PEMcast 28: Drawn to Place

[Musical interlude]

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan: Oftentimes there’s been a headline, "Can museums be relevant?" "Are museums relevant?" So, wake up and smell the coffee. If that's being questioned, then you better pay attention to it. I'm really pleased and happy and proud that museums definitely are in this incredible period of evolution and change and I know that PEM has a lot to contribute to that.

Host, Dinah Cardin: I’m having a conversation with Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the first woman to lead the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Museums are trying to find their footing in a new world that has less patience. Or as a recent piece in the The Boston Globe stated: If 2020 and 2021 saw hurried attempts to get with rapidly changing times, 2022 was more about stitching the urgent lessons of those years into the permanent fabric of our museums.

[Musical interlude]

Dinah: Hordes of people are moving past the big windows outside Lynda’s office. It’s as if we’re looking out at a giant aquarium.

[Water sounds]

Dinah: (tape) So, my question is, if you could wander out there and capture an audience and describe the museum that they're passing in only 10 seconds, what would you say?

Lynda: Oh good Lord. So, I would probably tell them, "There's an incredible array of things that people have made to really enhance and improve how we understand ourselves in the world. It's fun and there's lots of energy and come on in."

Dinah: Welcome to the PEMcast, conversations and stories for the culturally curious. From the Peabody Essex Museum, I’m your host, Dinah Cardin. We’ve recently been talking about how to make PEM a more magnetic destination. A place people feel drawn to and compelled to stay connected. An exhibition that opened in the fall, called Drawn to Place, seems to parallel these thoughts. In this episode, we take you back to the 19th century when the museum was run by a man named Edward Sylvester Morse. His voracious curiosity led him to Japan and to forming an integral part of our museum’s collection. Fast forward to 2022, and the exhibition Drawn to Place features some of those objects. Objects that inspired a massive 58-foot long wall drawing by Canadian artist Shalegh Keeley.

Shelagh Keeley: When you work on a wall, you have to use your whole arm and your body.

Dinah: Shelagh studied with the National Canadian Ballet. Today she brings a certain physicality to her drawing practice as she marks the walls or, as she says, the skin of a room.

Shelagh: I use very much the arc of my body and the gesture of my body.

Dinah: She also uses intuition in her work.

Shelagh: It's very important for me to visit a space ahead of time, to listen to the architecture, the walls, what they tell me, what I feel from the space.

Dinah: Shelagh has much in common with the Peabody Essex Museum. Both have a long history and a fundamental interest in embodied knowledge, multisensory experience and creatively expressing connections between East and West. For 40 years, this artist has been drawing on massive walls.

Shelagh: Why draw on large walls? Who doesn't want to from the time you're a child, right? I mean everyone wants to. The first wall drawing I ever did was in my house in Toronto which was an 1860 house. So, it had incredible layers of wallpaper, probably seven layers on a beautiful plaster wall. I kind of pulled back the wallpaper and then when I saw this beautiful surface, I just had to draw on it. Then I started to be invited to do pieces in other contexts, galleries, and museums. And I'm really interested in this notion of ideas brushing against ideas.

Dinah: This is the title of the wall drawing. Ideas Brushing Against Ideas: The Library as Refuge.

Trevor Smith: The discussion and preparation stretches back almost a decade.

Dinah: This is Trevor Smith, Associate Director of PEM’s Multisensory Experience and Curator of the museum’s Present Tense Initiative.

Dinah: Shelagh was part of a roundtable that our museum did almost ten years ago with The Magazine Antiques.

Trevor: Shelagh’s first visit here was to participate in a roundtable with The Magazine Antiques. That collaboration was about bringing contemporary artists into our institution that has this incredible historical collection, and seeing the collection through the eyes of the artists.

Shelagh: This idea of the layering of the books, the research, my responses to those objects and the collection. To me, it is like a giant notebook. That’s kind of how I want the viewer maybe to read my wall. They're seeing what inspired me, but then they take what they take from it. It could be something completely different.

Trevor: In Shelagh’s work, you always have these registers of mark-making from the written text to very large embodied gestural drawing. There are also gestures that she's made here by just pouring ink down the wall. She took these Japanese inks, and the bottles the ink came from were so beautiful, they looked like perfume bottles. And just ran it down the wall. You have a range of colors. They tend to be very natural colors. There's iron oxides. There's this color which she calls caput mortuum. The original color in the 19th century would have come from mummies. You know, ground-up mummies.

Dinah: (tape) It's a gorgeous color.

