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<\/p>\nBeing the Art Museum\u2019s Collections Management Intern for the semester has been nothing but fascinating. Getting the opportunity to explore a recent acquisition of Vietnamese and African pieces, with similarities to the collections at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is an opportunity that most undergraduates do not get the chance to work with. With this position, I am in charge of documenting the artwork, providing a brief description, including its cultural provenance, a condition report, taking photographs, and digitally entering this information into the database in order to make it accessible to the general public. However, with limited knowledge of Vietnamese art, understanding exactly what I was looking at became a little tricky. Even without the full context and backstory of each of the hundred plus catalogued pieces throughout the semester, I learned to appreciate each one for what I saw them as.<\/p>\n
This donation totaled around 180 objects ranging from masks, textiles, ceramics, and woodworks. Some of my favorite and most interesting pieces I worked with were two of the Shaman Ritual Crowns from Vietnam, which inspired me to do some further research on. All very different in shape and design, the high priests\u2019 crowns came in varying levels of complexity and decorative symbols. Some crowns are made of painted paper, while others are made of cotton with fully embroidered figures. The crowns from the Museum\u2019s collections I cataloged are most likely from the Yao Daoist priests, dating to the early twentieth century. They were always decorated with the \u201cThree Pure Ones,\u201d which distinguishes them from the other ethnic groups. The first crown, is a boxlike shape made of a special paper, reinforced with glue and joined together with thread, and is only worn by the shaman priest. It features two pieces of cloth, called \u201cears\u201d on the left and right sides.<\/p>\n
The second crown, also made of paper, cloth and paint, is more distinguishable as a crown with triangular peaks along the top. The crown also depicts the \u201cThree Pure Ones,\u201d seated in the center with each holding a tablet. The figure in center and right are depicted with black hair, compared to the figure on the far left, who is balanced with white hair. Black is believed to absorb all the light, while white outputs the light and elements. The backside of the crown depicts two underworld messengers, shown with animal heads, accompanied by the Lord of Death in the center.<\/p>\n
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Images:<\/strong><\/p>\n Vietnamese Shaman Crowns, Paper with pigment Samantha Fellers, ’19 <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Being the Art Museum\u2019s Collections Management Intern for the semester has been…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iterns-blog","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10433"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10456,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10433\/revisions\/10456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/museum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTop images: 8 x 6 \u00bc inches
\nBottom images: 9 \u00bd x 15 \u00bd
\nBates College Museum of Art
\nGift of Mark Rapoport, MD and Jane C. Hughes<\/p>\n
\nArt & Visual Culture: History and Criticism<\/p>\n