at these pictures, don’t worry, it does not look like the image closest to me anymore.
This was from decades ago, but keep images like that in mind when you get into the kinds of collection care work I know Tamara is gonna be teaching you about, right?
What does it mean to truly care for objects and to have objects in the kinds of storage context that can really help us keep them for the future?
Now, in the CDMC, we engage in a whole range of research projects related to material culture, textiles, and design.
We have a lot of different kinds of student opportunities around these various topics.
And we actually invite in more than 50 classes every year into the center to do this work, from maybe expected classes like my design history classes to maybe unexpected places.
For example, every year, we have a financial coaching class that comes in to work with our collection, because investigating an object can help you understand what people value, right?
A central skill for a financial coach, right?
So we love to think of creative ways to use our collection and connect across campus.
We also have two galleries and a really active slate of hands-on experiences, lots of making opportunities, lectures, and programs.
And we think a lot about how we care for our collection from the kinds of best practices we need to use, whether that’s using acid-free paper or conducting a regular inventory, or thinking about how we maintain our database, to really creating meaningful opportunities for our undergraduate and graduate students who work with us in the center.
And opportunities for curricular engagement around topics like avoiding cultural appropriation, for example, helping our students really think about what are the museum questions they need to be prepared to ask and answer today and in the future, right?
That’s really central to the work we do.
And this is work that’s really vital for the future of places like the Sheboygan County Museum as well.
So we are gonna be rooting our discussion today in the early history of museums to help us really think through some strategies for understanding how we can fruitfully approach objects in museum collections in order to understand how the kinds of treasures that we’re gonna be talking about today from this collection, treasures like this awesome, and when I say awesome, I mean huge seed wreath that you see here in this image.
Treasures like the detail I’m sharing with you of this really wonderful, charming, incredibly important signature quilt from the 1940s, and this hunk of wood at the bottom of this slide, which I’ll talk more about in a little while.
We will think about these treasures, and we’ll think together about how the histories of museums, as well as methods from material culture can help us understand and make sense of these objects, can help us connect these objects to stories in meaningful ways.
So to begin.
To begin, I like to go way back, way back to 1655, back to one of my favorite images of a museum.
This is Ole Worm’s Museum Wormianum in Leiden from 1655.
And Ole Worm was a professor, probably nothing like me, but also a professor.
And he had this museum, this collection, and this is the image that he published in this collection, in his catalog of this collection that, as the frontis to the book.
And basically he named this book Worm’s Museum.
It’s translated from the Latin, or A History of Rare Things.
He divided the collection, represented here in this image, into the original kind of Aristotelian category.
So we have animals, vegetables, minerals, right?
Then he added a fourth category, the fourth category of artificialia, so things made by man.
So in this book, he’s dividing all of the different things that you see here into these categories, trying to make sense of the world, okay?
And my students actually had the privilege of studying a copy of this book in special collections at Madison.
We have amazing books like this that we’re actually able to go and study.
So we spent some time with this 1655 book earlier this semester.
And when we look closely at this image together, we can see all sorts of interesting things.
If you look really closely, you can make out the words on some of the boxes in the back.
And my Latin is a little rusty.
Maybe yours is a little better, I don’t know.
But if we translate some of the words on those boxes, we see things like boxes of animal parts, boxes of shells, boxes of stones, boxes of soils, all different kinds of materials that might fit into this animal-vegetable-mineral category.
We see all kinds of things.
There’s a canoe on the ceiling, there are tortoise shells.
There is an array of probably weapons or spears on the back wall.
There’s this funny little figure at the very back of the room.
It’s an automaton, so a clockwork figure that could move.
These are pretty wondrous, interesting things all brought together in this collection.
The collection further can come to life for us.
And we look at this really wonderful work by contemporary artist Rosamond Purcell, who actually recreated Ole Worm’s museum in 2005.
Now, I love this installation.
I think this is just an incredibly powerful way to think about that image that I just shared with you, and helps us think about how varied and really bold his attempt to order the world was.
Now, I want you to look at this image, and I want you to think to yourself, “How do you go about doing that, creating an image like this?
How do you go about creating an installation like this?”
Think about the things that are in there.
There’s a polar bear, there’s an automaton.
There are all kinds of weapons hung on the wall.
There are those boxes of animal parts and shells and rocks.
But just sort of imagine that you are going to create something like this.
Think of all the different people you would need to talk to to do this.
