THE NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY

As acquired from Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary

I’m editing this quite a lot.  Persons wanting to know more about the Neubauer should use the link.

from the U of Chicago mag: 
Know no boundaries

BY CLAIRE ZULKEY |  DIALOGO—SPRING/SUMMER 2015

With a new director and 16,000 square feet of new space, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society has grown a lot this academic year—and with ten new research initiatives starting in July, it is prepared for more.

Architects' plan.

Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought, was appointed the Neubauer Collegium’s Roman Family Director in October . . . “My interest is in bringing together ancient Greek traditions and ethics with contemporary thinking about psychoanalytic treatment and therapy,” Lear says. “I’m the guy who thinks of these as one thing rather than two.” . . .  One new project he is particularly eager about spans institutions as well as disciplines. Open Fields: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Very Idea of a Natural History, Lear says, involves “not just an anthropologist from here and a professor of art from there, but the curator of the Field Museum, tribal elders from around the country, and young practicing native artists. “When it comes to certain kinds of research projects, we refuse to recognize boundaries.”

I hope he maintains some rigor and scepticism if he’s going to deal with Native Americans because they are intensely political, which means smoke and mirrors.  But my connection to the Neubauer is not intellectual -- it’s the building, which was constructed specifically to be the Meadville/Lombard Theological Seminary -- for the ages.  They assumed that a Unitarian tradition, with all its love of ancient Greeks and psychoanalysis, would last for all time.    

M/L now has no campus, using the money from the sale of the several buildings it owned to lease space for the library, classrooms, and offices in a Chicago Loop skyscraper.  The cynical among us, including me, refer to it as a mail order seminary.  It has pretty much abandoned the Classical world or the psychoanalytic world.  But all that is irrelevant here.

This is the remodeling plan the architects provided.  It’s not quite fulfilled.  It appears that the library stacks are simply removed.  In fact, the interior was simply rebuilt.  I think this is the same as was done to Chicago Theological Seminary some years ago.

Resuming the original article:

The renovated building provides a new space for scholars from around the world to collaborate, establishing the Neubauer Collegium as a locus for global engagement: 1. The building houses multiple suites for visiting fellows to set up office with adjacent versatile areas for collaboration. 2. The seminar room features advanced e-collaboration and videoconferencing capabilities. 3. The reading room, which showcases the building’s original wood paneling, is intended for informal engagement and reflection. 4. The exhibition gallery presents historical and contemporary art, films, and performances. (Illustration courtesy Kliment Halsband Architects)

. . . [the Neubauer’s] new home, which officially opened April 20 at 5701 South Woodlawn Avenue . . .  is a work of adaptive reuse, maintaining the spirit of the former Meadville Lombard Theological School while updating it for 21st century needs. 

Alumni will have an advance opportunity to see the building and witness the Neubauer Collegium in action . . . during an Alumni Weekend UnCommon Core session on the project Past for Sale, where researchers from anthropology, art history, economics, law, and policy will discuss the illicit antiquities market and how to combat it.

Anthropologist Justin Richland and a team that includes Field Museum curator Alaka Wali and tribal leaders from the Hopi and Crow Nations explore the use and misuse of Native American material culture with Open Fields: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Very Idea of a Natural History.

Most recently, workers installed a sparkling new copper canopy over the main entrance on 57th street. Like the Neubauer Collegium's logo, the canopy's design mirrors the architectural motif found throughout the building's stonework.

So what does all this mean to me personally?  I won’t address the content of the symposiums here.  In the past "Native American Material Culture" has had me by the throat.  I think high intellectuals don’t get it.  They keep trying to convert a political and survival issue into a moral issue.  THEIR morality, not that of the Indians.

Buildings I’ve loved and lost include, from the beginning, some humble structures: a barely post-homestead farmhouse on South Deer Creek near Roseburg, Oregon, where my beloved aunt and her family lived.  The farmhouse was demolished to make way for a modern house three times the size and ten times as convenient.  The house where I grew up in Portland, OR, was both my mother’s bridal dowry and her deathbed.  It's still there, maintained and upgraded by young professionals starting families.  What saved it was location: near downtown, easy commute.

