Sorry for the self-promotion, but myself and my Brazilian colleague did a cultural biography of African sacred statues. We traced how they went from sacred to commoditifide tourist souvenirs, to "art", and how they're resacralized by Afro-Brazilians for African Traditional Religous worship.
A bit of left field but it examines the western fetishization of Afri Trad Reli as souvenirs and museum pieces. I've more on Benin artwork and the fetishism of Afri art if you want.
Link: https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0119
Thanks! Let me know if you want others and I'll email the articles to you. Would love to see your final publication or syllabus (whichever you're doing this for)!
This is for our undergrad method course in religious studies; I’ve got a unit on how to use archives and museums as resources in history of religion and I just want to give them a list of examples to look at to get more concrete ideas.
Oh, I've taught something similar while co-writing the above piece. The undergrads really enjoyed this article: Silva, Sonia. “Art and Fetish in the Anthropology Museum,” Material Religion 13:1, 2017, pp. 77-96.
As you get further into this project and I turn my attention from the book I'm finishing up right now (and, erm, the other three that I've made various degrees of promises about) let's definitely talk! I have some archive notes about 19th c. stuff.
The Baylor/Bob Darden/Smithsonian Black Gospel Music Restoration Project might be an interesting one at the intersection of archival digitizing, music, social and political movements, race, and religion. https://library.web.baylor.edu/bgmpp
Alana, I don't know if this counts, but I wrote an article a while back on how thinking of the Primary History (Genesis through Kings) as a kind of museum, through the lens of contemporary museum studies, might be useful
Ludvik Kjeldsberg has published on the exhibitions of the dead sea scrolls which touches on this. The database is a great starting point for thinking about impact of scrolls in popular consciousness https://lyingpen.uia.no/publications1/
(I’ve seen VCS and Museum of the Bible projects already mentioned) KCL does a programme with the National Gallery - @siobhanjolley.bsky.social knows more.
Also Grace Emmett did a project with art installations.
Oh, excellent--the museum itself was already in my resource list, but the book will really help giving examples of what to *do* with a collection other than just looking at it.
St Mungo's is on my list of museums that students should be aware of, but I'm looking specifically for books/articles/project websites that give clear examples of how scholars actually analyse collections or exhibits (this is for an undergraduate methods course, I want them to see a range of stuff.)
Yvonne Sherwood (it feels funny to say ‘Yvonne Sherwood’ since we both know her as Yvonne, but some readers wouldn’t recognise her without her last name) has that essay on the ‘blasphemy’ Bible at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, but that’s not really an ‘archive’ sort of treatment.
The Visual Commentary on Scripture project doesn’t focus on a single museum, but provides a sort of global archive of biblically-relevant art, predominantly held in museums.
Yeah, I'm even overdue on a contribution to that--but this is a method course for undergraduate students in history of religion, and I think VCS is a little bit more exegetical than the sort of thing I want to steer them towards.
The website needs updating, but our Empires of Faith project was museum-based, developed an exhibition and engagement activities, and wrote on the critical study of religion&art in museums https://empiresoffaith.com
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Link: https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0119
https://www.rug.nl/masters/heritage-and-religion/
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-taught/courses/theology-bible-and-the-arts
Also Grace Emmett did a project with art installations.
https://www.routledge.com/Museums-as-Ritual-Sites-Civilizing-Rituals-Reconsidered/Wijnia-SBielo/p/book/9781032270098
This was rad!