Think of all the different collections you would need to connect with, because these kinds of objects are not housed in the same museum today.
They’re not housed in the same cabinet as they were in Ole Worm’s time, right?
Because they’ve been divided up into all of these different sorts of museums.
Museums for shells, museums for taxidermy, museums for cultural objects like the canoe hanging from the ceiling, okay?
And so we can look at this and we can understand what it might feel like to bring an image like this to life.
But we can also look at this and think about the logistics, the complexity, kind of the museum culture that this might make visible for us.
And just think how many people and how many layers would you have to go to to create something like this?
Rosamond Purcell’s installation reminds us that the world of Ole Worm’s museum has changed a lot over the years, but it still creates this sense of wonder when you look at it.
It is still a space that helps us think about wonder, possibility, and connection.
Now, I want you to think about all those different people you’d have to connect with as we move forward in our talk.
Now, you’ve likely experienced your own version of a cabinet like this if you love museums and ever make it down to Milwaukee.
Has anyone visited the Milwaukee Public Museum and made it to A Sense of Wonder?
Okay, I’m seeing some nods, I’m seeing some hands.
That’s great.
Fantastic installation at the Milwaukee Public Museum.
So they have their own version of a cabinet, okay?
And this installation, this Sense of Wonder, really leans into that history that I was just sharing with you a little bit about.
Creates a feeling of awe, a feeling of wonder at just the assembled group of things that’s kind of supposed to wash over you, okay?
And it’s supposed to have a real impact on you.
This is something that would be called, like, a cabinet of wonder, a Wunderkammern, right?
A place that you would open up and be able to narrate the world.
And while we focus on the wonder feelings in a place like this, more than anything, it is an intellectual attempt to order nature, to make sense of things, right?
Wonder is one result of that, but it’s an attempt to try to find order in the world.
And so when we think about sort of the history of museums, we think of a history that comes from a place of sorting and categorizing.
We think of a history that brings things together and tries to make sense, not just of wonder, right, but of the world.
And this is really important to the new book that I’m working on that Tamara mentioned briefly.
And in my new book on museum feelings, I’m thinking a lot about this focus on wonder versus a focus on understanding and museums, and thinking a lot about this idea that I’m kind of calling wonder cover in terms of what wonder sometimes elides or hides or prevents us from seeing or understanding.
But that’s a story for another day.
But wonder’s a very rich topic for us to think about.
And wonder remains really important in the museum curator’s toolkit.
And wonder, sometimes it comes to the fore in unexpected places, in unexpected things.
It can come to the fore in big things, like giant squids and polar bears hanging from the ceiling.
It can also come to the fore sometimes in small places.
When I was the curator and director of research at the Chipstone Foundation, I found this tiny little museum in a box, and this is actually a miniature cabinet, it’s not a full-size cabinet, when I was visiting the winter antique show in New York that year.
And I immediately knew I had to figure out how to acquire this object for Chipstone.
This is so cool.
It looks like this unassuming little cabinet right now, ha ha, but wait.
It tells a lot of stories.
When you open these little drawers, what you find inside are 37 little tubes, almost like test tubes, each of which has a kind of relic object in it.
Each of these objects has its own label, and its own fairly dramatic and interesting story connected to it.
So in effect, what this is is a museum in a box, a tiny little museum that you can carry with you wherever you go.
These items are not sorted into animal, vegetable, and mineral.
And I can tell you, I’ve spent hours with this object.
I have no idea how it’s supposed to be sorted, apart from just really cool things that can fit inside of test tubes in a small box, right?
There’s no other organizing principle that I can figure out, but it is fascinating and it is wondrous.
The things in this little box open up windows onto the past, connect us from tiny pieces of history to really big stories, okay?
These are four of my favorite items from inside the box.
You can see we have these tiny little items inside these sealed test tubes.
And there’s a note in each of the tubes.
So allow me to read you some of these.
“A piece of the wreck “of Commodore Perry’s flagship Lawrence, “which was exhibited at the Centennial.
“From the colors worn by Joe Goss in the ring “at the Sullivan-Ryan fight.
“Peas served out to a prisoner in Andersonville, “who presented them to H.W.H.
at a soldier’s fair.
And part of the battle flag of the 55th Cavalry.”
And this was a Massachusetts regiment of African-American soldiers.
Wow, okay.
Pretty fascinating group of objects.
Tiny little things opening up really big questions, really big stories.
But part of what’s so interesting to me about it is you need the story with the thing, right?