Interior:  Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

Museum of the Plains Indian

Interior: Starr Gallery, Fort Benton

Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, new major addition

The most painful change, quite relevant to “Open Fields”, was the conversion of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife to the Blackfeet Heritage Center.  It is next door to the Museum of the Plains Indian, which was built during WWII to encourage the Blackfeet to create materials for sale to tourists, parallel to the Appalachian quilting projects.  When Bob Scriver, to whom I was married in the Sixties, died of old age in 1999, his fourth wife cashed out his estate and left the country.  (Rumor suggests the amount she cleared was in the millions.)  The contents of the museum were full-mounts of all the Montana game animals, free-standing, not behind glass, and Bob’s own sculpture.  (Today the Scriver bronzes about Blackfeet are in Fort Benton, in a reproduction of a fur trade factor’s house that is in part the Starr Gallery.)  Bob’s museum never displayed NA artifacts -- though among Thad Scriver (who came in 1901) and his two sons, born there, they had a good collection.  The book cataloging them still circulates on the used book market.

When the politics became belligerent (at one point there was a fire in the museum), Bob produced a book that recorded everything in detail and then sold the material culture collection to the Edmonton Royal Alberta Provincial Museum.  The Blackfeet in Browning were so angry that they drove up and cursed Philip Stepney, the acquiring curator.  In a few years he died of cancer.  The Provincial Museum gave all sacred Bundles back to the tribes, except that Bob’s personal materials mysteriously disappeared, including the Bundle he and I acquired ceremonially and kept “alive” over the years.  When things cooled a bit, the tribe -- which had bought the Scriver museum building -- hired William Grant, architect, to design a remodel.  It now sells the sort of products that the Museum of the Plains Indian was meant to promote, including the wealth of fine paintings by local artists, many trained by AIAI. 

Down at the heart of the Scriver Museum is an old warehouse, built in maybe 1900, which Scriver personally disassembled, hauled to the new site, and hammered back together.  There is still no fire protection, but no old valuable material objects either.  The Museum of the Plains Indian was damaged by the 1964 flood and objects were destroyed, but experts say the displays were damaged more from a scientific point of view by a project that “renewed” and “cleaned” them.  By now I am more philosophical about all this.

The scale of the remodeling of the Meadville/Lombard building and the ideas it shelters is remarkable.  When I was enrolled, 1978-82, Mircea Eliade was housed there.  He was our most valuable object.  The academic world was still on the upswing.  Once an arson fire broke out late in the evening in the stacks and I rushed over with my key just in time to save the doors from the firemen’s ax.  Long story.  Mixed.  Like all stories told about structures over time.  Time IS a fire.  It consumes buildings and people alike.

Where M/L rents space

WHAT IS AN ACCREDITED MUSEUM?

When I was serving the Saskatoon Unitarian Congregation, one of the families went on a holiday trip to the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller and came back raving.  “It is a temple to Life itself!” they declared, and when I finally got there myself, I saw that they were right.  www.tyrrellmuseum.com/    Other Canadian museums are just as grand and inspiring.  The secret is that most of the “object focused” earlier collections had the good stuff, so the Canadians had to rely on ingenious presentation.  Of course, at Drumheller the fossils wash out of the ground after every rainstorm.  But “Head-Smashed-In” buffalo jump required careful thought.  Check it out here:  www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120137 

I’m not naive about museums.  I grew up in a museum-worshipping family and traveled across the US and Canada, stopping at every roadside attraction, so that I saw many a basement or garage collection as well as the great institutions of the cities, esp. the ones in Chicago where I went to university.  One of my early favs was the case of rocks at the Portland Children’s Museum which looked like nothing until the room lights were off and the black light in the case was on -- then they were spectacular.

This NPR story is about a museum in the Blue Ridge mountains and is worth opening just for the photo, but the radio story is there as well.

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/16/135442423/in-shuttered-museum-appalachian-history-boxed-up  The link description tells the story.  Everything packed in boxes.  People wanting their family history returned to them.  No room.  No money.  And as one lady said tartly, “It doesn’t rhyme with football.”

That story is being repeated all over many countries as the notion of what a museum “is” gets reappraised.  And the museums themselves are appraised as well.  www.aam-us.org/   There are 6 accredited museums in Montana:  the C.M. Russell Museum, the Montana Historical Society Museum, the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, the Missoula Art Museum, the Museum of the Rockies, and the Western Heritage Center in Billings.  Maybe your fav is not on the list.  What would it mean?  Only 4.5 % of the 17,500 US museums are accredited.  

