Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1918. / "From the American Journal of Archaeology, vol. XXIII, no. 3."

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) of Richmond, Virginia, is completing its largest expansion and reinstalling over 6000 artworks, including the Ancient American art collection, to be displayed in the museum’s first permanent gallery space for Ancient American art. In preparation for expansion, the VMFA issued its “Interpretive Plan Guiding Principles,” identifying visitor motivations for viewing the collections. As collection accessibility is central to the museum’s mission statement, all galleries are to provide visitors with the tools to engage with artworks. This thesis project presents a comprehensive history of Pre-Columbian collecting in museums and the history of the VMFA including its Pre-Columbian collection, which will be displayed in the Ancient American Gallery. It includes a summary of research conducted on objects designated for installation. Finally, this project addresses how the Ancient American Gallery will serve as an environment adapting to the principle experiences established by the VMFA.

Note: pages 126, 183, and 209a are missing from the original. / Designed in 1870 and opened in 1876, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was encrusted with ornamental terracotta, a material essentially unknown in America at that time. Across the Atlantic the South Kensington Museums in London (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) had grown up following the Great Exhibition of 1851. By 1869 they were housed in buildings which are among the best known examples of terracotta architecture in the world. In both philosophy and structure, the South Kensington Museums were the model for the Boston enterprise, the first great public art museum in America. The mid-nineteenth century re-emergence of terracotta has been an accepted fact for some time. Heretofore most scholarly attention has arisen in connection with its application as cladding to steel frame structures like skyscrapers in the last quarter of the century. Consequently, research on the origins and use of the material is fragmented and inconclusive. This dissertation addresses questions of its technological development, early applications in England at mid-century, and its long-range aesthetic implications which have not been generally recognized by architectural historians. Because of its specific and documented transatlantic connections, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, assumes a central role in the matter of the terracotta revival and stylistic influences from England to America. It would appear that Sturgis and Brigham (1866-1886), architects of the museum, were in a unique position to design and execute a terracotta building in America in 1870 because of the English education and affiliations of John Sturgis (1834-1888), who was able to research and contract the production of the terracotta ornament in Stamford, Lincolnshire from John Marriott Blashfield. With his able young partner, Charles Brigham (1841-1925) running the Boston office during his long absences abroad, the complexities of the construction were carried forward on a transatlantic basis by Sturgis, the prime designer. Much new source material concerning those personalities involved with the early nineteenth century production and use of terra cotta in England is contained in the letters and papers of John Sturgis, the foundation of this work. This study attempts to establish the nineteenth century chronology of the terracotta revival in England prior to 1870. The technological development of the material and its role within the South Kensington Museums is explored in detail. Major terracotta installations in England prior to 1870 are identified and the relationship of the material to museum architecture, a newly emerging form, is discussed. The Boston museum is then assessed in terms of its origins. On a larger, aesthetic base the role of terracotta is reviewed within the framework of the Gothic and Queen Anne Revivals of the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Recently, the management of museum shops has become a popular issue in museum sector. Many people think museum shops are an unique place in the museum, also a perfect place to buy gifts for other countries. The operation of museum shops is one of the emphasing areas and sets up many individual operating divisions, such as cultural goods developing divisions in the United States, United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. Today museum is not only for exhibition, but also become a place of collecting various resources to create more service to the public. New businesses such as museum shops has been developed by museums. This study attempts to discover the operation at mode of museum shops and the changellages of museum shops. The study used multiple-case studies as research method. Three cases are shops of public fine arts museums in Taiwan, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. The methods of data collection include observation, documental analysis and interviews. The study uses triangulation to increase credibility and reliability. The major research questions are listed as follows. First, what are the operation and strategies of museum shops? Second, how to develop and design merchandises in museum shops? What is their considerations for the future? Five aspects of the research: operational principle, organization structure and human resource management, financial management, marketing, and the product design as well as the atmosphere of museum shops. The results indicated as follows: 1. The mission of museum shops and images of museum can coorspandant very well. 2. The structure of museum shops are established according to the Cooperatives Act. 3. Applying the cooperative Act on museum shops has its own advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are to increase the sense of participation to museum shops; the disadvantages are administrators¡¦ overlapping and overloading of workload. 4. The standard of selectring shop clerk is having good communication capability and love Arts. 5. The earned income is divided into four ways: provident fund, public welfare fund, museum fund and public revenue. The museum shops have limited funds on their own used. 6. The cultural goods that are designed and made by museum shops are limited. 7. The development of cultural goods should be noted intellectual property rights. 8. A good environment in museum shops stimulates consumption. 9. The marketing of the museum shops usually is with the large-scale exhibitions or blockbuster show, yet it seldom uses internet marketing. Suggestions are provided to the public museum shops, the government, and future research in Taiwan. 1. Museum should reconsider the connection between museum shops as well as cultural and creative industries. 2. Museums and museum shops should strengthen their branding, and set up the selction process of their culture products. The products in museums shops should include characteristics of each museum and various products. 3. Using electronical at media to enhance the explanation and education of cultural goods. 4. Applying internet marketing and event marketing. 5. The necessity of establishing transparent financial system. 6. Holding the competition of culture product design for students. 7. Brand alliance. The government could think the possibility of privatization and corporatization of public museum shops. Suggestions to the follow-up study will be that the European countries or neighboring countries such as Japan, South Korea¡¦s museum shops, or private museum shops can be studied.

This study concerned the methods in which fourth and fifth grade teachers in one of the larger suburbs of Dallas, Texas, prepared themselves and their classes for a visit to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Twenty teachers who had visited the Dallas museum in the last two years were interviewed using a validated interview questionnaire. The majority of teachers were concerned with both visual and written resources. Although, additional materials were requested, many teachers were uniformed about preparation resources provided by the museum. The teachers' idea and attitudes were found to be supportive of the museum and its programs.

