Joe Baubles

It's Chinese New Year, Pancake Day, the start of Ramadan, and also Rosh Hodesh Adar.
It's not often all of those things line up, so I'm choosing to see it as a kind of cultural solar eclipse, which will portend positive change. Fingers crossed.

How White Elites Drained Ancient Art of Its Color The publication of “Chroma” represents an important shift by museums toward recognizing polychromy and its entanglement with white supremacy.

There is a fab new book out about the 2022 polychromy exhibition at the Met. It underscores 38 scholars who are the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 experts in polychromy today. Coming out of polychromy retirement to review _Chroma: Sculpture in Color from Antiquity to Today_ for @hyperallergic.com (edited by Natalie Haddad).

The whole process with regards to detecting/ treasure/PAS/ museums etc is stretched to breaking and not fit for purpose.

Things MUST change, and fast.

#Archaeology #Detecting #Treasure 🏺

If you could do a successful heist of any museum or gallery which would you choose and what would you take

Truly honoured to be part of this excellent exhibition which you should all get along too!

‘The goal has been to demystify’: how a colonial Nairobi library was restored and given back to the people Once a whites-only enclave, the grand McMillan Memorial library is one of three in the Kenyan capital that have been transformed for the community

‘The goal has been to demystify’: how a colonial Nairobi library was restored and given back to the people www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

I saw Heaney at a funeral; & Bernard O'Donoghue once took him to the tiny Half Moon

I was playing at the funeral & had just been given some wine as a thank you by a friend. I had to take the wine out of my music case to get started - the wrong impression, so I tried to hide it. He noticed & laughed

We're excited to announce the launch of the MA Race and Empire at @soasuni.bsky.social convened by our very own
Samia Khatun & Henny Ziai. The MA is enriched by the Histories of Capitalism and Race seminar series, running since 2022. For more info see:
www.soas.ac.uk/study/find-c...

A smiling man in front of a display

A display with objects and a pop up banner

Excited to be talking about Freedom, a group thats been supporting LGBTQIA+ young people (and their families) in Bristol since 1995, at the OutStories LGBTQ+ History Month event at MShed today.

I've been part of the team since 2023, and it's been the most rewarding work.

Game board with 20 numbered compartments arranged around a central panel, each square containing a forfeit to be enacted by the players, comprising gestures, grimaces &c. 1697.

Hours of fun here. (British Museum)

The increasingly nonsensical invocation of decolonization (when often people just mean democratization) in western academia piqued me so much I designed and have taught an entire class because of it for years lol.

“In an effort to reconcile their own observations of highly skilled African surgeons with prevailing racial prejudices, colonial officials frequently attributed such knowledge to diffusion from ancient Egypt rather than to local intellectual traditions.”
www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-surgeo...

I mentioned this article on a C16 wedding conducted using signed language and a colleague pointed me to this @pastpresentsoc.bsky.social article, 'Speaking in Hands: Early Modern Preaching and Signed Languages for the Deaf' by @rosamundoates.bsky.social
academic.oup.com/past/article...

Our Land tickets with Robert Beckford, Hodge Hill Birmingham 7.30pm 18th March
www.tickettailor.com/events/hodge...

Artist uses Harry Potter books to make portraits of murdered trans women A Vermont-based artist is making a statement after using Harry Potter books to make powerful portraits of murdered trans women.

I spent a long time trying to figure out what to do with my Harry Potter books, because just dumping them in a little free library felt wrong. So I mailed them to this artist who was turning them into portraits of murdered trans women

www.thepinknews.com/2025/11/11/a...

The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Lambeth – London County Council (LCC) and Greater London Council (GLC) Architect’s Department, 1963-68 Image © Morley von Sternberg

BREAKING NEWS: We’re absolutely thrilled to announce that the Southbank Centre - the Hayward Gallery, Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall and skaters undercroft - has finally been Grade II listed by DCMS after a 35 year long campaign.

➡️ c20society.org.uk/news/southba...

Silhouette of a railway bridge with a steam engine on top. Through the arch are visible buildings and a chimney partially obscured by mist

Train near Newcastle railway station, 1937, by Bill Brandt.

My hot take –

Oscar the Grouch is an archivist, with a focus on ephemera and social histories.

