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NEWSLETTER Summer 2006 The newsletter of the Spurlock Museum INSIDE 3 CURATOR RECOGNITION: CLARK CUNNINGHAM AND LAURA BELLOWS 4 JOHN GARVEY’S INDONESIAN ARTIFACTS 6 ALLAN CAMPBELL’S ROOTS AT ILLINOIS 7 FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENT CONTRIBUTES TO SPURLOCK A MESSAGE FROM THE MUSEUM DIRECTOR By Douglas Brewer The Museum continues to enjoy an active tion, and we have entered into the second of schedule of exhibitions, events, and perform- three stages of the process. ances.We opened the year with Visions of the As I mentioned in my last letter, we are Unseen: Picturing Balinese Ceremony and Myth, a preparing to offer a Museum Studies Program focus on Balinese paintings and sculptures. Our to our University students. Officially classified next temporary exhibit, Rain Forest Visions, as a “minor,” the curriculum will consist of opened on February 28 and highlighted indige- three required and two elective courses.The nous South American pottery and other art- capstone experience for our students will be works.The Museum has also hosted a number the internship.This will be made possible by of special events in the Knight Auditorium, our collaboration with the Museums of the including the very popular “Wine and the Vine” Crossroads Consortium, which encompasses lecture featuring Dr.Patrick McGovern of the various museums, planetariums, and natural University of Pennsylvania, whose research history learning centers in our community. focuses on the origins and spread of wine and Through this consortium, our students will be viticulture. able to gain hands-on experience in a variety of At the end of each year, the Museum sets a working museums, an important experience in number of goals for the next academic cycle any well-rounded professional curriculum.We SUMMER 2006 (see Director’s Letter FY ‘06).We are proud to are completing the University’s necessary appli- report that we have already realized many of cation forms for new course offerings, which our goals for this year. Last fall, the Museum will give official status to the minor. WILLIAM R. AND CLARICE V. received a wonderful gift from Dr.Allan and As part of a national trend, the Spurlock SPURLOCK MUSEUM Museum is evaluating its role as an information University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Marlene Campbell in support of our rotating 600 S. Gregory St. gallery. In gratitude for their generosity, we service organization. Because museums and Urbana, Il 61801 have renamed this gallery “The Campbell museum professionals have found themselves Phone: (217) 333-2360 Fax: (217) 244-9419 Gallery.” Thanks to a generous gift from Ms. facing new questions and new challenges re- Betty Ann Knight,with matching funds from the garding the access and use of their electronic Director, Douglas J. Brewer University, the Museum is now able to be open records—for example, anyone accessing the Museum Hours: on Sundays, and we hope you will enjoy this Internet can retrieve data relating to Spurlock Tuesday: Noon - 5 pm Wednesday,Thursday, Friday: 9 am - 5 pm new opportunity to visit us. Museum collections, exhibitions, and educational Saturday: 10 am - 4 pm The Museum has also finished the first phase programming—the way our information is used Sunday: Noon - 4 pm becomes an important practical as well as eth- Monday: closed of the American Association of Museums’ formal accreditation process: we filed our application ical issue.The Museum Studies Program will www.spurlock.uiuc.edu and accompanying information in December.As include coursework on information technology many of you know, accreditation is acknowledg- so our students will have the most up-to-date The newsletter for Spurlock Museum is published through the ment by our peers that the Spurlock Museum learning experience and the skills needed to generous support of the Spurlock Museum Guild and the Spurlock Museum Board. Contributors to this issue include Yu (Ian) Wang, Jim adheres to all AAM guidelines at the highest compete for jobs in the museum field. Sinclair, and Robin Fossum.The newsletter is produced for the level. (Currently, only 750 of the more than As our immediate and long-term vision for museum by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Office of Communications and Marketing (05.087). 