You need that little piece, but you also need the carefully detailed label that goes along with it.
The thing and the text have to stay together, because without these labels, I mean, we end up with a few peas in a little glass jar.
Like, what’s the story?
Like, we don’t know what’s going on.
We need to keep that story and that object together, right?
And when we think about these 37 little vials brought together in this cabinet, we can begin to recognize that these peas, this feather, these important pieces of cloth come together to do something important, creating this little museum, this little window onto the world in this late 19th century moment, likely around the centennial in 1876 when this was brought together.
It’s another version of Ole Worm’s cabinet, another way of thinking about what does it mean to create a collection.
And I immediately thought about this little cabinet, this little museum in a box, when Tamara kindly shared the first ledger book of the Sheboygan County Museum with me.
Initially, this museum, I mean, started off as something supported by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
And so this is the original Daughters of the American Revolution object ledger.
And I’d like to invite us to look closely together at the objects that were first acquired by this museum.
These objects are quite varied, but each of them is closely connected to a story.
And one of them is very similar to our museum in a box.
The first object on this ledger book is a piece of wood from historic battleship Niagara of Commodore Perry’s fleet, which has lain for more than a hundred years at the bottom of Lake Erie, given by Mrs. P.H.
Peacock.
Now, from what I’ve been able to learn in just a few days, Mrs. Peacock’s a completely fascinating person.
But that’s a story probably for another day.
But if we continue down this list, we have a powder can.
There is a copy of an important newspaper article from 1803.
We continue on, we have another newspaper article from 1865, a important picture from early Sheboygan history, a railroad timetable, okay?
A real array of things, a real array of things that the founders of this museum thought, “This is a story.
“This object is a touchstone that can open up a world, “that can open up a possibility.
“We need to save it, we need to catalog it, and we need to build and create something around it,” okay?
And so we can think about that little museum in a box.
We can also think about this much larger museum context that we are part of here when we think about valuing these things.
This, we believe, is that piece of wood that started off this whole collection.
And as you can see, like those Andersonville peas in that little test tube, will be hard to know without this context.
It would be hard to know exactly what we’re looking at.
Without it, it’s a log.
It’s a piece of wood.
And that story becomes just as important as the thing itself.
And it’s a really wonderful reminder that there, people who started this museum, those early collections, the knowledge and the stories and the context that went along with those things were just as important as the things themselves.
And whenever I start thinking about a museum, what becomes really important to me is to really ask and think about what is the foundation of this place where I’m visiting?
What is it that makes this museum the museum that it is?
Where did this collection come from?
What are the categories?
What are the questions that are driving this institution?
And these questions of museums and categorization are really quite important and are really at the heart of the history of museums.
And this has really been central to the history of my own research for a long time and central to my teaching.
And more than a decade ago, these questions of museums and categorization were the foundation of a project that I was privileged to work on when I was at Harvard called Tangible Things.
This project was something that I worked on along with Laurel Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, and Sarah Schechner, three really wonderful scholars and collaborators.
And what we did was we investigated how museums sort objects into categories.
How do they do it?
What categories do museums pick?
And what does it mean to pick one category over another?
What happens when you do that?
And these questions about categorization are a central part of a course that I’m currently teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It’s a course called Histories of Object-Based Learning, in which we study how and why materials are used in different ways in different academic contexts, right?
So the questions from this project have really fed into and shaped my current teaching and research.
So going back to Tangible Things.
Tangible Things looked to people like George Brown Goode, who was one of the leaders of the Smithsonian Institution, to think about how museums sort things.
Goode created these six different categories, which he said, “All museums are one of these things.”
There’s a museum of art, there is a museum of history, museum of anthropology, natural history, technology, commerce.
Museums are sorted into these different categories.
And what thinking about Goode’s categorization makes so apparent is that the type of museum something is really shapes the kinds of questions we ask about the objects in that museum, right?
We’re gonna ask different objects different kinds of questions, depending on where they sit.
And one of the challenges with a material thing versus something like a digital file is it has to sit in one place.
It has to be in a museum, right?
It can’t live in lots of places.
It is a thing in the world, right?
And so, depending on where you put it, depending on the category that it is part of will determine the questions that we can ask.
And so just playing with this idea opened up some really cool possibilities for engaging with and thinking about objects.
And I’m just gonna share a couple of those today.
One of my favorite objects from this project is this board game, “Blondie Goes to Leisureland.”
Some of you may be familiar with Blondie from your cartoon-reading days, which perhaps, perhaps they’re today.
Perhaps you’re all still reading Blondie cartoons.
I hope you are.
But it’s this really fascinating object because we could look at it and be delighted by the graphics and by its connection to Blondie and Dagwood and these cartoon characters.
But we’re also playing a game, just thinking about childhood.
But then we can look at it and think to ourselves, “Huh, how does Blondie get to Leisureland?”
Well, she gets to Leisureland through, surprise, surprise, rural electrification.
That’s how Blondie’s gonna get to Leisureland.
And so it looks like this delightful, fun game.
But Blondie has to play this game.
And as she does, goes through each step, she gets to acquire a whole range of appliances.
They’re gonna make her life easier.
And if any of you know Blondie, you know she gets into a lot of trouble.
And new appliances could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the day probably, with her track record.
But rural electrification is a key part of this, right?
So there’s a history of technology strand here, okay?
There is an aesthetic story here.
We’re looking at this really quite gorgeous, late 1930s, early 1940s, almost, like, poster that you could frame, right?
From an aesthetic perspective with the colors and the shapes.
We could also think about gender roles and women’s history, and think about, huh, why is everything Blondie’s responsibility in this context, right?
And thinking about histories of women’s work, right?
So depending on where you put this object, it could go in lots of different directions, right?
Which makes it pretty fascinating.
But if it just sat on one of those shelves, sort of in George Brown Goode’s imaginary museums, right, it limits what it can do.
Another object that we thought about in this project that opens up those kinds of doors is this beetle necklace or bracelet, which I think is just gorgeous.
So this is something, it’s probably from either India or Myanmar, we’re not sure.
And it’s in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
But it’s a bracelet.
It’s a piece of jewelry, right?
It’s also five insects.
It also has a really fascinating aesthetic.
It’s something beautiful.
Is it a work of, could it be a work of art?
You know, is it a work of history?
Is it a work of culture?
Natural history, are we looking at insects that we could connect to a natural history collection, right?
What is it?
It’s a category crosser.
And in crossing those categories, I think that’s where we kind of feel that sense of like, “Huh,” you know, wondering, pondering, thinking about the connections that an object like this could help us make, okay?
And so this way of thinking about things opens up these possibilities for us.
Now, there’s an object in this collection that is also very much a category crosser.
And I think it is an absolutely wonderful thing.
And this object, maybe some of you know what it is.
But look closely.
And as you look closely, you might begin to see some of the tiny little pieces that form this lovely floral wreath.
It’s made out of seeds, and it is huge.
This was the object that I saw here almost 10 years ago, that when I had the chance to talk to Tamara, I said, “I think I remember this giant seed wreath.
“That’s yours, right?
You have it?”
And she’s like, “Oh, yeah, it’s ours.”
And it was wonderful to learn a little bit more about it.
But looking at this object, is it a work of history?
Is it a work of art?
Natural history, economic botany?
What is it?
What is this thing, okay?
And frankly, the path that we choose to go down as we explore it, that path is gonna determine how we shape its story.
It’s gonna determine the story we decide to tell about it, okay?
And part of what is so interesting is the museum wasn’t quite sure what to do with this object initially either.
So here it is on display, kind of hidden in the background there behind this group of mannequins.
It’s there in the corner on the wall.
It’s probably upside-down at this point, right?
You know…
Okay, so they still weren’t quite sure what to do with this object, but it’s been on view for a long time.
And so in 1968, the museum decided to try to figure out, “Well, what’s going on here?”
I mean, how do you lose the records for a giant object?
And of course, we know things are complicated and we have objects like this that have this sort of complexity in our collection as well, right?
So I say that from a place of empathy, right?
It’s complicated.
You know, and the museum moved and changed hands.
All of these things happened over the course of the early 20th century.
You know, the 20-plus years in between it being acquired and this article being written.
But it was found, they put it on view, and wanted to figure it out.
And so here it is in The Sheboygan Press, “Maker, donor unknown,” right?
So not anonymous.
‘Cause we know someone intentionally made this.
Someone intentionally gave it.
And by saying that, they’re acknowledging that, “We wanna find out who that is.
We wanna find out who that is.”
So we don’t know that yet.
We will know that soon.
But at the time, what did they know?
Well, they could look closely at the materials of this object: acorns, popcorns, pecans, sunflowers, walnuts, rice, tapioca, sago, peach stones, cherry pits, on and on, right?