The CM Russell Museum spokeswoman said the inspectors checked “lighting, heating and air conditioning, sound systems and everything from the way the collection looks, and things such as the temperature pieces are kept.”  I expect they also looked at the endowment.  I do not know whether they investigated the quality of curation, security, inventory control, education programs and the like, but I would guess they did.

The Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife personally constructed by Bob Scriver would never have qualified.  It had no fire suppression system, though it was built of old wood from a dis-assembled warehouse.  I once overheard a little gaggle of college girls dis-assembling the captions.  They didn’t knock the content, but they thought that typing words on cards with an old primary school typewriter and thumbtacking them onto homemade stands was too, too primitive.  They deplored the fact that the animals weren’t under glass, and a lot of other stuff.  I put my fingers in my ears.  One of the things they found truly shocking was an old sofa where I snuck in for naps.  After all, I was there at 6AM sweeping the floor and polishing the glass and couldn’t lock up until the last tourists were through petting the moose.  There was also a matched pair of asymmetrical coral-colored boudoir chairs left behind by Bob’s second wife.  The sapphire velveteen drapes behind the bronzes were an early Christmas gift from myself.  This was a very "personal" place.

When the museum was dispersed after Bob’s death, the bronzes of Blackfeet went north to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton because they had already bought the legendary “million dollar” Scriver collection of Blackfeet artifacts.  But they had to leave everything in storage for lack of space.  Thanks to the tar sands income, they are now able to rebuild, as you can see at http://www.royalalbertamuseum.ca/  But the bronzes are scheduled to be transferred to the Fort Benton, Montana, museum, which is developing quickly and with standards that will probably qualify them for accreditation soon.

We tend to think of museums as fusty, unchanging repositories of inscrutable objects, which becomes a problem in two ways.  One is when changing times and knowledge make the previous incarnation of business and presentation so out of sync that it becomes irrelevant, even though its whole purpose may be the preservation of the past, and the other is when it comes time to raise money for the funds to renew the museum.  The Montana legislature has just approved authority to borrow to build a new Montana Historical Society Museum.  There will be a struggle between those whose prestige rests on the status quo and those who will want to proceed on a new paradigm of presentation.

Bob Scriver’s entire estate was given to the Montana Historical Society, though the funds that had been included to provide for building had mysteriously evaporated.  The C.M. Russell Museum, somehow snubbed in what started out to be a partnership, is now busily stripping all references to Bob Scriver.  I watch all this from the sidelines, legally defined as having no “standing” to advise and without any funds or clout to contribute.  What I have is knowledge.

So what I commend to the Powers-That-Be is that though they are nearly overwhelmed with objects, including Bob’s collections along with the many beloved possessions of other Montanans around the state, is that they take a Canadian approach -- that is, emphasis on curation.  I don’t mean just “how much is it worth” which is the focus of many people in our greed-based world, but WHY is it valuable, what does it mean, what can we learn from it?  These are the values that made the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife so beloved.  

The Blackfeet artifacts were never exhibited there so as not to compete with the Museum of the Plains Indian next door.  You can buy a book that includes everything:  “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” if one turns up -- maybe on eBay or Abebooks or Alibris.  Amazon sometimes.  And you can buy my account of Bob’s life, “Bronze Inside and Out” which includes the story of the creation of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and how the pet bobcat napped in the horns of the mounted moose, which is NOT an accredited practice.

TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF BOB SCRIVER

Today, January 29, 2009, is the tenth anniversary of the death of Robert MacFie Scriver. I jogged the Great Falls Tribune to see if they might note that fact, but they didn’t. They are absorbed in their struggle to prevent their own death as a newspaper. The actual paper has been shrinking in measurement, the ad revenue is down as it is in all media, “headquarters” is busy trying to decide what to axe next (they aren’t in Montana), reporters are over-loaded, and no one knows exactly what counts as news or whom to believe anyway. The Lee-owned newspapers are consolidating services, turning back towards the good old Anaconda-coiled world. Why gone those times? Maybe they’re circling back, just temporarily out of sight.

The positive notch about Bob Scriver is that his biography is written and was published in Canada by the University of Calgary Press. “Bronze Inside and Out.” I’ve been asked to sign copies at the CM Russell Museum benefit auction in mid-January. The Ad Club-organized soiree is also a plus, constantly re-energized and consistently growing in spite of being nearly a half-century old.