Trevor: Yeah, it's a gorgeous color. Like the color of an aged Bordeaux. Obviously, the idea of making wall drawings connects not only to wallpaper, to frescoes. It goes all the way back to cave paintings and, often, this kind of work is associated with storytelling, instruction, etc. Shelagh's work is not so narrative. It's a kind of choreography of memory. In this particular case, the memories have to do with her 10-year association with us and exploring our collection.

Dinah: As a permanent fixture at the museum, Shelagh Keeley’s wall installation will serve as an enduring testament to the power of inspiration and knowledge and commemorate PEM’s very own Phillips Library, one of the main inspiration points for the wall drawing. PEM's research library brings scholars from around the world to explore the collection of rare books and manuscripts, including logbooks from Salem ships that traveled the world. The library preserves important documents from the history of Salem, Essex County and the nation.

Trevor: Shelagh spends a lot of time researching, exploring, contemplating, making notes, making sketches, making drawings in preparation for making the wall.

Shelagh: I've done research and visited libraries all over the world when I've been doing my installations and projects. I'm fascinated by them. They are a refuge and I think that that's part of why there's an attack politically through history because it's a space of freedom. I grew up in a small town and the library was somewhere I could kind of escape and my parents would let me go alone at night. It was a space for me where intellectually, like, I could be away from my family and think and be on my own and start making my way out into the world.

Trevor: I remember when I was a student, of course, you'd find the book you want, and then you'd start looking down the stack or down the shelf to see what knowledge was adjacent to that thing that you were interested in. It's how the Internet works. This is a very physical embodied expression of that same principle. If you think about the title, ideas brushing against ideas, that idea of ideas and gestures and materials that are coming from different places, different cultures coming together. This is where creative potential comes from. This is where new ideas emerge. This is how cultural change happens. It's an opportunity to reflect on what happens with all this knowledge rubbing up against each other.

Dinah: (tape) Which is essentially what PEM is as well, right?

Trevor: Which is fundamentally what PEM is. Absolutely. We were founded by what in effect were this country's first generation of global entrepreneurs. The objects that they were acquiring and bringing back were objects that spoke about their encounters across cultures and objects that spoke to their sense of wonder about what they were encountering and their desire to communicate about that. I think this is still a very, very important task for museums today. The leap from the book knowledge that you get as a student and the kind of insights that you get when you physically experience a place or encounter an object or a space for the first time, it's profound.

Dinah: Working with individual curators at PEM, Shelagh found objects that resonated with her. Some of these objects are now in a case across from the wall drawing they inspired.

Trevor: Then this group of bowls, largely Japanese. You can see with this larger white bowl, which is quite early -- it's 1400s. The bowl has been broken at some point and it’s been repaired, but it’s been repaired with gold. That’s a practice in Japan known as Kenshugi. It really is signifying the kind of preciousness of an object.

Dinah: (tape) I thought this label was interesting…These objects stand as examples of the works that inspire her and they are shown here in celebration for her regard for those who care for them. What does that mean?

Trevor: What that means is that, without the people who have dedicated their lives to collecting such objects, to making sure that they're kept safe for future generations, for helping us bring these works into dialogue with a 21st-century artist, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to think about these connections through time.

Dinah: This dialogue began when Shelagh first came to PEM. She became fascinated by a very rare set of antique wallpaper that was being restored. It was hand-painted in China for a castle in Scotland hundred of years ago but it spoke clearly to her, through time and across cultures.

[Music from Asian Export Art gallery]

Karina Corrigan: So we’re sitting here in the reinstallation of the Strathallan castle wallpaper in the Asian Export Art Wing. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we wanted to install this.

Dinah: This Is Karina Corrigan, PEM's Associate Director of Collections and The H.A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art.

Karina: So, this is an entire room of hand painted Chinese export wallpaper that was painted about 1800 and was almost certainly a commission for James Drummond, who was a Scottish merchant in the British East India Company. He spent about 20 years in China, and when he was headed home to cold, rainy Scotland, he perhaps was wanting to bring a bit of China home with him, and so he commissioned this wallpaper. Many houses in Scotland and elsewhere had hand painted Chinese wallpaper, but this set is absolutely unique in that it depicts the foreign factories or Hongs in Guangzhou, in Canton.