Grumpy, yes, but he's also devoted to ensuring preservation and community access. A truly passionate steward of monster cultural heritage.

open.spotify.com/track/2brIWd...

Each university, as in most states, has a Board of Trustees. The Board of Governors sometimes gives directives to the Board of Trustees, who then give directives to campuses. In this case, what's happening is that staffers for the Board of Governors, not the board members themselves, but staffers for the Board of Governors, will call provosts. I emphasize call. Written directives never come; they are always oral directives. They're issued to provosts, and then provosts call, not put in writing, department chairs, and then department chairs call the individual instructors teaching a given class.

@grundrza.bsky.social goes into detail about censors avoiding putting directives in writing, making accountability harder to accomplish.

Medieval French jetton or token visible among the rocks and gravel of the Thames Foreshore at low tide.

The obverse of the faded copper alloy French medieval token, seen in my black gloved hand, showing three fleur de lys, the shield of France.

A rather knackered medieval French jetton/token, now safely deposited with my FLO for recording on the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS.) Made from copper alloy, Paris mint, approx 1380-1420. The shield of France visible with three fleur-de-lys and the initials AMGP - Ave Maria Gracia Plena 1/

fuzzy small brown bat with little black ears and leathery wings

bat on wooden planks, waking up

A bat fell out of the eaves here and seemed a plump little kiwi fruit w no visible signs of injury. So we put the bat in the sun to warm up, in a higher spot. Flew off after a few minutes. Hopefully to find a cozy bat colony shelter. Interrupted hibernation? (yes yes we all know not to touch bats)

Went to see Tutankhamun Exhibition on Tuesday it was worth the 3 hours wait.

it looks better this way

A rectangular piece of fabric woven in orange, purple, red and green, with a design consisting of a central diamond-shape filled with small triangles and with diagonal stripes around it. One quarter of the textile is heavily faded.

A piece of fabric folded into a square. Some of the colours it was woven with have faded, only leaving shades of red, orange, and yellow.

This beautiful textile reminds us of the damage light can cause. Kept folded for years one quarter of it is noticeably faded. To help prevent this we can reduce UV levels by covering windows, use LEDs bulbs and dim lights over objects made from fragile materials.

New exhibition for 2026: The Colonial Brontës | The Brontë Parsonage Museum The influence of British colonialism on the literary family and their work is examined in a new exhibition, The Colonial Brontës, which will run from 4 Feb

On the new #WutheringHeights film.

I've co-curated an exhibition (Bronte Parsonage Museum) showing what the Bronte children read & wrote (they invented their own colonies) & how Wuthering Heights was inspired by their colonial reading material.
www.bronte.org.uk/news/new-exh...

The cover of the forthcoming book Colonial Negatives: Picturing History and Identity in Morocco by Patricia Goldsworthy. Bottom half of the image has an image of an oil seller in Fez surrounded by Muslim and Jewish Moroccans. The image highlights the religious diversity of the crowd, and demonstrates the dynamic nature of the Jewish district

I just got a copy of my cover for my forthcoming book! It features a postcard from Fez by the Moroccan Jewish photographer Joseph Bouhsira. Bouhsira was the first Moroccan to establish his own commercial photography studio, and many of his images featured the Jewish community in Fez.

A woman in a green head wrap with gold hoops wearing a green ski jersey and then an insulated skrit featuring a red charging horse over a lush background. A man stands behind here in a similar color way fit ski jacket and pants

Well, I would criticise Lord Mandelson, but two and a half years ago, a UK government official emailed me to tell me that I can't criticize government officials on social media, for a period going back five years. So. I have to wait a bit.

(You think I'm kidding. The UK government told me that)

And yes, because I hired lawyers and fought, I got an apology. And I got at least 14 (!!!) such secretive policies "withdrawn for review" but that review is still pending. No results.

Facing Defunding, Indigenous Culture Workers Resist The proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities threatens Indigenous libraries and arts programs.

Trump's "war on woke" has put Indigenous arts and culture institutions in a challenging position. “Without being able to transmit our traditional knowledge and oral histories, unfortunately, it feels like we’re at the end of a long genocide," one culture worker told me. Read my reporting here: