Anthropology museum readies for reopening
By Amy Geiszler-Jones
 Jerry Martin, director of the Lowell D. Holmes Museum of Anthropology, stands in front of Guatemalan textiles from his private collection that he has loaned for display in the museum. |
A few display placards are missing, the reproduction of a Mayan mural is partially painted and not yet assembled, and photos still need to be hung.
But the Lowell D. Holmes Museum of Anthropology has come a long way from its beginnings in 1963 in a small room in McKinley Hall as a way for its namesake, a WSU faculty member for 30 years, to display items collected on his trips to Samoa and the South Pacific.
The museum, with its official space of 3,000 square feet in its new home in Neff Hall, is getting ready to reopen after more than 18 months. Director Jerry Martin expects the museum will start opening in the afternoons in the next few weeks. He and others at WSU are still working on the details for the museum’s official opening reception May 1.
While the museum technically has a secure space of 3,000 square feet off the south hallway of Neff Hall, Martin envisions displaying all those interesting and unique items held by the anthropology department almost anywhere there’s an empty wall or space.
On a recent tour of the museum, he tells a visitor, "let’s start at the beginning," as he walks to the front entryway of Neff Hall. In his plan for the museum, he sees several other items joining the two display cases now there.
"We will redo all this and make this into a really exciting entry," he says. "It’ll be something that when you walk in, it will really grab your attention and you’ll know you’re in a museum."
He later leads the visitor to yet another potential display area – a stairwell where Martin plans to display a child’s canoe that was a gift to the governor of Samoa from his people in the early 1900s and a large world map marking the sites where anthropology faculty conduct their research.
"We look at Neff Hall as the museum," he says explaining the department’s long-range plans. "The classrooms and the offices will be the functional part of the department."
A number of display cases are already in the hallways.
For now, however, Martin, students in his Museum Exhibition class and volunteers are attending to the last-minute details of the exhibits in the secure space before the museum reopens.
The museum’s two galleries were funded by donors and bear their names: the Mary Lynn Oliver Gallery and the Sally and David Jackman Gallery.
 A replica of a Hindu temple is in the Mary Lynn Oliver Gallery of the Holmes Museum. |
In 1999, when the anthropology department moved to Neff Hall, it had to pack up literally thousands of ethnographic and archaeological specimens – wooden sculptures, paintings, intricate clothing and fabrics, well-crafted and some repaired pottery, stone tools, and even shrunken monkey heads. Most of the items hadn’t been displayed – even though the museum had grown into a larger room in the meantime – in the aging McKinley Hall, which was shared with two other departments.
It was Martin’s job to unpack the boxes piled high in the museum’s space. Newly hired as the director, he literally had to discover what each cardboard carton contained, as somehow the inventory lists had been lost.
While the move to Neff Hall gave the museum more space, it also gives the anthropology department the chance to maximize the museum’s role and enhance the museum studies program.
While visitors can view cultural items and learn more about the Japanese tea ceremony, a Hindu temple and ancient people of Mexico through the current displays, students have been learning how to plan and create museum exhibits, curate artifacts and understand the standards for maintaining collections.
"We used to think of the museum as a little exotic entity to which people could take visitors," says department chair Peer Moore-Jansen. "Now the museum is an operational part of the department. It’s not just display cases, it’s a teaching tool."
Students taking the Museum Exhibition course in spring and fall 2000 and the current semester crafted all the current exhibits in the Holmes Museum. The current class is also working on an archaeology display for Neff Hall’s north hallway.
It’s no small feat to develop exhibits, considering major professional museums usually spend two to three years conceptualizing and creating displays.
"We do it in 16 weeks," says Martin, an alumnus who had taught the class as an adjunct faculty in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "It’s eight weeks of planning, eight weeks of construction."
The class meets three hours Monday afternoons. Students are expected to spend at least another three hours each week on their projects, but most have spent more.
Students like senior Barbara Kae relish the experience. "I like the fact that there was an empty space and I got to be creative."
In the spring 2000 class, she and two other students were told to focus on a display representing Japan. The trio constructed a small-scale, functional Japanese teahouse that sits almost in the center of the museum.
Kae says the class helped her find a way to combine her field major interests in art history, studio arts, anthropology and astronomy. "I’m ready to do this kind of work the rest of my days," she says.
The experience will also help as she undertakes an internship project this semester, creating a display for the Norton County Historical Society. Kae continues to work with Martin at the Holmes Museum, too: She volunteered to paint the reproduction Mayan mural.
The museum will offer other ways for students to learn. Students will fill the museum’s positions of two curators and a registrar, and students in the Museum Methods class, which focuses on curation, administration and museum standards, will use the museum as a resource.
An unexpected learning opportunity came along in the fall, when Neff Hall became too humid and mold started appearing in the building and on items.
"Thousands of items had to be inspected one at a time, gone over with a microscope or magnified and cleaned. We were able to hire students to do that work for us," Martin says. On a recent visit, a yellow sticky note on a reproduction Tibetan prayer wheel attested to that work with the message "cleaned and vacuumed 10/17/00."
In one area of the museum, visitors will have another opportunity they didn’t have in the former location. Martin constructed "open storage" areas, where collection items are simply shelved in environmentally controlled glass cases. That allows visitors to see more of those thousands of items the museum has, but without creating an elaborate display.
In that same area, students will be able to work on pieces – mend pottery or mark items from the latest archaeological dig – while visitors come through the museum. "People won’t just see the artifacts in the museum," says Moore-Jansen, "but the museum at work."
