Egyptologists are lobbying for "Wadjet."

Since then the naming contest has made the pages of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and I see that other “Egyptologically-minded” readers have already suggested the name Wadjet.  Unfortunately, this name does not appear to be a “front-runner” among suggestions so far, at least according to the Times.

As it happens, last year I was invited to write an entry on the goddess Wadjet for a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Ancient History, which naturally required lots of enjoyable research.  I would therefore like to point out why the name of Wadjet seems so entirely appropriate to me.

Head of Hatshepsut or Thutmose III, ca. 1479-1425 B.C.E. Granite, 10 3/8in. (26.3cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 55.118. Creative Commons-BY-NC

The goddess Wadjet (also called Wadjyt, Ouadjet, Uto, and Edjo in Egyptological literature) appears in ancient Egyptian mythology from the earliest times.  Her name means something like “The Green or Fresh One” or “She of the Papyrus Plant.”   Associated with Lower Egypt, she is often paired with the goddess Nekhbet of Upper Egypt; together they are the Two Ladies in the second title of the king, representing the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.  In her earliest form, as a cobra, Wadjet is also the uraeus snake that appears on all Egyptian royal headgear, performing a protective function.

Statue of Wadjet, 664 B.C.E. – 332 B.C.E. Bronze, 20 1/2 x 4 7/8 x 9 1/2 in. (52.1 x 12.4 x 24.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 36.622. Creative Commons-BY-NC

Wadjet’s embodiment as a fierce, spitting cobra leads to her inclusion in a group of goddesses, who are all variously identified with The Eye of Re in ancient Egyptian religion.  Many of the other goddesses in this group are often depicted with lion heads and therefore Wadjet too could be shown with a lion head from the New Kingdom period on; we have a fine example of this here at The Museum.

We know from ancient Egyptian mythology that The Eye of the sun god Re was envisioned as a goddess, his divine daughter.  The Eye protected Re from his enemies but she also had an angry, destructive aspect.  One myth concerning The Eye of Re certainly makes me think of the Bronx Zoo cobra.

This story survives in a number of different versions, often incomplete, and because we don’t have an ancient title for it, is usually referred to as “The Distant Goddess,” “The Wandering Eye,” or “The Myth of The Eye of The Sun.”

As so often happens in even the best divine families, Re and his daughter The Eye have a big fight, although none of the versions of the story specify the cause of their disagreement.  The Eye runs away, storming off to the desert or other distant, wild regions, where she sulks.  To the ancient Egyptians, the desert and other wild, uncultivated regions represented the chaos outside the ordered Egyptian world, personified by the goddess Maat.  Although the Bronx Zoo cobra never actually left the building, she did run away from the ordered world of her cage, causing disorder by her absence.

Re discovers that he misses his Eye and that her absence threatens his safety and indeed that of the cosmos.   So he sends another, more junior deity, in some versions the god Thoth, to find her, appease her, and persuade her to come home.  Her return is greeted with great rejoicing, celebration, and relief—just as that of the wandering young female cobra from the Bronx Zoo has been.

An installation view of The Fertile Goddess intro panel and title taken for archival purposes by our ECAMEA Curatorial Assistant, Kathy Zurek-Doule.

All this time, I had been researching each figurine type intensively in order to understand their original appearance, method of manufacture, and to find out what scholars thought their functions might be. This involved locating information about the provenance and archaeological context of scientifically excavated examples of each figurine type. All this is necessary to write didactic panels and labels that will answer viewers’ questions when they are confronted with the object in the gallery. Piles of books and articles, pages of notes, and countless hours are required to achieve a level of knowledge about the object that can then be reduced to less than a hundred words in the case of an individual label. What a visitor reads there is the product of months of collaboration and review by curators, editors, and our Interpretive Materials Manager, intended to make sure that the content is comprehensible, informative and useful.

What the polished and installed “chat” label for one of our figurines looks like up close.

By this time, we had also agreed upon our vision for the show: we wanted just a few stunning objects displayed in a jewel-box setting and, most importantly, in the round, so that the viewer could see them from every angle. This was crucial because museums so frequently display such ancient female figurines in groups, often literally with their backs against the case wall, and in conjunction with other objects from the cultures that made them. We wanted to make them the focus for a change; we also hoped to highlight the similarities and differences between types over time and geography by displaying them together, something that is seldom done.

