Research in Museum Collections
While working in museum collections I have frequently assisted researchers and students with access to collections by pulling artworks for study and providing associated and records. I have also been trained in conducting research in museum collections through a class in graduate school that focused on object-research methods using a model from SIMA . During this course I conducted research on basketry hats from the Klamath River area of Northern California. For another project I conducted research on a series of flat twined "cornhusk" bags from the Plateau region in the collections of the Denver Art Museum. As a part of my master's thesis project I wrote and was awarded a Museum Student Research Award to study the basketry collections of four other museums in California (Oakland Museum of California, California Academy of Sciences, the Hoopa Valley Tribal Museum, and the Clarke Museum). I used this research to develop resources for my project including a guide for others conducting similar research projects in museums.
Mills College Art Museum Basketry Collection
In October of 2020 I visited the Mills College Art Museum to research 39 baskets from Northern California Indigenous communities in the MCAM collection. This research project was sparked when I was looking through the baskets in the MCAM online collection and found a few from Northern California that were almost certainly misidentified. I worked with MCAM’s Exhibitions and Collections Manager to closely examine several baskets and improve the catalog records for the basketry from this Northern California region. I also wrote about this project and my research on the MCAM blog Glass Cube in a piece called Basketry is Sustenance .
Plateau Cornhusk Bags
In 2016 as part of a graduate seminar in Indigenous art histories, I conducted an object-based research project on flat twined "cornhusk" bags from the Nimíipuu and the Plateau region of North America. This project included using the collections at the Denver Art Museum, presenting my results in a lecture, and co-curating an online exhibit . Our papers were also structured for inclusion in the records of the Denver Art Museum for future researchers.
Northern California Basketry Hats
In 2015 I participated in a course on object-based research methods using museum collections. Over the course of several months I conducted a research project on Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk basketry hats from the Klamath River area in Northern California. This project included practicing "close-looking" techniques, developing a research question, identifying primary and secondary source research materials, digitizing the small collection, and presenting my results to the public and to the museum staff in the form of an academic lecture at a research symposium.
As a part of my master's thesis project I wrote and was awarded a Museum Student Research Award to study the basketry collections of four other museums in California (Oakland Museum of California, California Academy of Sciences, the Hoopa Valley Tribal Museum, and the Clarke Museum). I used this research to look at more basketry hats all over California, as well as some raw basketry materials. This work and the conversations I had with community members enhanced this ongoing research. I presented this work again at the Handweaver's Guild of Boulder meeting in the fall of 2016.
Graduate Thesis Project
As a part of my 2016 master's thesis project work on preserving ethnographic basketry collections I focused on a three part preservation model: information, materials, and access. The project was designed to be an accessible tool for museum professionals and contained numerous case studies, practical examples, and resources such as brochures and guides, a sample space assessment, an academic research paper, and an example of a basketry exhibit. A sample of theses resources are included below, and you can see them shared publicly through the industry website Museum Trade . For a copy of the whole project, please contact me and I'd be happy to share it with you!
Resources:
Researching Collections Brochure
