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Apr. 21st, 2015 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotI feel like this happens every Tuesday: I'm re-energized by my time off, and then I come in and it feels like everything's falling on me. There are SO MANY problems. Sue is a nice boss but doesn't understand how terrible the situation is and I can't really explain it to her because she was the previous collections manager and created or exacerbated all the problems.
Like today while going through boxes of hats marked to be deaccessioned (most are from the 1950s/60s - you can. not. imagine. how good it feels to see gross plastic hats and know that deaccessioning is coming, I HATE plastic hats), I came across a white silk plush bonnet from the 1840s just dropped in a box. Dropped in a box. One of the boxes of deac.-ready hats had a black bobbinet 1860s day cap, another drawn bonnet, and a padded hood with kind of a drawn layer on top ... because who would want this? What is it, even? MADRE DE DIOS.
And the foamcore boards and labels from all the exhibitions get shoved in there, and this like table with a VCR on it and a box of tapes because of course we need that? And to get at anything boxed you have to pull out at least two of the racks into the next room, which is why I took the opportunity to get the TBD stuff out. Which was hard, because while the hats were in small file boxes, there were three big Hollinger boxes full of textile stuff.
- Hollinger boxes are weirdly heavy even empty, there's something about the dense, thin board and the metal edges
- textiles are crazy heavy as you know
- these boxes were maybe 4' long and 1' high and filled pretty well
- ONE OF THEM WAS FULL OF BOOTS AND SHOES
It was just ridiculous. JeanMarie came by when I was trying to move the last box off the lower shelf on my cart and suggested I take some of the stuff out, which is when I found that there were huge heavy man boots in it. We were exclaiming over the awfulness when Rita - an elderly but sharp board member who had been doing research in the archive - started to object to deaccessioning on the basis that they were old even if they were disgusting and provenanceless. We tried to explain to her about how you can't hold onto everything but she didn't really get it. She started talking about how her parents donated three paintings years ago and we wouldn't have thrown them out just because we didn't want them - she couldn't get that most of these things are things we have no way of returning to the donors (not accessioned and no record/donors are dead).
---
OT but I just realized that as Lucile and Poiret have been more talked about in recent years I've gone off them so much - not on purpose but I just have. Paquin and Chéruit 4 life.
Like today while going through boxes of hats marked to be deaccessioned (most are from the 1950s/60s - you can. not. imagine. how good it feels to see gross plastic hats and know that deaccessioning is coming, I HATE plastic hats), I came across a white silk plush bonnet from the 1840s just dropped in a box. Dropped in a box. One of the boxes of deac.-ready hats had a black bobbinet 1860s day cap, another drawn bonnet, and a padded hood with kind of a drawn layer on top ... because who would want this? What is it, even? MADRE DE DIOS.
And the foamcore boards and labels from all the exhibitions get shoved in there, and this like table with a VCR on it and a box of tapes because of course we need that? And to get at anything boxed you have to pull out at least two of the racks into the next room, which is why I took the opportunity to get the TBD stuff out. Which was hard, because while the hats were in small file boxes, there were three big Hollinger boxes full of textile stuff.
- Hollinger boxes are weirdly heavy even empty, there's something about the dense, thin board and the metal edges
- textiles are crazy heavy as you know
- these boxes were maybe 4' long and 1' high and filled pretty well
- ONE OF THEM WAS FULL OF BOOTS AND SHOES
It was just ridiculous. JeanMarie came by when I was trying to move the last box off the lower shelf on my cart and suggested I take some of the stuff out, which is when I found that there were huge heavy man boots in it. We were exclaiming over the awfulness when Rita - an elderly but sharp board member who had been doing research in the archive - started to object to deaccessioning on the basis that they were old even if they were disgusting and provenanceless. We tried to explain to her about how you can't hold onto everything but she didn't really get it. She started talking about how her parents donated three paintings years ago and we wouldn't have thrown them out just because we didn't want them - she couldn't get that most of these things are things we have no way of returning to the donors (not accessioned and no record/donors are dead).
---
OT but I just realized that as Lucile and Poiret have been more talked about in recent years I've gone off them so much - not on purpose but I just have. Paquin and Chéruit 4 life.
