What Do Artists Do All Day?

In 1910, Dr. A. R. Crook, curator at the Illinois State Museum of Natural History, created a list of questions to determine the worth of prospective natural history museum curators.

I found this article recently which was posted by Hyperallergic. Given my interest in natural history and how museums operate, I found this really interesting, if not a little odd! The questions are:

1. In what schools have you studied?
2. What degrees have you received?
3. To what scientific organizations do you belong?
4. State the positions which you have held, the duties involved, and your length of service.
5. What languages other than English do you know?
6. In what countries have you traveled?
7. What have you been interested in collecting?
8. What experience have you had in museum work and in what line are you interested
9. Have you skill in mechanical work, photography, taxidermy, or field work?
10. In how many of the following have you had a working knowledge and which is your
    specialty—geology, mineralogy, paleontology, archeology, ethnology, zoology, botany?
11. Give full list of your scientific publications.
12. What skills do you think you possess as a solicitor for materials and money?
13. Along what lines should a museum be developed; in other words, what is the purpose of a museum?
14. Name ten of the leading natural history museums of the world and state the essential character of each.
15. Give titles of the scientific publications issued by three leading museums in America and by three foreign museums.
16. What has been the trend of museum development in America during the past decade?
17. Distinguish between (a) the educational and (b) the scientific work of a museum.
18. Describe the conditions under which a museum should be a conservator of materials and those under which it should be an aggressive agent in educational work.
19. Has it any other function?
20. Define the scope of (a) a university natural history museum; (b) a municipal natural history museum; (c) a state natural history museum; (d) a national natural history museum.
21. State briefly your views as to the relations which a municipal or state museum should maintain with schools, colleges and special students.
22. Explain in detail the age, intelligence and occupation of the people to whom a museum should appeal and how it can best benefit them.
23. To what extent should the growth of a museum depend upon donations and to what extent upon vigorous effort to reach certain ideals?
24. What do you consider the principal requirements for a satisfactory museum building (Consider at least five points.)
25. Explain the principles of proper labeling, giving an outline of a suitable label for Amphelis cedrorum, Cedar Waxwing; for an army field writing desk used by General Grant during the civil war; for a fossil plant; for a mineral.
26. Discuss items to be considered in case construction.
27. Discuss items to be considered in the color scheme of rooms and furnishings.
28. In what order would you arrange the main groups (such as minerals, rocks, reptiles, etc.) starting with those which would be first seen upon entering a museum?
29. Would you arrange a collection of fossils stratigraphically or zoologically?
30. Where would you store a study series collection?
31. Should a museum receive gifts subject to restrictions imposed by the donor?
32. What is the best method of cataloging a museum?
33. Should a museum issue publications of its own, and if so what should be their character?
34. Should a museum maintain a library, and if so what should be its extent and character?
35. Prepare a thesis of not less than 3,000 words summarizing your views as to the proper organization of a natural history museum as regards (a) personnel (b) care of collections (c) exhibits, emphasizing especially that department which is covered by your specialty.

Here are two more drawings of my hybrids from my sketchbook. I am not entirely pleased with these two drawings, mainly because I feel like I was distracted while drawing them; the draughtsmanship feels of a lower quality than what I would like. I think they are still good as sketches, and getting the ideas out onto the page is the main priority at this moment in time, so they are still of value.

I need to continue to create these hybrids, and quite a few more of them, to make sure I have plenty of my ‘specimens’ to choose from when I begin to develop these initial drawings.

The AirSpace studio artists have been organising an exhibition of their own to run alongside the current AirSpace Gallery exhibition, Icon, with Ian McIntyre. They invited me to join the exhibition, which I thought was a great opportunity to get involved with them. Being involved in an exhibition less than a month into my residency is also a good benefit!

With only joining in with the group exhibition at short notice, and with the themes running around the exhibition, I decided to re-exhibit one of my previous works, the small clay sculptures. I have never exhibited them by themselves, they have always been a part of a larger work. As I want to examine these sculptures a lot during the residency, it was a good way to start the process by seeing how they stand as an artwork by themselves. I chose to use the window space as I have always shown them at a certain height, always at table height or below, so having them almost at eye level is quite interesting. It elevates them and allows you to examine their forms much more closely than how they have been exhibited previously.