Reason for writing. The space of confusion and possibility where the practices of art and design collide seems to be in a constant amoebic state. This place of shared influence and growth seems to pervade not only the intersection of these two disciplines, but within interior design, the intersection of people and space. How can the boundaries between an interior space and it’s inhabitants be as richly embedded with tension and opportunity as the edges where art and design meet? Like art and design, how can a space and it’s visitors interact to affect one another? Problem + Methodology: This project explores these questions in a context mindful of their origin: The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The design proposal of inserting a fashion wing into the VMFA’s existing context evolves from research and process work across art, design, and architecture, from the scale of the building to the scale of a seat. Results + Implications: The challenge of creating public space that can be just as responsive to and influential over it’s inhabitants as private space seems resolved through the navigation of movement and moment. Finding value in an unscripted discovery of a space and the ownership of private experiences, offers a way to feel engaged with and connected to a space that doesn’t rely on object ownership or territorial comfort. This solution does rely, however, on inhabitants capable of being present and responsive to their environment, allowing other visitor’s interactions with the space and their individual path through the exhibits to affect their perceptions of and connectedness with the design.

Collection, research, exhibition and education are traditional functions of a museum. With the taking off of the economy and change of social pattern, people have more time to do leisure activities which brings about the focus on museum as a potential destination. The museum opening hours, as a result, has to adjust accordingly, and late opening becomes a worldwide trend. The goal of the present study is to find out the conditions and essential factors regarding late opening of museums, and to assess the possibility of a late opening for Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and the related industries. The research has adopted different approaches including literature review, case study and in-depth interview in the project. Four categories were included in the research: 1. The original policy and reasons of museum late opening; 2. The implement of late opening; 3. Cooperation in hardware facilities, public transportation, restaurants and museum stores; 4. Assessment of the outcomes. We found that: 1. Late opening is usually a policy from higher authority; 2. A clear and definite objective and targeted visitors is the key to a successful late opening; 3.Choose a better time for the highest cost benefit; 4. Using various activities to attract visitors during late opening; 5. Wisely make use of available budget and active fund-raising; 6. Utilizing special events to strengthen the marketing forces; 7. Well established public transportation, lightning, and catering facilities. According to the results of the study, some suggestions are provided for the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts: 1. Staff of Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts should be leisure-oriented in managing the museum. 2. Strengthen the symbolization of the museum as the art exhibition center in Kaohsiung. 3. Co-Marketing with other municipal activities and establishing an effective marketing strategy for the residents. 5. Seeking corporate sponsorship for late opening and recruiting volunteers to support the late opening 6. Making circumspect assessments regarding the late opening.

The art historian Charles Callahan Perkins (1823–1886) taught Boston elites to embrace early Italian Renaissance art, and, in so doing, transformed the cultural landscape of his city. Mostly Unitarian in their religious beliefs, the local elites had previously spurned Italian paintings and sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for their Roman Catholicism. However, when the new Museum of Fine Arts opened on July 4, 1876, the institution displayed close to one hundred art objects of the period, mostly copies. Perkins, who had returned recently from twenty-five years in Europe as an acclaimed scholar and illustrator of early Italian Renaissance sculpture and an expert in fine arts museums, was responsible for this result. Perkins focused on art whose “visual rhetoric” reflected the early Italian Renaissance humanist belief in clarity of line and subject as the most pleasing and edifying in art. These Renaissance principles emerged in his view from classical rhetoric, that is strategies for persuasive spoken and written communication, which had long been the core curriculum of Harvard University where Boston elites studied. Perkins also capitalized on the city’s taste for classical sculpture by privileging quattrocento sculpture, which, while more devotional in subject than had traditionally been displayed, did feature a naturalism that evoked ancient art. Chapter one presents four biographical case studies of individuals who were important players in shaping the fertile cultural ground upon which Perkins built a generation later. Chapter two forges the link between classical rhetoric and the fine arts in ante-bellum Boston. Chapter three examines the broad-based revival of early Italian Renaissance art that Perkins encountered in mid-century Europe. Chapter four assesses his own professional oeuvre within that context. The concluding chapter demonstrates how Perkins revamped ideas of what constituted fine art and how it could be viewed by positioning early Renaissance art at the new Museum as a powerful visually rhetorical tool, thus achieving a far more wide-reaching cultural change than previous scholarship has suggested.

In order to develop a program whereby people can be educated to appreciate and choose the best contemporary designs among the many textiles that are available, it is necessary to know which types of textiles, if any, among those designed in the modern manner, the public accepts, which it rejects, and the factors that influence selection. This study was made to discover those factors -- such as color, subject matter, and utility -- that determine popular choices in a representative group of well-designed modern printed textiles which were available on the Dallas market. The textiles were placed on public exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.

This museum thesis project considers the challenges involved in developing engaging museum tours. The purpose of this project was to develop a fifty-minute, guided gallery tour that uses inquiry-based instruction to engage participants in dialogue and critical thinking about artworks. The tour was designed specifically for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond, Virginia, using artworks selected from the museum’s twenty-first-century art collection that relate to the theme hybridity. This project contributes to the museum studies field by exemplifying how gallery tours can stimulate active learning, encourage visitors to find meaning in artworks, and form their own conclusions about objects in the museum. The project provides a model for integrating inquiry-generated dialogue within the gallery tour structure. Finally, it demonstrates that dialogue-based teaching can be used with teens and adults, audiences that some educators perceive as more reticent than younger learners to engage with this style of education.