September 27, 2019 | UHCL Staff
University of Houston-Clear Lake’s Associate Professor of Art History Sarah Costello has been invited to Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, to be a visiting scholar at Universite Catholique de Louvain. During her two-week stay, Costello will be making three presentations to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to the public, about museum-related topics.
“My colleague at UCLouvain, Prof. Annelies Van de Ven, is doing work that is very similar to mine,” Costello said. “She’s a post-doctoral student, and she’s been allowed to invite a scholar to visit, and we thought we could work very productively together.”
Costello, who teaches in UH-Clear Lake’s Museum Studies program, said her first presentation will be about the use of casts in museum collections. “Plaster casts of original sculptures used to be very popular in American and European museums in the 19th century, but most have been removed in favor of the genuine works of art,” she said. “Now there is a resurgence of interest in these casts. The museum there has been recently renovated and they have a collection of these casts. There will be an opening while I’m there.”
The second presentation is a discussion about object biography. “This is a way for archaeologists and art historians to contribute research to museums,” she said. “Objects change hands and their meaning changes as well, over time. Object biography encourages you to stretch the story of each object and learn what else it means, who might have used it, how it was excavated. You learn to tell a fuller story.”
Costello’s collaborative project with Houston’s Menil Collection is the topic of the third presentation. “The goal of the Collections Analysis Collaborative is to bring scholars and students into museum research so that both the museum and the academic institution can benefit from the collaboration,” she said. “That collaborative project has helped me give UHCL students opportunities in museums. Part of the reason for my visit is to share that model with UCLouvain. It’s an example of what we do well at UHCL, and the intention is for them to apply the same ideas to their university and university museums.”
Costello will be in Belgium from Sept. 29 - Oct. 12 and will be blogging about her trip. Learn more about UHCL’s Minor in Museum Studies online.
