There are many things I like about Swarthmore, but the location of our campus is close to the top of the list of my favorite things. Being on a campus as sprawling and green as ours, it can sometimes be easy to forget that we’re also right next to a bustling city–which is why I love when my professors require us to venture outside the so-called “Swat bubble” into the City of Brotherly Love. Last week, my classmates and I went on a field trip to the Penn Museum in University City and saw a bunch of really cool art.
This field trip was for a cross-listed Art History and Environmental Studies course called “Woodland Native Arts and Ecologies.” The class focuses on the indigenous art, artists, and cultures of the Woodland tribes in the Northeast. We’ve learned a lot about different material cultures and art forms across tribes and looked at a lot of old and contemporary art. Our trip to the Penn Museum last week came after we’d spent the semester discussing and learning about different styles of beaded art, quillwork, black ash basket making, and more. At the museum (which we were able to get to from campus using our free SEPTA cards) we first spent around an hour and a half looking at different historical pieces of art that had been pulled and set aside specially for us from the museum’s collection. Our professor asked us to walk around and try to see if we could identify the likely tribal affiliation of the artist, the purpose of the object, what materials it was made from, and when it was created based on all the background information we had been learning in class all semester. I was excited to realize that I could do all this identification work on several objects being shown to us. It’s always really nice to have a concrete moment of knowing you’ve learned something, and I felt like this experience was that for me. Before taking this class, I definitely wouldn’t have known where to start with identifying these different art pieces.
After we spent some time looking at those pieces, we were able to go up and look at one of the main exhibits relating to Indigenous art and culture. As a class, we discussed what we liked in the exhibition, what we thought was problematic about the display, and what we found interesting. Once we discussed the exhibition as a class, we split up and wandered around. The exhibition contained a mix of contemporary Indigenous art and older stuff. It was all closed up behind glass, but there were big touchscreens in front of all the interactive displays with a lot of information about the materials, time period, and creators of each piece in the case. It was really amazing to learn so much about the history and stories the art pieces showcase.
Getting a chance to go into Philly can be tricky as a busy Swat student, but checking out the museums or other things in the city as part of class is always fun. I love that Swarthmore classes propel us to experience some of all the great things Philly has to offer!