The beautiful casework mock up for The Fertile Goddess with our Halaf figure superimposed inside. Designed by Matthew Yokobosky, the Museum’s Chief Exhibitions Designer.

A major step in any exhibition is a so-called “mock-up;” a meeting between curators and designers in storage with the actual objects, when the layout of the cases and the placement of each object is determined. Based on decisions made there, special exhibition mounts are then made for each object and designs from which cases will be made are drawn up. Our Chief Exhibition Designer, Matthew Yokobosky, realized and even improved upon our vision beautifully. We were blown away by the cases he designed for the figurines; he surmounted the challenges of showcasing such small works at approximately eye level and including our label information, without letting either casework or text overwhelm them, with incomparable ingenuity. Matthew and Tomoko Nakano, Assistant Graphics Designer, also did an incredible job designing the graphics for the gallery, particularly the map, which posed its own set of challenges.

During the exhibition mock up, Matthew, photographed here with Barbara Duke, Art Handler, holding the Halaf figure, arrived at the “jewel-box” setting that we envisioned for what would become the sketch above.

Finally, during installation, our expert and very patient Art Handlers brought the objects to the gallery and placed them in their mounts within the cases, making endless adjustments at the request of curators, designer, and conservators to ensure their safety and make sure they looked their best. All around them, the final products of the hard work of so many on the Museum staff, wall panel didactics, labels and graphics like our map, were going up; until, at the very end, Matthew supervised the lighting for each object within each case in order to bring them all fully to life.

The finished product in the gallery. Check out more photographs of the installation here.

Maura and I originally wanted to have thirteen objects in the exhibition, but ended up with only twelve perfect pieces. I soon realized happily, however, that we would in fact have thirteen present in the gallery, as the thirteenth would be you, the visitor, who is, after all, the reason for every exhibition we present.

Interested in seeing more “goddesses” in the Collection? Browse the Museum’s ever growing Collection databank or just click here.

Want to learn more about the Ancient Egyptian “goddesses” in the Collection?  Check out this group.

Last summer we met in storage for a “bonding” session with the figures we selected from the collection for the show, where Maura, Ellen Belcher (our consultant), and I talked at length about each individual object. Much of what came out of these discussions was incorporated somehow into the labels for the exhibition. Photograph by Sarah Giovanniello.

Once we had established our criteria, nude female figurines with exaggerated or schematized forms, we needed to put together a list of potential objects for the show. This meant including figurines from the entire ancient world, not just Egypt and the ancient Middle East, so first I searched the object records in the Museum’s database and older card files to find appropriate candidates. I also visited other museums or scoured their websites to identify suitable figurine types and put together a bibliography of scholarly sources on these types in order to research them. Finally, I went into the Museum’s storage to look at the actual objects. I must say that, when it comes to ancient pieces, it is always a shock to see the real thing after looking at pictures. In this case, it brought home to me how powerful these figurines are in appearance despite their very small-scale; all of them can be held in one hand.

Most objects were small enough to fit in the palm of our hands! Photograph by Sarah Giovanniello.

After we chose nine objects to include, we had to schedule their examination and any necessary treatment by our conservators. This would determine if they could be displayed and whether there were any special restrictions on how we could display them based on their condition, always a major concern with any ancient object, some of which can be extremely fragile. We also needed to arrange for new color photography of each object, not least because Museum image records are now digital.

Meanwhile, Maura was arranging for loans of Chicago works related to The Fertile Goddess place setting, as is customary for Herstory exhibitions. We were really excited to get a large-scale version of one of Chicago’s figurines to compare with the ancient figurines, especially because it provided a visual reference to the older Paleolithic figurines, like The Venus of Willendorf, that inspired it. Maura and I both talked to Judy Chicago about the sources that inspired her figurines the books she had been looking at when she made them. For me, it was truly unprecedented to be able to consult an artist, as I am usually dealing with works that were made thousands of years ago!

During the exhibition mock-up for the show, we were able to situate the Chicago goddess sculpture and two Chicago Dinner Party sketches alongside the other objects for the first time. Photograph by Sarah Giovanniello.