[Music gets louder from Asian Export Art gallery]

Karina: This is fundamentally a sound and light installation to accompany the wallpaper that takes you from China to Scotland and back with the sounds of Erhu and bagpipes for China and Scotland, respectively. But there are also individualized elements of sound. So, the sounds of James Drummond walking across the room or enjoying a cup of tea, so the clink of porcelain. This paper hung on the walls of Strathallan castle in Scotland for 175 years. In fact, it was with a London dealer for almost 20 years. We worked very hard to try to acquire it, but it did need a lot of conservation in order for us to install it.

Shelagh: I was fascinated by the wallpaper. I'd never seen that hand-painted wallpaper before.

Karina: When Shelagh saw the paper in 2013, I believe we had only managed to get 9 of the 19 panels installed. The panels are mounted on essentially what are very large picture frames. And so, they're movable. The paper is backed on Tyvek if you think about that building material that wraps construction sites or your boats over the winter.

Dinah: Shelagh’s approach to preserving her own work has been changed since the discovery of the hand-painted wallpaper in our collection.

Karina: That is ultimately allowing us to make her work part of our permanent collection. When the exhibition ultimately closes, we're going to be able to take it off the walls and reinstall it in other places, which will be wonderful.

[Musical interlude]

Dinah: Shelagh Keeley’s practice, like PEM itself, was forged in experiences of global travel and cultural exchange.

Trevor: Certainly travel and the idea of immersing oneself in another place, another culture. Some of the earliest travel she did overseas was throughout Africa in the early 1970s. She spent like 12 or more months moving through the continent.

Shelagh: when I went and did travel in Africa, it was also to learn in a different way from what I was studying in class, sort of be in a context and meeting people and learning in another way.

Dinah: Like Shelagh, one of our museum’s former directors believed in extensive travel and learning by doing. Edward Sylvester Morse was a self taught zoologist who became director of the Peabody Academy of Science, a precursor to PEM. He helped forge the museum’s remarkably long relationship with Japan that extends back more than 200 years. Morse traveled to Japan after it first opened to travelers and was highly influential in encouraging American interest in Japanese art and culture. Ever curious, Morse interacted with the Japanese people, became interested in how they used everyday objects and documented daily life in his sketchbooks. He made significant scientific discoveries and helped PEM establish not only its Japanese collection, but also its natural specimen collection.

Trevor: Definitely Morse is a figure of interest in that shared fascination with travel with other cultures, with a natural world with understanding how people live. He was a person of incredible importance in relation to the natural sciences and archeology, but if we think about the collections that he assembled for this museum in particular, they really tell the story of everyday life in Japan at that time. I think that this is why that collection continues to be so resonant today because it really is about people solving problems. It's about people being creative. It's about how they signal to one another, the daily rituals and so forth.

Dinah: Like Morse, Shelagh spent a lot of time in Japan.

Trevor: Of course, she didn't speak a lot of Japanese, they didn't speak a lot of English, but she immersed herself. She's somebody who isn't traveling for holiday. She isn't traveling to take a break. She's traveling to see the world through new eyes or different eyes.

Dinah: Trevor takes me through a few more objects in the case across the gallery from Shelagh’s wall drawing. Many of them were brought back by Morse in the 19th century.

Trevor: We have this incredible book of hand-painted illustrations of shells. The color of the particular shell that we're showing is really strongly correlating with Sheila's own pallet as an artist. I can remember when we saw this illustration, we all just went, "Oh, wow. That is just so extraordinary." The two cricket cages, this tea scoop, and tea whisk were owned by Morse himself, and one could have imagined him using these implements. It's nice to have this kind of human trace. There's this group of four drawings from his notebooks.

Dinah: (tape) Can we describe this one right here?

Trevor: In this one, you have a figure who looks to be serving tea or food like perhaps a street vendor.

Dinah: Morse’s illustrations include the book "Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings.” Published in 1888, this was an intimate study of the Japanese home of that time and included more than 300 line drawings. You could equate this book with a Super 8 film Shelagh made when she first went to Japan in 1985 to study the zen gardens, landscapes and architecture of Kyoto. The film is being screened in PEM’s Japanese gallery, in a space that is known as a tokonoma. In a traditional Japanese home, this would be an area reserved for contemplation.

Shelagh: I never have used tripods. It moves with me, kind of, the fim, but the whole point of it was really to record these extraordinary spaces.

Dinah: (tape) She talked about how no tripod, just really shaky, which has got a charm to it, I think.

Trevor: Yeah, you're very aware that the film is handheld. When we were looking at the projection the other day, she's going, "Oh man, I'm moving that camera so fast." [laughs] Again, this is an instance where you are seeing in effect through the eyes of somebody seeing something for the first time. You are following in her footsteps. You are moving following her journey as her eye passes through the landscape along the winding paths, taking the measure of the place in effect.

