Welcome to the Penn Museum blog. First launched in January 2009, the Museum blog now has over 800 posts covering a range of topics in the categories of Museum, Collection, Exhibitions, Research, and By Location. Here you’ll hear directly from our staff and Penn students about their work, research, experiences, and discoveries. To explore the Museum's other digital content, visit The Digital Penn Museum.
Crating and Packing
By: Stephen Lang
After spending some time in Osaka seeing the sites, ( bunraku, fugu, kobe beef, Ceramics Museum, shopping) I headed to the city of Nara ready to get down to work. I arrived at the museum with the intention of condition reporting our statue and its base and then overseeing the crating of each. If time […]
Minpaku!
By: Stephen Lang
I visited the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (MINPAKU). It was incredible. see: http://www.minpaku.ac.jp/english/museum/exhibition/ They had a design award in their lobby prominently displayed and I found out why. The museum galleries are just packed with objects of every kind and sort. The majority of the material seemed to be from the 18th century […]
Power Down Garden Party
By: Bea Jarocha-Ernst
The Museum’s Development Office is happy to have a Penn student, Jessica Bell, as our intern this summer. We hope to show her the full gamut of what development does and one of those things is special events. Her first project on her first day was to label and help stuff all of those buckets […]
Planes, trains, and buses.
By: Stephen Lang
Well I made it to Japan in one piece. The journey was not very pleasant, even though I did get to fly business class. This sometimes happens when the borrowing institution wants you to be able to get some sleep on the plane, particularly when there isn’t much time to get over jet lag. I […]
Courier Trips
By: Stephen Lang
Courier Trips. If you peruse the admin meeting minutes you may notice that every so often a registrar or keeper is away on a courier trip. What are these trips and what do they entail? The answer varies widely depending on the section and the final destination. Courier trips occur when we loan an institution […]
Networking
By: Lynn Grant
In the final week our Chinese colleagues were with us, we did give them a chance to do something other than work on the Horses. Our colleagues at Historic Preservation on Penn’s campus gave them a tour of their architectural conservation labs and digital resources and very kindly arranged for them to have a special […]
The 3D craze
By: Lynn Grant
In the old days (which are still around sometimes), if you wanted to make a copy of something like the Tang Horses, you’d take an impression using silicone rubber or rubber latex or something like that. It was/is a messy business that required a lot of preparation and even then sometimes damaged the artwork it […]
Catching up
By: Lynn Grant
Things have gotten especially interesting around here (see my Museum post “Exodus”, from May 28) and I haven’t had a chance to update you on the Tang Horses. Our Chinese colleagues left us on May 28th, having accomplished great things in a very short time. As I told them, they did in three weeks what […]
Electronic Artifacts Dug Up at the Museum
By: Michael Condiff
It’s only fitting that the technology used to do museum research and administer collections eventually becomes an artifact itself. In the I.T. department we are reminded of this on a daily basis as our office constantly takes in broken and antiquated computers and either fixes or replaces them for museum staff. We will occasionally see […]
Secrets of the Silk Road
By: Stephen Lang
I got my first look at the “Secrets of the Silk Road” exhibition now at the Bowers Museum and it looked great! http://www.bowers.org/index.php/art/exhibitions_details/35 The show opens at the Penn Museum on February 5, 2011 so mark your calendars. I took the audio tour which was included with the price and well worth a listen. […]