17,500 museums across the country hold ac- the museum becomes a reality, we hope you creditation.) The AAM has reviewed our applica- will continue to support our endeavors and visit us frequently. Dr.Laura Bellows, Mellon Fellow and Visiting Curator for the Spurlock Museum, stands beside a carving that portrays a scene from the epic Mahabharata. (except for the addition of one painting from the CURATOR RECOGNITION late Professor Emeritus Robert E. Brown, ethno- Dr. Clark Cunningham and Dr.Laura Bellows musicology, San Diego State University). The exhibit concept and design emerged through By Dr.Yu (Ian) Wang study of those objects and resonates strongly In 1955-56, Clark Cunningham first went to an expert on Balinese culture, he brought in Dr. with certain broad themes expressed in Bali’s Indonesia, where he later conducted the research Laura Bellows, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Hindu religious life, ceremonies, and arts. for his PhD. Since then he has been involved in visiting the University’s anthropology department “In our design of the gallery,” Dr. Bellows ex- research, teaching, and consulting in Indonesia and for the 2004-2006 academic years. plained,“we worked to evoke Balinese aesthetics Thailand. In 1970, when Dr.Cunningham joined Dr.Bellows’ first encounter with Indonesia was and a cultural logic of space. The colors we the University of Illinois anthropology depart- through a trip to Bali in 1991. This visit solidified chose—red, black, and white—have layers of ment, he taught a course on the “Peoples and her interest in anthropology and she began her cultural significance. These are the colors of the Cultures of Insular Southeast Asia,” as well as PhD coursework at the University of Virginia not three principle deities, the trisakti: red for Brahma occasional seminar courses on Southeast Asian long afterward, completing her degree in 2003. the creator, black for Wisnu the protector and topics. Later he and Professor Kris Lehman Her contribution to Visions of the Unseen is the maintainer, and white for Iswara and sometimes jointly developed and taught the “Introduction to result of the more than two years of fieldwork Siwa the destroyer. Their colors are repeated Southeast Asian Civilizations” course.Dr. conducted in Bali, most of which she completed within offerings as divine invocations of gods to Cunningham was instrumental in building the from 1998 to 2000. The wide-ranging interests grace ceremonies, accept propitiatory offerings, University’s Asian American Studies Program, she brought to bear on this exhibition include a and keep the universe going. They are also the serving as the program’s vice chair from 1997- study of Balinese mortuary rituals and their inter- colors of procreative fluids—white being male, 2000 and chairing the program’s first curriculum section with esoteric and everyday understand- red being female, and black their mixture to form committee. In 1992 Dr. Cunningham’s “Asian ings of the human body gleaned from interviews a fetus. Thus, both at the cosmic and corporeal American Experiences” was the first Asian as well as from Balinese drawings of the human levels, these colors speak to a cycle of life and the American studies course on campus. Dr. anatomy,Tantric books,and meditation maps productive nature of potent combinations.” Cunningham is widely regarded as an inspiring written in Old Javanese. Another aspect of her In dividing the gallery into two physical spaces teacher,mentor, and colleague, and he is now fieldwork relevant to the exhibition was her re- connected by a “gateway” flanked by ceremonial Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the search focus on gender. The combination of male yellow and checked banners called penjor, we University. and female is a potent way to articulate produc- sought “to evoke the spatial divisions the Balinese Some years ago, when organizing an exhibition tivity, continuity, and fertility, both literally and make in Hindu temples, which like human bodies, for the World Heritage Museum, Dr.Cunningham symbolically. Dr. Bellows examined how nearly all are divided into three main parts—an upper part reviewed the Museum’s Balinese holdings. While aspects of the universe—both natural (such as (the head), a middle part (the torso to the waist), working on the exhibits of Southeast Asian and the relationship of earth and sky) and human- and a lower part (below the waist),” Dr. Bellows Oceanic materials for the Spurlock Museum’s made—are gendered in Bali. continued. “In temples, this tripartite division is Workman Gallery of Asian Cultures, he used According to Dr. Bellows, the exhibition title mapped horizontally onto the temple compound some of these artifacts to illustrate the historical Visions of the Unseen: Picturing Balinese Ceremony with the outermost area devoted to commerce Indian/Hindu influence on Southeast Asian culture and Myth has a double reference:“We refer to and daily activities and the innermost area de- and arts. Dr.Cunningham included a small rolled artists’ depictions of two realms—a visible voted to gods and ritual activities. In the exhibi- painting and some small wood sculptures in the realm inhabited by humans and an invisible tion gallery, the ‘outer yard’ contains the large exhibition, but the gallery’s size and design pre- realm inhabited by gods,