We've arrived

College of the Sciences Dean Kirk Johnson and CWU Trustee Patricia Notter cut the ribbon.

The Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University is officially open. When I began this blog more than two years ago, the museum didn't even have an official name. It didn't have a gallery. It didn't have a webpage. What it had was the dedication of some volunteers and an academic department, 35 years of history, and one new full time employee.

We've come a long way in these two years.

Guests view the exhibit for the first time.

We opened on September 25th, 2009 with a crowd of nearly 200 people touring the gallery (Link to Facebook photo album.). The opening exhibit, River of Memory: The Everlasting Columbia, on loan from the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center, has been really an excellent first exhibit for us. It truly combines the themes of culture and the environment by exploring the history of a river that people have impacted for thousands of years. The Museum even added a small component to the exhibit, showing some of our net weights and talking about fishing on the Columbia.

Net sinkers and anchor weights on display.

We've come so far in just a couple of years, but we have farther to go yet.

In the meantime, I hope to get back to talking about collections work on a regular basis soon here. And I hope you can come visit us! River of Memory runs through December 17th. We're open Wednesday through Friday 2 to 6 pm and Saturday 10 am to 3 pm. Parking is free on campus after 4:30 pm on weekdays and all day Saturday.

Too busy, can't blog

The opening is tomorrow at 4 pm! (Read the official press release.) We have been busy here the past few days (busy is an understatement, it's been a madhouse! But in a good way.).

I've got to get back to work, but here's a neat photo of one of the spawning salmon.

Swimming with the fishes

The crates for our first exhibit - River of Memory: The Everlasting Columbia - arrived on September 1st.


7 of them! Four and a half crates holding 68 images and panels to go up on the walls, one holding the opening panel, and one holding 144 silk fish. I just updated the MCE facebook page to say how excited I am about the fish and I got a request for photos. Well, I can certainly oblige. But a little about how exhibits travel.

This exhibit originated at the Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center and has toured the Northwest. You've already seen how you move an exhibit: in custom built crates.

When the crates arrived, the first thing we did was... nothing. We moved the crates into our space and then let them sit. They sat for 48 hours so that they could acclimate to the climate at the museum (okay, they sat longer than 48 hours - I had a bit of a fight with some of the screws holding the crates on, and there was a holiday weekend). Once opened, the next step is to unpack and prepare a condition report for each individual piece.

A condition report is an individual examination of each object to provide a baseline. So we know that when the MCE received X object, it had a chip at the bottom right corner and a scratch in the upper right, 2 inches from the corner, for example. That way the lending institution knows what happens where. Condition reporting can be time consuming, especially with over 200 pieces to process. This is what it looked like when I was working on the images:


I would keep the report with the image until the image was moved into the gallery. When I completed the images, I moved on to the silk fish. The fish are beautiful, and the condition reports are pretty easy, since they're almost all in excellent condition. The fish are made from silk, painted by artists, and are meant to be hung from the ceiling. They're going to be amazing and dramatic. They range from quite small (just a few inches) up to 4 feet, and one that's 14 feet long - those are the real sizes the fish would be in the Columbia! Here's a glimpse of four of the 144 fish.


Spawning Salmon:


They're gorgeous on the table - I can't wait to see them all hung up with the historical photographs in the gallery.