There’s a lot of amazing stuff in this object.
We know the context; it had to have been collected before 1953 ’cause then it was in the collection.
We know the size.
So I said, “This thing is massive, right?”
The wreath is four by three feet, the frame is six by five feet.
It weighs 60 to 65 pounds, right?
It’s just, like, bigger than a small child.
Like, it’s a big object, okay?
And we know the quality of this object, right?
The person who created it was meticulous.
It was well-planned.
It took years to make.
A great deal of care went into the creation of this thing.
So these are things we do know, even if the donor and maker are still unknown.
So what if we think of it as a natural history specimen?
That could work, right?
We could think about the seeds.
We could think about all of the different objects, little tiny seeds that go into make this gorgeous wreath.
And the people here at the museum who were caring for it and wondering about it and trying to figure it out listed out, you know, they looked carefully, found all of these little seeds as part of it, right, as part of their care for this object.
And so we think about it, could it be a collection of seeds?
Could scientists study this object and understand something about seeds trapped in time from the 1890s?
Could we learn something from this about seeds before crops might be genetically modified?
Could we learn something about this, about foodways in the late 19th century?
What are people eating here in Sheboygan at this moment, right?
We could learn something about agricultural history from this object, right?
We could take it in all of those directions.
You know, we could put it in a long line of works that could lead to something like the seed art that we see at a place like the Minnesota State Fair.
And my husband, who’s from Wisconsin, originally told me to apologize for having anything about Minnesota in my presentation, so, sorry.
But I thought it was a cool image.
You know, it’s part of this long history from, you know, 19th century seed art all the way, 19th century seed wreaths to 21st century seed art.
We could put it in that sort of trajectory.
We could think about it in the context of the National Agricultural Library.
Would they like to know what seeds are there available to us to think about in the 1890s, right?
We could think about all those things just from the economic botany, natural history kind of seed perspective of this object.
But of course, when you’re looking at it, and it’s gorgeous, we have to ask questions about aesthetics, right?
We have to ask questions about what it looks like.
And these are some hair wreaths.
This is one hair wreath, the two details from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection that is part of my research center.
You know, and there are a lot of formal similarities that we could draw.
We’re looking at two different kinds of objects, one made of hair, one made of seeds, emulating a floral wreath.
What can you do with these different kinds of natural materials?
And from an aesthetic perspective, there are a lot of similarities.
I mean, this hair wreath does not weigh 65 pounds, because that is a scary concept as a person responsible for a collection.
It’s much smaller.
But aesthetically, there’s similarities.
Even closer similarities to an object like this one, also from the collection.
So we can see maybe some of the inspiration.
Thankfully, the niece of the woman who created it managed to solve the mystery of this object, which I just think is the coolest thing.
So she was able to connect with the museum, and we learn from this newspaper clipping that Miss Gottschalk had recalled admiring the wreath as a child, and said her aunt made it to occupy her leisure time.
So how wonderful.
And as we learn more about this story, it seems like she actually passed away shortly after she shared this information.
So it was one of those, like, just-in-time connections, right?
To be able to share this story with the museum.
And so that brings us to this context now of history and memory, right?
So we’ve thought about this as a work of natural history, botany, economic botany, all those connections.
We’ve thought about aesthetics, but now we can think about history and memory in relation to this object.
And here is a longer, really quite wonderful little narrative from the object file.
So Miss Gottschalk in 1968, she was 70 years old, used to admire the wreath as a child, having her aunt identify all the seeds, nuts, et cetera, in the wreath.
But always admonished not to touch it.
The wreaths made by Mrs. Dreier in her early marriage, probably in 1890.
She did it for recreation, as some women would knit or crochet.
It was always displayed in the Dreier home on an easel, and weighs about 65 pounds.
So reading this closely, this jumped out at me.
This is something she was doing for recreation, a kind of fancy work, right?
Like knitting or like crochet, okay, so we understand this is her creative work.
But I also loved this, having her aunt identify all the seeds and nuts.
So that brings us right back to this botany context.
That brings us right back to a natural history story.
Yes, it’s beautiful, but what are all the pieces?
What are the natural history botany stories here that she was inviting her niece into?
And of course, do not touch it because if you could imagine a small child near a 65-pound wreath on an easel, it’s slightly terrifying, right?
It just seems, like, quite dangerous.
So she didn’t touch it, but she was learning all of the pieces, okay?