However, the Montana Historical Society refuses to speak to me, even as they unsuccessfully try to raise money for a new building. They told me bluntly that everything belongs to THEM now and they will do what they please with it. Montana Humanities has struck me from their list of authors invited to the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula, evidently because I’m uncontrollable.

The only entity that appears to appreciate Bob’s actual estate is the Royal Alberta Museum, the institution that Bob wanted to have everything. However, the artifact collection that caused so much contention (including the curse put on Phil Stepney, their director, that may or may not have resulted in his death from a rare cancer) has been at least partially dispersed, the Sacred Materials going back to the elders of the tribe, who sold at least some of them to tribal individuals on the Montana side of the line. I’m not sure I object to that. The Royal Alberta Museum did mount an exhibit of the Blackfeet bronzes and did invite Bob’s sister-in-law, Helene DeVicq, an integral part of his work who lives in Edmonton, to attend their opening.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which was given custody of all the full-mounts from the Scriver museum, and who for a while provided employment for Arnold Olsen, the dismissed MHS director who made the transaction for the Scriver estate, will not respond to my visits, phone calls or emails.

Bob divorced me forty years ago and as his “third wife of four,” I have no legal claims. In Montana, which lags a bit in social assumptions, people believe that all former wives are predators who hate their former spouses and crave money. In this case the description better fits the fourth wife. But as the only surviving wife, a year younger than Bob’s daughter, I have rather slipped over into a daughter-like role. This is recognized by Bob’s Quebec cousin, Margaret Meeks, gracefully aging in a retirement home.

Bob’s children, produced by his first marriage, died in his lifetime. The five grandchildren are in their forties now, solidly middle-aged. One is a contractor, one is a beverage distributor, one is a testing lab administrator, one is a CPA, and one has had a warrant issued for her arrest because of a forgery charge. The great-grandchildren are college-aged. None is married yet as far as I know: they don’t keep in touch. One is an international fencing athlete (Ariel DeSmet). None are artists. None carry the Scriver name.

Siyeh, the wholly-owned business subsidiary of the Blackfeet Tribe, is running the Blackfeet Heritage Center in the former Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. Siyeh also accepted custody of the two major fiberglass monumental rodeo sculptures. David Cree Medicine, Bob’s foundry foreman, is doing well, working for Siyeh. His father, Carl, continues to create art and shows at the Indian Art show that runs parallel to the CM Russell Museum benefit auction. Flatiron Ranch is in the joint-custody of Nature Conservancy and the Blackfeet Land Trust. I know nothing about it except that Googling is complicated by a housing development near Hamilton also called “Flatiron Ranch.”

These observations are only about the local and smallest circle of Bob’s world. I figure there are three circles where Scriver’s work have significance. The local is based in large part on people who actually knew Bob and visited the museum or dealt with him in some way. This is the least significant in terms of his work, though it includes a few people who have tried to get rich from what they could siphon off, including Flathead entrepreneurs producing illegal copies.

The second “circle” is the world of Western art, kind of a double-yolked egg that is half “cowboy” artists and half historical recorders of the West as a place. Cowboy Artists of America, which began explicitly as a friendship group, was so successful that as soon as the founders had been removed by Father Time, the second generation has worked hard to make it a profit-aimed group. The controversies and power-struggles among them have interfered with that goal.

The other “yolk,” the Morans, Bierstadts, Catlins, and Russells, are a bridge to a larger art world, currently beset with some of the same problems as the other humanities spheres, such as dance, music, and publishing. Over the years institutions have been gifted or have acquired works of art as “investments” worth tax credits as well as prestige and scholarly value. Now the dark side of the equation has come to the fore as the institutions, much diminished by investment collapse, try to get the money back out of the art. The most recent, perhaps wishing to avoid the struggles over trying to market a beloved piece of art, is Brandeis University, which proposes to simply close down their Rose Museum and auction ALL the art. Which goes to show that the executors of Bob’s will were ahead of their times when they closed down his museum and auctioned his collections: his Russells, his Remingtons, his Rungiuses, and so on while trucking his own works down to Helena to be locked up, not even unpacked. As the former director said to me, “I don’t much care about art. I like the saddles and wagons, the paraphenalia.”

The wheel continues to turn. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.