Dinah: Like Shelagh, Edward Sylvelstor Morse was constantly curious during his 19th century travels about the way things were done in Japanese culture.

Karina: Morse was collecting objects of daily life.

Dinah: This is Karina again.

Karina: He went to Japan as a scientist studying brachiopods, but over the course of his time in Japan, he became increasingly interested in the culture of Japan and recognized that a lot of the more traditional ways of living in Japan were disappearing during the Meiji era and the increasing accessibility of Japan to the wider world.

Dinah: Morse appreciated everyday Japanese objects for their melding of form and function.

Karina: We have works that were assembled by Morse and others that are really not represented in any other collection either here in the United States or Japan. Very simple things that were not typically saved. I think that's one of the aspects of PEM's Japanese collection that makes it so rich and unique. For example, one of PEM's great treasures in the Japanese collection is a very large group of what are known as Kanban. These are shop signs that are often very large wood signs that would have hung from the outside of a building, and they don't necessarily have words on them. It's, for example, the carving of a giant radish to advertise that this is a vegetable shop, or a whole series of very beautiful sword guards mounted together to advertise that this is where you would go to buy a sword.

[Footsteps on squeaky old floor]

Karina: This is an example of one of those kanban, these were ever present in Japan in the 19th century, but really were quickly disappearing. Morse recognized that it was important to preserve this form of material culture. This is a totally fabulous toy shop sign in the form of Daruma. The shape of this sign is based on the round Daruma doll, which depicts Bodhidharma, the Indian prince who was the legendary founder of Zen Buddhism. Fundamentally, you get a little Daruma doll and the eyes don't have pupils on them. You're supposed to color in one pupil as you wish for something and then, ultimately, when that wish is fulfilled, you can color in the second eye. Many, many years ago, I got a Daruma doll and I wished for a daughter. I had to wait 10 years, but I colored in the other eye ball of my Daruma doll when my daughter Annika was born.

Dinah: (tape) What is it about Morse's curiosity and his love of travel that feels very the origins of PEM?

Karina: I think he was a voraciously curious man and cleary went to Japan for one thing and then continued to do that but then also was doing so many other things.

Karina: In 1877, when Morse was in Japan, he was on a train and he spotted several what would ultimately he would realize are Neolithic shell mounds at Ōmori what is present day Ōta City in Tokyo.

Dinah: These ancient dumping grounds contained thousands of years of human existence waiting to be discovered.

Karina: The subsequent excavations at the Ōmori Shell Mounds mark the birth of Japanese archaeology. His presence is visible in the 21st century Peabody Essex Museum in so many different ways. He's very clearly present in the Japanese gallery with so many things that he donated and collected. And even our…beautiful auditorium, where so many lectures and programs take place, is named in his honor. He is very much with us even to today.

Dinah: Morse’s world travels and major accomplishments came from humble beginnings in nearby Portland, Maine, where as a child, his curiosity led him to collect seashells.

Lynda: I share the passion for collecting seashells, although he would have known much more about them scientifically.

Dinah: We’re back to PEM’s current director, Lynda Roscoe Hatigan.

Lynda: My husband would say, "Do you have to pick up one more shell” when we're on the beach?

Dinah: Preferring self-guided nature explorations, Morse never received any formal diplomas. Yet, with his scientific mind, in 1859 — the same year Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published — he joined a coterie of up-and coming scientists at Harvard. This led Morse Salem, to the Essex Institute and then, in 1867, the newly established Peabody Academy of Science. Here, he dazzled people with his popular and humorous lectures, illustrating them with precise sketches on the blackboard.

Lynda: I think, increasingly, we need to pay more attention here to the intersection of the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Dinah: Lynda is excited to get the museum back to its roots with a better connection to science, when the museum collected natural specimens.

Lynda: We as human beings tend to forget that we are part of nature. We're not separate from it. Obviously, we're big players in nature.

Dinah: As part of PEM’s Climate and Environment initiative, we've been streamlining our exhibition practices to be more environmentally friendly, offsetting our carbon consumption, and even receiving awards for how climate-minded the museum is. But for all of this progress and focus on the future, we’re also relying on the resilience of our historic institution when ship captions navigated the globe, bringing back treasures that would form our collection.

Dinah: (tape) We have this unique history that almost no American museum has. How does that give us resiliency and how does that set us apart?