And because her niece made that connection, we know who the maker is.
And because we know that, we can learn a little bit more about her and go back to her obituary when she passed in 1942.
So Mrs. Mary Dreier was “well-known “for her beautiful handwork on church altars “and on priest vestments.
“She was most interested in her garden and was active as a mission worker in the Holy Name Church.”
And so looking for images of, say, Holy Name Church from this period, you can kind of see the sense of scale that maybe she was thinking about in her giant wreath.
Perhaps there might be some aesthetic connections, perhaps future research could see do any of those vestments survive?
Are there any connections that could be made to her other work?
Really exciting.
But what really got me was this line.
“She was most interested in her garden.”
And so we’re right back to that natural history story.
But in this case, she’s making flowers, yes, from seeds, but from seeds put together.
She’s growing flowers that can still last to this day, right?
So imagining this woman from the 1890s to the early 1940s, gardening in a way that will last for decades, right?
It’s pretty beautiful and it reminds us that these categories keep crossing, keep moving.
As we think about the kinds of categories that something like the seed wreath fits into, we really quickly are thinking about art and design, history, anthropology, natural history, technology, commerce, and even something a little more, that emotional connection of understanding.
You know, she loved her garden the most, and here is a garden that will last, that we can still enjoy from seeds that she created and put together, but didn’t plant.
So we can also get to some really poetic places when we allow these categories to cross and to think about how these questions can talk to each other in meaningful ways.
And thinking about it in this way makes this object just even more meaningful for me.
I think it’s just such a fantastic thing.
Now, thinking through categories like these can help us get to the stories we wanna tell, and that’s part of how we care for objects.
But so can asking different kinds of questions, right?
And there are various lines of material cultural questioning that can help us get to new stories about objects.
I wanna very briefly share some of those questions that we thought through in the Questioning Things exhibit, which was a project we did at the CDMC a couple of years ago.
And for this project, what I did was I invited my colleagues and alumns of our Material Culture program to share questions about the objects on view, acknowledging that if I were to do it all myself, I only have one perspective.
One of the strengths of material culture scholarship is that you can bring things from multiple perspectives, multiple voices.
It is naturally collaborative.
And when you have multiple perspectives, the work becomes much stronger.
We often think of collaboration maybe in the sciences, but collaboration in the humanities also invites much stronger and more exciting and more rigorous work.
And so inviting my colleagues to do this allowed us to put together an exhibition that was beautiful, but also an exhibition that was really question-driven.
And so to do this, we actually created a handbook for Questioning Things that is free and accessible on our website that you can download and see, like, what those questions are.
What kinds of questions might you bring to an object?
How might you begin to approach a material thing?
So some of the things that we thought about are things like this phonograph shown here.
And we asked a history of science professor and a curator, actually two curators, a couple, like, “How do you think about this thing?”
And together, we started thinking about how do objects’ meaning change over time, or are there hidden themes in this object?
Like what questions might we begin to bring out as we examine this early 20th century phonograph, an incredibly cool object that was actually sent by Thomas Edison to Madison for use in the physics department.
Fascinating provenance.
You could stop there, or you could keep asking more questions, which they invited participants to do.
Or in a totally different category of questions, we could think about how do artists see things, how do makers see things?
Inviting our visitors to sketch what they see, to pick a detail, to look closely, to draw it, to think about close looking as a line of questioning.
And I couldn’t resist putting this image in because it shows more of our 19th century wreaths, as well as two wreaths that are in the framed pieces made by contemporary artist Martha Glowacki.
So reminding us that contemporary artists are also part of this conversation, right, and can be in really wonderful ways with our historical collections.
We can also think about how maybe inviting students into this work can help us do interesting things.
In this case, we left one drawer empty, and my colleague, Professor Marina Moskowitz, had her students basically curate mini exhibits throughout the semester in conversation with the larger project.
Or, of course, thinking about exhibitions and works on view through your body, right?
Actually trying things out, touching things, engaging physically with things.
That’s a whole ‘nother line of questioning.
So the idea here is that these different lines of questions, these different ways of engaging with things are designed to really get your creative juices flowing as a researcher, right?
Because research should be creative.
Making connections and engaging with objects should be something that allows you to creatively connect things and to think about how we might tell meaningful stories with the things that we care about.
And I really think that this kind of approach invites an attentiveness to material things that I see as really closely related to care, right?
When you’re attentive to things, when you’re asking questions, you’re also caring for those things.