Chicago’s figurine highlighted the issue of figurine types that were not represented in the Museum’s collection and what we wanted to do about including some reference to them. For example, there are no Paleolithic figurines in American collections, at least that we could find, although the American Museum of Natural History has a case with replicas of famous examples in the Hall of Human Origins. Maura came up with the fantastic idea of a world map on the gallery wall that would demonstrate the incredible range of such figurines over time and throughout the world. Implementing this also involved a lot of research and some surprises. I knew about figurines from the Paleolithic period, Old Europe, and other places in the ancient world, like the Indus valley, that I wanted to include but I had no idea that such figurines existed in China, Japan, and in Ecuador before our cutoff date at the end of the first millennium B.C.E. It was very gratifying to go to storage to see gorgeous examples of the third millennium B.C.E. from Ecuador that are in the Museum’s collection and to include them on the map.

Getting to ask Suzuki our questions directly was incredibly exciting and the answers we got were pretty thrilling too! How cool is this…

How True Blood found the “Bird Lady”

The script for Episode 1 of Season 2 called for “a primitive piece of art; like a dancing girl” to be placed on the character Maryann’s coffee table. Suzuki and Cat Smith, Art Director, went to Google to look for images that fit these requirements, hoping to find something that inspired them. They looked at many different types of ancient images including Mycenaean, Etruscan, and Minoan examples. Entering search terms something like “Egyptian female statues,” they came across our very own “Bird Lady.” They printed out a selection of appropriate images and presented them to Alan Ball, the show’s creator.

He was immediately drawn to the “Bird Lady,” seeing something so elegant, beautiful and perfect in her form that she became the obvious choice. As Suzuki pointed out, though she is not the first to do so, this ancient figure looks both modern and primitive at the same time. In terms of the show, she said using it helped to emphasize that Maryann’s character is timeless.

We also found it interesting that Suzuki said they looked at a lot of Egyptian images and chose this one precisely because it is not a “typical” ancient Egyptian representation. This was precisely the thinking behind curator James F. Romano’s choice of the “Bird Lady” as the signature image for the reinstalled Egyptian galleries, which opened in April 2003. As usual, he wanted to get people to stop, look and think twice.

How True Blood created their “Bird Lady”

As part of Alan Ball’s vision for the show, which involves going the distance to add a level of authenticity, an artist was hired to make a version of the “Bird Lady” based on renderings off the web. Cindy Jackson made three statues in case one got broken during filming. Suzuki wanted a base that let the figure float and emphasized its sense of movement. So the artist drilled a rod into the bottom of the statue that connects to a flat base. We explained that we obviously couldn’t do that to a 5,500 year old object but we do have a special mount that safely produces the same floating effect.

HBO’s version of “Bird Lady” made for the series True Blood by artist Cindy Jackson from a mold she created and casting plaster.  Images courtesy Suzuki Ingerslev. 

Lastly, a few final bits of “Bird Lady” and True Blood trivia.

One of the characters refers to the statue as “Mycenean or something.” Maryann intentionally raises her arms in the same pose during the episode; this gesture was directly inspired by the choice of the “Bird Lady” for the statue. And yes, the “Bird Lady” can be read as a clue to Maryann’s eternal nature, but no, there is not necessarily any further connection.

Many thanks to HBO’s True Blood team for responding so quickly and warmly to our questions. We are glad you love the “Bird Lady” as much as we do.

We were first notified of this surprise appearance from a comment in our online collection by Marlene F. Emmett, who spotted a statue that sure looks like our “Bird Lady” in the first episode of the second season of the HBO series True Blood. When I heard about it from Shelley via e-mail, I began to search the web and found an art history shout-out to us at this blog.

Great eye, ladies, and thanks for letting us know about it! Shelley meanwhile got some screenshots to me so I could study them:

Sam Trammell with “Bird Lady” in the second season premiere of the HBO series True Blood.

Of course, this is not our actual “Bird Lady,” but the prop in the pictures is clearly based on our most complete examples, like the one on our website. I know this because we included two fragmentary “Bird Lady figurines” in our recently closed exhibition, The Fertile Goddess and I did a lot of research on Predynastic female figurines from Egypt in order to write the labels.

Close-up of “Bird Lady” from True Blood.

Like the figure used in True Blood, the Brooklyn Museum figurines have white paint on their lower halves, representing a skirt, and their legs are not indicated. They were all excavated from graves at one site in Egypt in the early twentieth century. Other Predynastic figurines with raised arms and beak-like faces exist but they don’t have the skirt and their legs are indicated.  For an example of this type see this figure at the British Museum.

I would love to know how True Blood got the idea for this prop! Did someone from the show come to Brooklyn and see ours? Did they see it online or in a book? It is certainly an iconic and much reproduced image but not necessarily one I’d expect to turn up in a television show.

