Open Forum

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Susan Laudicina
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Hello,

As a student, I'd like to learn more about the role of provenance research.  I'd appreciate any feedback you can give me on these questions:

1)  Before purchasing a work or accepting a gift or a loan with an incomplete ownership history, does your museum undertake additional research to determine its provenance?

2)  Is it a priority for your museum to conduct provenance research on objects in your permanent collection?

3)  Does your museum make public the results of its provenance research or share its findings with other museums?

Thanks very much.

Susan Laudicina

Candidate, Certificate in

Art Collections Management and Display

New York University, NY

Hello Susan, 

The answer to all of your questions should be "yes" for all museums. Note the use of "should". You're undoubtedly familiar with the AAM/AAMD 2000 guidelines on provenance research, and the NEPIP site. 

Until very recently, provenance research has been extremely, extremely difficult because resources are/were far away, and research trips to remote archives that result (frequently) in dead ends are very expensive. For museums that are already desperately underfunded, staff that are overworked and overscheduled, and budgets that are thinner than monofilament, the work is very hard to tackle at the scale it probably should be.

I'd be interested to hear how many museums have a dedicated provenance researcher who does only provenance, and how many role it in to "other duties" and curatorial responsibility (registrarial responsibility?). We do have a provenance researcher, in addition to my research which is about 70% of my working time, as well as the curators working on their own items

What I'd be more curious about is how the work of provenance has changed in the 15 or so years since the AAM guidelines came out, plus how things like the Internet Archive, Hathitrust, Gallica, and the Getty Provenance Index have changed the work of provenance research. The practice today is very different from what it was when the guidelines came out. It's easier-not easy, but easier- than ever to do provenance, but it is still such a big project for so many museums. 

At CMoA, we're actually really pumped up about provenance right now. We're working on an IMLS funded project to turn provenance in to structured data, and hopefully in to Linked Open Data. You can read a bit more about our project and what we've been doing on the CMOA blog here, and see our paper from Museums and the Web here, and see my co-conspirator David's slides about it here. 

From a researcher's standpoint, what I need is for more museums to publish their provenance online. Many do not do this, and it makes it difficult to disambiguate paintings. I also think that we kind of owe that to our public as well. For too long we've thought of provenance as the thing that gets published in a paper catalog and that's it. There's some great stories to tell, and if you spend days and weeks neck deep in other people's paintings, you'll find that the inter connectivity of art collecting is really amazing. 

My other researcher wish is that museums would make their archives and archival material available online, or at least a finding aid. For many of the works I have been investigating, we have pretty strong exhibition histories attached. When there are exhibits, there's an exhibit catalogue, and the catalogue can often disambiguate ownership. If I know that John Smith lent it to the exhibit in July 1935, I know that John Smith had it at least by July 1935. More and more of this information is coming online (the Royal Academy has released many of their exhibition catalogues here recently), which is great, but it is still slow. 

With the realization that we can't possibly be magical enough to digitize all of our holdings, my next wish is that there were clearer contacts for people seeking provenance information. Many times I send an email to the general info@museum.org address, and cross my fingers for a reply. It doesn't give me great confidence. I wish there was a "Jane Doe@museum.org for Provenance Inquiries" or even a "Jane Doe@museum.org for Object information queries". Its hard to know where to send this information when you don't know who works where and does what. 

TL;DR: Provenance is easier to do, but we're still miles behind. We need better visibility in to archives and resources in remote places, and need to publish our own internal resources for others to use. More museums need to publish provenance, and publish full (read: OK with incomplete data) sets of their collections.

So...that's nothing like what you wanted, and I'm sorry to have taken your thread as a bit of a provenance soap box. 

It does give me heart that programs are training people in provenance and asking students to think critically about provenance! 

Cheers,

Tracey 

(Standard disclosure that these are my feelings and mine alone)

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Tracey Berg-Fulton
Collections Database Associate
Carnegie Museum of Art
Pittsburgh PA
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