In my last post I mentioned that I recently visited the Mariano Fortuny museum in Venice in April of this year. This museum had been on my museum bucket list for quite sometime and to say I was not disappointed was an understatement; the museum blew my mind and I would go back again and again.
Naturally. when I go abroad I like to visit museums to find out more about the area and it’s heritage and history. When I visited Bologna of this Year I visited the Museum of the History of Bologna situated in Bologna’s city centre. The museum details the story of Bologna from pre-historical times through the Roman and Renaissance up to the Twenty-First Century. With a nominal fee of eight euros and situated over several floors visiting the museum was a great way to find out more about the history of Bologna which I admit I knew very little about!
Puppets from King Stag, 1918.
As mentioned in my last post I had the great opportunity to visit the Sophie Taeuber-Arp retrospective at the Tate Modern, London, in October 2021. Sophie Taeuber-Arp is like many women artists; an over-looked Modernist artist whose prolific output and truly multi-disciplinary. Taeuber-Arp worked in mediums as diverse as metal work and needlepoint to drawing and dance across a career that traversed the early part of the twentieth century.
Eva Chichester was a Sunday School teacher born and raised in Newcastle, County Down c.1872 and passed away c.1955. Her life spanned the end of the 19th century and saw the advances for women from the early 20th century to her death in 1955 aged 83. Eva was born into a well-to-do middle-class family and appears from photographs to be her parents only child. Although it is worthwhile noting that little is known about Eva’s life outside of her photographs, albums and travel journals that are now deposited in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). A systematic problem that is all to common with women’s history that scant details of their lives exist and we are left to pick up the pieces from what records do survive from their lives.
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest etc. ever thought of these digital social media platforms as a method of research or public engagement as an historian or museum professional? More and more people in 2019 have social media profiles that highlight their work to a wider, often global audience in a way that people twenty years ago could only dream off. I have and do use Twitter (and soon Instagram) daily to interact with historians across the world and to catch-up on the latest historical research and news whilst also promoting myself as an historian, blogger and curator.