I am also very curious about where they found the replica that is used in the show. I did find a few websites that sell replicas based on our “Bird Lady” (here, here and here) and even a photo of one of these replicas on Flickr. However, these have very different bases from the one on True Blood. Maybe they had a different base made or even commissioned an artist to make a replica. I’d be grateful to hear from anyone who might know the answers to these questions.

An installation view of The Fertile Goddess in the Herstory Gallery. Photograph by Christine Gant.

As we deinstall The Fertile Goddess exhibition, it seems appropriate to reflect on a very good question that numerous visitors have asked me: how do we conceive of, plan, and create an exhibition like this one? So for those who did not get the chance to ask me this in person, here is the (long) answer in three parts.

I should mention here that the Herstory gallery exhibitions in the Center are slightly different from other special exhibitions in the Museum. First, the subjects for all these exhibitions are drawn directly from The Dinner Party, comprising the names of the guests and the related names on the Heritage floor, and second, while the planning phase is often shorter than normal, the shows usually remain on view for longer than the standard three month span of a special exhibition, which can affect the choice of objects, especially with regard to loans. Works in certain materials have restrictions on how long they can be exposed to light, for example, and requests for loans must often be made years in advance.

Another gorgeous photograph taken of the installation of The Fertile Goddess. From this angle you can also see the original didactic “murals” that Judy Chicago created for The Dinner Party. These are installed permanently in the gallery. Photograph by Christine Gant.

The Fertile Goddess began with a shared interest and an invitation. Before the Center opened, its staff undertook the monumental task of devising a web resource of background information about The Dinner Party. I was enlisted to assist with identifying and researching the ancient goddesses and women whose names appear on place settings or the heritage floor—a project that gave me an enormous amount of respect for all the research Judy Chicago did—truly amazing for the time! During this highly enjoyable collaboration, we began an ongoing dialogue on the subject of what is now known about ancient goddesses through scholarship and how feminist artists have drawn upon goddess imagery for their own work. As someone who always felt that contemporary art was “just not my millennium” and something I would just never “get,” this was a revelation for me, opening up a new realm of interest.

Then, in early 2008, Maura Reilly, the founding curator of the Center, contacted me to say that there was an opening in the exhibition schedule for the Herstory gallery and suggested that we collaborate on a “goddess” show. We chose The Fertile Goddess as our subject because, as the second guest in The Dinner Party, she is the first to be embodied in the form of small figurines sewn onto the place setting runner. (The first guest, The Primordial Goddess, is represented by spirals, fur and cowrie shells.) It was immediately clear to me that these figurines were inspired by ancient examples, giving us the perfect forum to illustrate the relationship between ancient art and contemporary feminist art that we had been discussing.

Drawings of letter studies for the Primordial and Fertile Goddess place settings await hanging. One of Judy Chicago’s contemporary goddess figurines was installed nearby. Photograph by Sarah Giovanniello.

I have always been interested in the fascinating—and frustrating—subject of ancient nude female figurines and the questions surrounding their identity and function. While researching and updating records for our ancient Middle Eastern objects as my current project for ECAMEA, I had been taking special note of such figurines, as well as other works that related to names from The Dinner Party. The “star” piece, of course, was our Halaf era figurine, which I discovered was the oldest sculpture in the Museum. Serendipitously, I found out that a friend and colleague I hadn’t seen in a while, Ellen Belcher, was working on Halaf figurines as a dissertation topic and had a lot to tell me about these and other ancient figurine types; she also agreed to serve as a volunteer consultant for the exhibition.

Stay tuned for more on this in the coming weeks, and for a different take on the use of this gallery, visit Patricia Cronin:Harriet Hosmer, Lost and Found, currently on view in the Herstory gallery through January 24, 2010.

Excavated examples of figurines such as this one from northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and Syria, made during the Late Halaf Period in the late fifth millennium B.C.E., have been found, often in groups, among domestic refuse.

We were thrilled to read of the discovery of the oldest known Paleolithic female figure and are fascinated by the widely divergent tone of the coverage from the press, as well as blogs and bloggers from all over the world just as our exhibition The Fertile Goddess nears its end. Although the ancient female figures on view in our exhibition are later, dating from the fifth to the first millennium B.C.E., they too have highly stylized forms that emphasize or reduce to abstraction breasts, bellies, and thighs; older Paleolithic figures are represented on a world map in the gallery.

