One of the best aspects of working in a museum is the constant discoveries we make about our objects. In addition to preserving and protecting the objects in our care, we also spend a lot of time researching objects in our collection. Each object embodies a specific narrative, and it's our job to document and relate this story. One of our goals in starting this blog was to make these narratives widely available. We also share our research through regular exhibitions in our gallery, presentations at academic and community venues, and through our interactions with the faculty and students of FIDM.
When we're researching objects, we utilize a variety of resources. In our post today, we're going to reveal some of our sources! Readers, we'd also love to hear from you. Where do you turn when you are trying to find out more about a particular garment or designer?
A well-designed and well-installed museum exhibit appears effortless, as if the objects on display were always meant to be viewed in that exact context. Despite this apparent ease, museum exhibitions require a tremendous amount of long-range planning. Christina Johnson and Kevin Jones, co-curators of High Style: Betsy Bloomingdale and the Haute Couture spent three years planning the exhibition. An important aspect of their planning was deciding how to best display the garments. As you've seen from the images we post on this blog, the FIDM Museum has an extensive collection of dress forms and mannequins. Christina and Kevin decided, however, that Betsy Bloomingdale's haute couture garments would be best displayed on floating forms. Unlike mannequins or dress forms, floating forms do not extend beyond the boundaries of the garment. This allows you to focus entirely on the garment, without the distraction of legs, arms or facial characteristics.
As you might imagine, creating floating forms is a complicated process. All of the floating forms used to display the garments in High Style were created by Carolyn Jamerson, FIDM Museum Study Collection Manager. Carolyn worked on the floating forms for almost a year! She recently gave a presentation about the process and we're going to feature a brief overview today.
First of all, we'd like to thank you for your fantastic response to our blog. We're very excited that our blog is off to such a great start and look forward to sharing more FIDM Museum objects with you. Thanks for your support!
Our posts so far have focused primarily on contextualizing a variety of museum objects for you. We are also planning posts intended to provide insight into some of the "behind the scenes" aspects of museum life. In particular, we are interested in any questions you might have about working in a museum. For example, you may wonder about the many steps it takes to produce and mount an exhibition. Or you might be curious as to where and how we store all of our varied objects. Maybe you have a question about our Study Collection. You probably have a number of questions that haven't even occurred to us!
We're hoping that you will be willing to share your questions with us via comments on this post or by sending us an email. Any questions you submit will be answered in upcoming posts. We truly look forward to hearing from you, so send some questions our way!