And that ethics of care, I think, is part of what we do as museum professionals when we think about our collections and the communities we are privileged to serve.
And this item in your collection, which is also here in the room with us, what a treasure.
It invites this kind of attentive care.
I think it really invites this kind of care.
This object, “The Kraft Cheese House ‘Gang'” signature quilt from 1942 to 1999.
1942/1999, which I will explain in a little bit.
So here’s what we know about the woman initially responsible for this object.
Here she is, Julie Powell, nee Skrube, in her Kraft Cheese uniform in 1942.
And there we also see an image of her square from the quilt.
And here’s what we know about her from the museum records.
A single mother of two, Julia Powell commuted to Plymouth every week, leaving Sunday afternoon and returning Friday evening.
Her mother and father, Franca and Blaz Skrube of Sheboygan, cared for the children, Charles and Sharon, while Julie made her living in Plymouth.
During the week, she stayed in a rented room and remembers that most of the women she worked with at Kraft were from rural farms in the area.
So this object, this image brings us to a very particular moment in time, a very particular moment in Julie’s life, a very particular moment in American history.
And so that’s one line of questioning that we could pursue.
We could think about historical context and really try to dive in to think about women at work on the home front during World War II.
So we know that in this period, many women started working in new ways.
And we don’t know Julie’s exact circumstances, you know, if she had worked before or kind of exactly what prompted her to start working at this period.
But we assume it has something to do with the need for more labor in this historical moment in the 1940s as men are away at war.
But we do know for sure that she was supporting her family and contributing to the war effort.
And this is a somewhat familiar story in some ways, right?
I mean, we all know images of Rosie the Riveter from this period.
But those images, those stories do not always include women like Julie, who might be working in the cheese factory.
They’re not always part of that story.
And I’m showing you here, this is a small help wanted ad from The Sheboygan Press that I found, you know, “Men and women wanted at Kraft Cheese Company, Plymouth.
“Starting wages men, 58 1/2 cents per hour, women, 44 cents per hour.”
You know, apply there.
So we can also sort of think about what is it like to be a working woman at this moment, when ads like this are part of the culture where men and women are routinely getting paid different amounts, right?
And then looking at these two images from just a little bit earlier this year, these photographs are centering and naming the male factory workers kind of in the foreground of the images, but look closely.
And you’ll see in the background a woman in each of these images.
In the bottom, a woman wearing a uniform not unlike Julie’s.
But they’re not foregrounded in these stories, right?
They’re receding into the background.
These stories are not often told, right?
So Julie ends up leaving this job in 1943, and she gets married again.
But in the next year, we see even more conversations and newer conversations with a different tone about what it meant for women to work as part of the war effort.
So this is just the next year in the Sheboygan papers, ads for women working in places like Kraft changed dramatically.
We don’t see that same kind of ad describing how much men and women are gonna make, but suddenly, women are wanted for essential war work.
The hours even are shifted so you could do this work while your child might be at school from 8:30 to 2:00 PM, like trying to really think dramatically, “How do we do this,” right?
But there’s a shift in tone.
There are posters like this really quite fabulous, you know, “soldiers without guns” image.
We start to see new conversations about women at work.
So you could go down this line of questioning.
This is a rabbit hole you could follow to think about Julie’s story, right?
But we also know that Julie made wonderful friends while at Kraft.
And as her daughter-in-law remembered years later, she wanted to have something to remember them by.
And so what she did was she asked each of these friends to embroider one cotton square with their name on it.
And the finished blocks were to be made into a friendship quilt, which would commemorate their time at Kraft.
Now, as I’ve been able to figure out in my research, in the 1940s, there were a lot of friendship quilts circulating in Sheboygan.
There was one made by a 4-H club in 1942.
There were quilts made for wedding gifts, as raffle prizes for various women’s organizations.
This was something that was a pretty popular thing to do.
So why not have the Kraft Cheese House Gang make a quilt to remember their time commuting into Plymouth, commuting on a Friday, excuse me, on a Sunday to a Friday to do this work?
And so that’s something that she asked her friends to do.
And maybe she was inspired by other quilts.
Like this is an example of an album quilt from 1943, quite similar to the eventual result of this quilt.
This was made by a group of cousins in Ohio, with each cousin creating a square that was then quilted together.
So another kind of line of work that we could think about is comparison.
Another line of questions.
What about similar quilts?
What else is happening?
