Clearing out the Gallery

Our first exhibit closed on December 19th. Over the past week, I've been engaged in taking it down, or deinstalling it. With 140ish silk fish and 60+ photos, that's a lot of material to taken down. This is what the gallery looked like on the last day of the exhibit. Very full, very vibrant.


When taking down the exhibit, the first thing I did was to re-attach the tags to each of the hanging fish. Then I went around, cutting down the thread we'd used to hang the fish with. After recording any changes to the condition of the fish, I returned them to their original boxes and will be repacking those boxes inside their crates when all the fish are down.

The second step has been to take down the framed photos. I noted any condition changes and repacked the images. Thankfully, this didn't involve going up and down a ladder countless times, like preparing the fish did. All in all, the process has gone really smoothly, and I expect to finish deinstalling tomorrow. Here's what the partially deinstalled gallery looks like right now (click on the image to get to a larger version).


Note all the hanging threads we used for the fish, and the stick-um on the gallery walls from the labels. We'll deal with gallery clean up last.

Photo Friday: Petrified Wood Projectile Point

I've spent a lot of time with archaeological lithics in my life. As an undergraduate, I spent 3.5 years working with and studying lithic debitage. In the collection here, we have about 6000 pieces of chipped stone tools - projectile points and scrapers, mostly. This week I've been photographing some projectile points and processing photos that our intern, Leila, took earlier this month.

I was really struck by the beauty of these tools. They're made from a variety of materials. Around here, you sometimes see projectile points worked from petrified wood. There's quite a bit of petrified wood in the area. There's even a petrified forest nearby (which has a pretty neat museum/interpretive center down the road from it). I think it's just wild how a tree becomes fossilized and then becomes a tool when worked by a skilled craftsperson.

Photo Friday: New Acquisition

Since the Museum of Culture and Environment began running workshops last spring, we've had higher visibility. Over the summer we received three new donations. This piece is one of them. After some delay, we've attached a label to it and it is now fully integrated into the collection.


At the moment, we don't have a great deal of information about piece, except that the owner before the donor may have been a librarian in Peru. Intriguing!

Photo Friday: Outside the Museum

I stepped outside on Tuesday afternoon to get some air and see daylight (occupational hazard of working with collections? Basement or windowless office.). The daylight was exceptionally beautiful - sun from the west, clouds in the east. So I ran back to my office, grabbed the camera and snapped a few photos before the light disappeared.

Photo Friday: Polar Bear Pendant

I skipped ahead out of the lithics this week and took pictures of some of our smaller Arctic type objects. This piece, a carved polar bear head pendant, was probably carved for sale. It's grouped with three other carved for sale type pieces including a napkin ring, a letter opener, and a small seal. I love the heads flanking it on the right and left. Seals, maybe? And also the tongue detail - very red and interesting!

Photo Friday: Mortar/Bowl

The major collections projects at the moment are somewhat less photogenic than the process of packing and moving were.

We're doing an inventory. Moving and unpacking was a group effort which involved many people, and sometimes lines of communication get crossed. Right now we're working to make sure that everything is where it ought to be and that our database reflects that.

At the same time, we're using our new Nikon camera to take high quality photos of the collection. We're starting with our mortars and pestles and moving on to the natural history collection. Here's a photo of a bowl or mortar made of volcanic rock:

This piece was collected in Idaho. According to its catalog record, the donor "worked on it" suggesting that he modified it in some way from how he found it. But what precisely was done is hard to tell. It may have been a chunk of volcanic rock, completely unformed, or it may have had the suggestion of a bowl. Another mystery to speculate on.

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.