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“I’ll work on that penguin suit” and other things said in meetings at my job

#museum talk

office day today was like half project management meetings, half buying vintage toys on ebay for an exhibit

#running commentary #museum talk

05.13.2024

I think this exhibit might actually be happening?

#museum talk #photo diary

you know you work in a museum when someone shows up at your office unannounced with a beaver pelt for you

#literally just. loose #‘oh we had a spare and I heard you were looking for one’#I am in fact #running commentary #museum talk

Me, actually packing up cleaned bones to give back to their proper departments to go into the collection after hoarding them in my lab for months: Wow I Have So Much More Space

#listen sometimes you get used to the large skeleton sitting on the shelf behind you #and it becomes your emotional support skeleton by virtue of you see it every day and you did a nice job cleaning it so it Looks Nice #and then you blink and its been sitting there ready to go back to the collection for four months #museum talk

just saw someone say that it's easier for museums to keep smaller old clothes because smaller mannequins are easier to get than plus sized mannequins, and I, for one, as a museum worker, would LOVE to know where this person gets their small mannequins because we can't find ones tiny enough for our tiny old clothes. we have 2 (TWO!!) really small women's mannequins, with the smallest shoulders and smallest bust and tiniest of tiny waists and some of our oldest clothes still don't *quite* fit them right.

meanwhile with bigger clothes some of our modern mannequins are too small and we just stuff them with towels or paper or whatever. like it's fine, it's not super hard to scale mannequins *up*, there's tons of ways to do that (even if we don't have to do it all that often). but making them smaller? I've heard of museums who have sawed off boobs and shoulders to get mannequins to be small enough for old clothes because small enough mannequins are so hard to come by and modern mannequins are just too wide.

#historical fashion #museum talk #I'll be the first to admit survivor bias and museum bias are both things that exist #plus also people in the 18th/19th century were genuinely smaller than modern people #like less wide/less tall etc #because of awful nutrition and food shortages and rampant diseases and super bad air quality etc #and from roughly 1900-1950s-ish onward people have been getting taller/wider again #which is something that gets left out of the whole 'were people smaller or not' debate very often #everytime that debate pops up - which is VERY often - people seem to think it's only about waists #but actually the whole 'people were smaller' thing was not about plus size people not existing #it was about people being smaller on average in every single way back in the day #like I just saw that the average french man in this time was 162cm tall. that's tiny! and it's because nutrition sucked!#and that's also why so many extant garments are TINY. because the people were too #it's not a waist thing. it's an overall size thing.

in the past week and a half I have drafted two (small) extremely niche technical exhibits and now I am filled with hubris. I can explain anything to anyone. ask me about osmosis. or manufacturing variances.

#running commentary #museum talk

me in grad school: these ethics case studies are interesting to read about and discuss. probably anything I encounter in real life will be more complex and ambiguous

me at my job lately: huh. yet another situation that's going to end up in some public history grad student's textbook verbatim someday

#running commentary #museum talk #you'd think 'don't turn moments of recent and horrific historical trauma into a children's play area' would be an uncontroversial statement

#museum talk

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