Lynda: It's never been a place that has stood still, rested on its laurels. I think that's just incredibly important. When the museum was founded in 1799, it was an expression of how people who had the means to go out into the world for trade, were also very intent upon doing something for the community, and creating an environment in which people could experience things that they otherwise weren't ever going to get on a ship and go and be able to see. Edward Sylvester Morse was curious and eager to respect and understand other cultures. I think he did that in some respects as a maverick.

Dinah: Morse was eager to get out of his comfort zone.

Lynda: Change is a positive force in your life. For me, one of the lessons that I take away from Morse and people like him is that it's important to dare to think differently, and to be as open as you possibly can to seeing the value and difference and to be absolutely passionate about what you're doing. The fact that he is still so revered in Japan, for example, for the discoveries that he made and how he made that known to the world means that a museum director can have real impact and lasting impact.

Dinah: As the first woman to lead this organization, Lynda also has a real opportunity to be impactful.

Lynda: Having this opportunity means that whatever skills I have as a mentor and as an example, I hope will become evident and encourage younger generations of women that they, too, can have this role.

Dinah: (tape) On one hand, it's like, "Oh, come on. It's 2022. This is not even an issue anymore."

Lynda: Of course, it's still an issue. There's plenty of stuff going on in today's culture that suggests that women do still have a battle, if you will, to protect their rights and to have a place at the table.

Dinah: (tape) We have a lot of issues in this world that need to be solved creatively.

Lynda: Creativity is a positive force in our lives and that should be giving us hope and belief in what human beings can accomplish individually and collectively.

Dinah: Because it’s powerful to see something that someone else made in another place and time. It’s a conversation. That’s why Shelagh Keeley, an international artist working today, was struck by the things that Edward Sylvester Morse saw in Japan and brought back to our museum for the people of Salem.

Dinah: What do you think Morse would say about the museum today?

Lynda: I do think that he would probably be really surprised. It’s just so different from what he would have experienced. I kind of imagine him running here and there to see what he could see next.

[Footsteps and then Drumming]

Dinah: The bond between Japan and the Peabody Essex Museum remains strong. Since the 1980s, PEM has lent objects to numerous exhibitions in Japan, featuring Japanese art and material culture from the Morse Collection. And the city of Salem shares a special relationship with Ota City as sister cities. This drumming that you’re hearing took place at PEM during a recent celebration of this 30 year partnership.

Peter Dolan: Over the years, we’ve sent over over 2,500 people back and forth and they’ve stayed in each other’s homes. They’ve become family members.

Dinah: This is the exchange program’s longtime organizer Peter Dolan.

Peter: It’s had offshoots that we never expected when we started all of this. Kids that have gone over from Salem have made such a strong bond that when they’ve been married here in the States, their quote, unquote, Japanese mom and dad have come from the wedding, saw their graduations from college.

[Drumming and cheering]

Dinah: During the pandemic, the exchange program had to take place with shared cards and video well wishes. It will slowly resume in the spring of 2023, first with a group of adults going from Salem to Japan.

Peter: It is red carpet treatment the entire time. Yes, we are on buses, we’re on trains, we’re on boats, we’re traveling all over Japan. We go up into the mountains, we go to Hiroshima and Kyoto we spend a couple of days. But then when in Oto itself, we get into the businesses, we get into the government and we visit Ota City Hall and then we also go into the school and spend a couple of days in the schools with the kids. You really get to know the people of Ota and that’s what is special about this experience. That’s what happens with this program is students and adults just make these connections that they hold onto and Dr. Morse would be very happy, I think. (Laughs)

Dinah: The celebration, this past summer, brought people who first participated in the program three decades ago. And there was one very special guest, Edward Sylvestor Morse’s great granddaughter.

Peter: We invited her and she came. It was so neat to meet her, it really, truly was. She was so proud that her grandfather is still being remembered and his work, it means something.

Dinah: One final thought. We recently received an email from a visitor named Josh, who felt compelled to share about his first visit to PEM. It said: There are several pieces on display that have opened something inside of me. I stood in absolute captivation. Very rarely have I had such an experience, but there was such a connection. If only I could go back in time and high five the artists hundreds of years ago for making such an impact on at least one individual in the future. Do you have a story to share with us about your experience at PEM? Email us at stories@pem.org.

[Musical interlude]

Dinah: Shelagh Keeley: Drawn to Place is on view until February 19, 2024. This episode of the PEMcast was produced by me, Dinah Cardin, and edited and mixed by Erika Sutter. The PEMcast is generously supported by the George S. Parker Fund.