C4 and Lambda Pi Eta Present
The Annual Research Lecture in Communication Studies
“Method and Madness at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum”

1:00pm, April 30, BLC 103

Welcome guest lecturer:
Dr. Gretchen Stein Rhodes, Louisiana State University

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum  in Boston, Massachusetts, is unique in history and design. Originating as a privately held collection, the Gardner Museum reflects its namesake's eccentricities in its unusual collection and arrangement. Understanding collecting and curating as modes of knowledge production, Rhodes's research attempts to uncover the types of knowledge produced by and within the museum, focusing on the affective and material transfers at work in museum practice. Rhodes engages performative writing as a mode of presentation that, like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, seeks to reflect upon and highlight the affective and sensual aspects of aesthetic experience.
 
About Isabella Stewart Gardner, from Wikipedia:
“The Boston society pages called Isabella Stewart Gardner many names, including "Belle," "Donna Isabella," "Isabella of Boston," and "Mrs. Jack." Gardner created much fodder for the gossip tabloids of the day with her reputation for stylish tastes and unconventional behavior. After she and her husband missed the train to a social engagement, she persuaded the railroad to lend them another for their own personal use. Her surprising appearance at a 1912 concert (at what was then a very formal Boston Symphony) wearing a white headband emblazoned with "Oh, you Red Sox" was reported at the time to have "almost caused a panic", and remains still in Boston one of the most talked about of her eccentricities.

After her husband's death in 1898, Gardner began work on her museum. She modeled it on the Renaissance palaces of Venice, Italy, using Willard T. Sears, as her architect. Gardner was deeply involved in every aspect of the design, though, leading Sears to quip that he was merely the structural engineer making Gardner's design possible. The building completely surrounds a glass-covered garden courtyard, the first of its kind in America. Gardner intended the second and third floors to be galleries. A large music room originally spanned the first and second floors on one side of the building, but Gardner later split the room to make space to display a large John Singer Sargent painting called El Jaleo on the first floor and tapestries on the second floor. She lived on the fourth floor when in residence at the museum. After her death, in accordance with her wishes the fourth floor served for many years as residence for the museum's director; more recently it has been converted for use as museum offices. Gardner insisted that the galleries be designed as a palatial home, not a museum, and in the early years after the building was completed she used those floors as such. She entertained guests frequently, but also opened the museum to the public two days each year.