Are other people making similar objects?
Or a quilt square in our collection, also from the mid 20th century, thinking about these signatures on this quilt, on this quilt square.
So we could think about textiles, community, context, similar sorts of objects.
So back to the quilt.
We also might wanna ask another line of questioning.
How was this made, okay?
What was the process that was used to create this object?
Each square is different.
And I was excited to actually find some transfers that were likely used on quilts like this one to help create the various images that we see on the different squares.
So there were a series of transfer prints, basically early iron-on transfers that came with a subscription to the periodical Aunt Martha’s Workbasket.
These were called Numo Hot Iron Transfers.
And each one had different patterns.
You could use them multiple times.
They could be reused, they could be traded.
You would get different patterns every month.
And so you could kind of begin to see how, with a quilt like this, different women could use different transfers and they could create their own unique image.
And I love these because when we look at some of these quilt blocks, which I think are absolutely charming, what we see are women thinking about a particular style maybe of that moment, but they’re working it out in their own way.
They’re telling their own unique story about this time.
We have their nicknames, there’s Shorty, there’s Squirt, there’s Johnny, right?
We have Elma down here reminding her friend, “Hi, babe,” in this bottom square.
And then there are women like Evangeline here on the other square, just “V for Victory” and the year, right?
So each woman shows a unique way of telling this story, right?
There might be these mass-produced patterns that you could draw on, but you’re still telling your own story and you’re doing it in your own way.
And that’s a beautiful way collections like this can help us connect the individual, the local, the specific to the national and the bigger stories, right?
It’s a really, really wonderful way to see that in action with this object.
Another wonderful way to see that in action is to think about the women who created this quilt.
And it’s just so remarkable that this object is connected to these photographs still.
And that’s just such a wonderful, wonderful reason why it’s here.
I mean, the museum is here to care for these connections.
It’s a beautiful thing.
So the women that we see here, this network of women created this object from very particular circumstances, a particular moment in time that allowed them to tell their stories.
And the women here in this photograph, Elma, Lucille, Irene, Shorty, Tuttle, Marie created a number of those squares below.
Lucille apparently did not get her quilt square in.
And I have much empathy for Lucille as I was going through this.
I was like, “Oh, she doesn’t have one.”
It’s okay.
[chuckling] But I feel like that might be me.
But how wonderful to connect these images with these objects in this way.
So we know from the object file that Julie collected the squares from her friends.
Then she left Kraft in 1943, she was married again, she had two more children.
Squares were not made into a quilt, right?
And I know many of us might have unfinished objects laying around our homes.
I have many people in my life who are crafters who refer to these things as UFOs, right?
The unfinished objects that kind of float around your home.
So we understand these things happen, right?
And they ended up in the attic, where she found them at age 82, decades later, okay?
And it was her daughter-in-law, Terri Erick, who actually completed the quilt for her and donated it to the museum in 1999, which I think is just such a beautiful story.
So this album quilt becomes a really beautiful metaphor for the work that museums do, right?
They can keep and share stories, they can put pieces back together, they can help surface complex histories that might need to be investigated.
You know, I kept thinking I wouldn’t have gone back to something like that really dramatic pay disparity.
I wouldn’t have been looking up that topic had I not had this quilt to send me down that path, right?
You know, a quilt, an object can do that.
Objects like this can become prompts for stories that might otherwise disappear, right?
And it’s so wonderful to have them here.
As her daughter-in-law Terri noted when she donated the quilt, “Bringing the squares together “also brought these old friends together again “and allowed their fleeting connection “to travel through time, “creating a representation of a long-ago world that becomes real and present today through this object.”
Now we kind of get to this point by thinking about all of these different material culture approaches, historical context, comparison, thinking about process and making, thinking about this object as part of a network of things and people, and the work of care that both Terri and this museum did to make sure this object got to this moment.
But these are all different material culture approaches.
These are all various lines of questioning that we can engage in together.
And so this kind of textured, object-based care is the work of museums like the Sheboygan County Museum, and it’s work that we can all be part of.
This work roots us in a place, in a community.
And the stories that we find may be similar to, or maybe echo, or might be really different from, in some cases, bigger national stories.
But they can offer us a local, rooted, personal meaning that reminds us of why museums matter, right?
These places help us time travel.
They help us understand the big stories that can be rooted and focused in well-cared for things, because caring for things is truly, truly one of the ways in which we can care for community.
So thank you.
[audience applauding]