Enfilade

From H-ArtHist:

Houses as Museums / Museums as Houses
The Wallace Collection, London, 12–13 September 2014

Registration due by 31 August 2014

The relationship between museums and domestic spaces is a long and complex one. Museums were born in the houses of collectors, while the reconstruction of the house or domestic room—of ‘home’, effectively—continues to be an influential if controversial model for museum display. On the other hand, museums have at times invested heavily in the idea of their spaces as public, scientific and definitively non-domestic. The line between house and museum is therefore also one between public and private, scientific and domestic; and house-museums/museum-houses have acted both to confirm, to alter, and to undermine this line completely.

The 2014 Museums and Galleries History Group (MGHG) conference seeks to understand the historical development of this relationship by investigating the ways in which museums have acted as houses, and houses have acted as museums. It will also explore the ways in which house-museums and museum-houses have been positioned in boundary zones of space and time, and what effect they have had on those boundaries. The programme
can be viewed and tickets can be purchased here.

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F R I D A Y ,  1 2  S E P T E M B E R

10.00  Registration and refreshments

10.30  Introduction

10.45  1: The Early Modern Legacy (Chair: Stephanie Bowry)
• Theda Jurjens, ‘Artists’ houses: spaces of knowledge, artistic production and social reputation’
• Cristiano Guarneri (IUAV University, Venice), ‘A private display for a public space: The Statuario Pubblico (1587–96), a Venetian approach to the display of ancient sculpture’
• Thomas Schauerte (City of Nuremberg Art Collections), ‘From memorial to museum: The Dürer house in Nuremberg’

12.15  Curator’s introduction to the Great Gallery rehang

12.30  Private view of Great Gallery

13.15  Lunch break

14.30  2: Architecture and Museums / Houses (Chair: Sarah Longair)
• Jeremy Aynsley (University of Brighton), ‘Curating Bauhaus houses, 1923–2019’
• Maria D’Annibale Williams (Ohio University), ‘Museum space in Fascist Verona and the display of social identity: A case study’
• Jane Whittaker (Bowes Museum), ‘Mrs Bowes’s mansion and galleries at Barnard Castle, Durham’

16.00  Tea and coffee

16.30  Roundtable: ‘Curating Houses as Museums’ with Abraham Thomas, Nicholas Tromans, and Giles Waterfield (Chair: Mark Westgarth)

17.30  Wine reception

S A T U R D A Y ,  1 3  S E P T E M B E R

10.00  Tea and coffee

10.30  Keynote lecture by Helen Rees Leahy, ‘The pleasures and paradoxes of house museums’

11.30  3: Concepts and Approaches (Chair: Elena Greer)
• Sophie Forgan (Captain Cook Memorial Museum), ‘Interpretation and anthropological approaches to the historic house museum’
• Lydia Brandt (University of South Carolina), ‘George Washington’s Mount Vernon: America’s First House (museum)’
• Helen Williams (Northumbria University), ‘The literary house museum: An eighteenth-century invention?’

13.00  Lunch break

14.15  4: Modern Spaces, Art and Houses / Museums (Chair: Barbara Lasic)
• Flaminia Gennari Santori (Syracuse University Florence), ‘Tropical baroque – Vizcaya: A Venetian-inspired house museum in Miami’
• Angela Bartholomew (VU University Amsterdam), ‘Chambres d’amis and the mediation of site (1986)’
• Louise Shannon (V&A), ‘Creating “Tomorrow”: Norman Swann moves into the V&A’

15.45  Tea and coffee

16.15  5: Science at Home and on Display (Chair: Ilja Nieuwland)
• Elisabeth Hoffman (University of Kassel), ‘Art and science: the interior of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s home as a museological and epistemological concept’
• Helen McCormack (Glasgow School of Art), ‘The anatomist at home: The Great Windmill Street Anatomy School and Museum’
• Caroline Morris (University of the West of England), ‘”…Fit like a snail to its shell”‘

All conference sessions except the Great Gallery view take place in the lecture theatre. Tea and coffee are provided in the Meeting Room. Wine reception takes place in the Café. Lunch is not provided, but there are many places for lunch very close to the Wallace Collection. The Wallace collection opens at 10.00 so please do not arrive earlier.