Matthew Yokobosky, Chief Exhibition Designer, and I spent a lot of time positioning the mounts for each figurine. They were very tricky to steady because none of them, except for the seated Halaf figure, were made to stand by themselves.

Its interesting to compare the coverage of this discovery with the more nuanced views expressed in that of the anniversary of the discovery of the Venus of Willendorf last August, when Venus mania gripped Vienna.  The title of the new book produced for the occasion is Die Frau von W. (The Woman of W.).

Tomoko Nakano, Assistant Graphic Designer, looks over the world map of female figurines.  It took months and months to research and assemble a range of figurines from across the world, but we think it really paid off!

This weekend is your last chance to see nine extraordinary examples of ancient female figurines before The Fertile Goddess closes on Sunday, May 31st in the Herstory Gallery of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Co-curator Maura Reilly, consultant Ellen Belcher, and the Halaf figurine.

During the planning stages of special exhibitions or permanent installations, it is a common practice in museums to involve consultants; scholars with specialized knowledge who assist the curators in researching objects. For The Fertile Goddess, we were very lucky to have Ellen Belcher as a volunteer consultant. Ellen came and spent a glorious and fun early September afternoon in storage with us looking at all the figurines and shared hours of editing with me on the labels and wall texts for the exhibition. She is an Ancient Near Eastern archaeologist and art historian whom I have known for years. We have been in classes and seminars together at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and at Columbia University, where she is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Art History and Archaeology – along with working full time as a librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Early in 2008, I attended a lecture at Columbia titled, “Embodying the Halaf: Prehistoric figurines from Northern Mesopotamia,” that Ellen gave on her dissertation topic. Co-curator of The Fertile Goddess Maura Reilly and I were already discussing the possibility of focusing on the Fertile Goddess for the next Herstory Gallery exhibition and featuring the Halaf period figurine from our collection. I came away from that lecture – and a subsequent one in May – with a greatly increased understanding of these figurines and other types that existed in Neolithic Mesopotamia. Ellen’s perspective was particularly important because of her work in the field; since 1995, she has excavated in Syria, Jordan and Turkey, where she has been a field supervisor and small finds specialist at the 6th millennium site of Domuztepe for the past decade. Many questions remain about the functions of these figurines in ancient societies and current scholarship has come to consider provenance and archaeological context crucial issues for any understanding of these objects.

Pondering the “Bird Ladies.”

I also was inspired by the work of another colleague (and good friend) in a more indirect way while I was researching our so-called Bird Lady figurines from Predynastic Egypt. Aware that other figurines types existed in Egypt during this period, I was able to see some actual examples In the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egyptian galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with extremely informative chat labels written by Diana Craig Patch, an Associate Curator of Egyptian Art there. I felt that Diana, like Ellen, had thoughtfully framed the questions of function and interpretation that still surround these objects. The Predynastic period is one of Diana’s specializations and, having worked extensively in the field in Egypt, she has a strong understanding of archaeological background and issues. I was therefore delighted when both Ellen and Diana agreed to speak at a panel which will take place tomorrow in the Forum. This is a chance for them to show the numerous other types that were contemporary with the two earliest figurines in the exhibition, the Halaf figurine from Mesopotamia and the Bird Ladies from Egypt and to discuss their latest thoughts about the possible functions and interpretations of these objects. Perhaps they will also share their thoughts about being a feminist archaeologist in the 21st century.

The latest exhibition in the Herstory Gallery, The Fertile Goddess, just opened on December 19, 2008. Imagine how delighted Sarah Giovanniello, Research Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and I were to see this decoration, which Museum art class students kindly made for the Museum’s Holiday Party for staff! We immediately recognized many of the figurines from the exhibition.

The art instructor for the class, Reynolds, is an artist who has always been interested in goddesses and has even made some of her own goddess figurines. We are planning to visit her studio to see them after Elinor Gadon‘s talk tomorrow.

One fascinating aspect of working on this exhibition for me, as a scholar who studies ancient art, has been exposure to contemporary feminist art inspired by ancient female images. While scholars who study these ancient figurines often question their identification as goddesses, the reclamation of ancient female images and the concept of goddesses by feminist scholars and artists, beginning in the 1960s, is a rich field in itself. It is one that I have greatly enjoyed learning about from my co-curator, Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and from Sarah.

It is also a pleasure to see young artists making their own versions of these image and we hope to see more in the coming months. For more education related activities, visit the link to the Teacher’s Packet for the exhibition found here.