Weekend celebration of a new wing and courtyard garden at University Museum
When the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology opens its new $17 million Mainwaring Wing and adjacent Stoner Courtyard Garden, be there with bells on!
By Dea Adria Mallin
Special to the University City Review
Dateline: 4/24/2002 - Philadelphia is the birthplace of this nation's museums, and one of our very best is opening a state-of-the-art storage wing for its collections, along with a public garden of profound serenity and beauty. The Museum is waiving its usual admission donation for May 4 and 5, and inviting the public to a party between 2 and 4 p.m. each day. On Saturday, celebrate to the West African sounds of the Women's Sekere (beaded gourd) Ensemble and on Sunday, to the calypso music of the Steel Kings. Talk with the architects of the wing and the garden. And get a rare insider's look at the new storage facilities, available afterwards only to qualified researchers.
Those who have never worked in museums rarely think about how and where the museum's holdings are stored. Some subterranean area, probably, without air conditioning, and crowded with boxes atop boxes and labeled drawers and cabinets. There is, to be sure, fluctuating temperature and humidity, along with atmospheric pollution.
Now, thanks to the really generous-hearted donors who understand that while state-of-the-art storage is not a glamorous, sexy front-of-themuseum accomplishment, it is the lifeblood of preservation and conservation of a collection. The Museum can now properly care for 100,000 of its most at-risk artifacts - ethnographic materials from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. To the visitor, this means the feather headdress from the Amazon, the antelope hide war shirt of the Plains Indian, the beadwork of the Choctaw.
"This is a dream realized, not only for the Museum and researchers," says Dr. Jeremy Sabloff, the Williams Director of the Museum, "but for the entire community." After more than 100 years of world-wide research resulting in a collection with nearly one million artifacts, Sabloff sees the international collections as "part of our shared human heritage" which the Museum holds "in trust for generations to come."
Sabloff is right. As a child, I came often to visit the University Museum and to stand in awe before the then-unprotected ram of lapis lazuli and hammered gold sheet from the excavations at Ur, and the cases with Ur's lapis and gold jewelry. Much later, as an adult living in London, I pressed my face up against the glass cases of the British Museum to observe another third of the artifacts from the Ur expedition. Whether it is the shaping of gold and lapis, or the ingenious forms that the world's housing takes, or mankind's cooking implements, or transportation, or representations of men or women in wood carvings and stone sculptures, my world first became entwined with other worlds through this Museum.
Imbued, then, with deep respect and fascination, I took a preview tour of the Mainwaring Wing's study and seminar rooms, then entered one of the high density storage areas to a whoosh of cold air. Inside, in giant metal storage containers that can move forward and back in military formation with the push of a button, are the organic materials most at risk. Think fur, think feathers, think ivory, think wood. Think of a single fragile artifact of mixed materials, expanding and contracting against each other. No more - the Mainwaring Wing is equipped with its own climate control system, maintained at a constant 60 degrees, with only 45-50% humidity, and filtered air.
For Assistant Keeper Bill Wierzbowski of the American Section, the job of moving and properly storing the museum's collections will occupy the next 18 months. When he opens some drawers in one of the sleek metal cabinets, beneath the Alaskan fur hats, I recognize some of the Museum's superb Pomo Indian baskets, part of a recent exhibition here, then on the road to other museums. "They've just come home," Bill says, triumphantly, clearly delighted that no surprise chemical reactions, no mold, no bugs will have a chance at the feathered baskets in their new environment.
"What kinds of things used to happen?" I wonder. Bill instantly recalls an Indian drum with a skin stretched tightly across the top, subjected to the vagaries of temperature and humidity, fluctuating wildly. "It just popped the drumhead," he recalls. Bill also looks forward to constructing about 4,000 fairly complex mounts and "beds" for the artifacts, so that they no longer have to be touched in order to be picked up for observation or study.
In Bill's favorite drawer is an elaborate Sioux (Lakota) dance bustle or "tail," from the 1880s. It was worn by the male and made of orange horsehair, peacock pinnules, quill-wrapped strips, magpie feathers, and feathers from the back of an impressive eagle.
Thanks to donors like Bruce and Peggy Mainwaring (and to inert plastics), this dance bustle will be here for another hundred years!
Down in the basement, I am privileged to enter a giant freezer room that operates at minus 40 degrees, and to contemplate what this might mean to such a distinguished collection. Give it the formal name of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) or say straightforwardly that wood, fur, and feathers inspire things that crawl and fly and buzz, and if the collection is to last, these critters must be contained.
Through the mid-80s, museums used pesticides, and when there was a shift to the cold treatment, the University Museum bought the largest chest freezer that Sears made, and used it to control pests. When someone donated 200 Guatemalan masks, it took the staff three months just to decontaminate them. Each mask was wrapped in polyethylene plastic and put into the freezer for a week, then removed to let any fledgling pests
develop, then returned to the freezer to finish them off. Today, with an entire freezer room, the process would take just three weeks. Large objects that used to present real problems - like a 7-foot Oceanic or African house post, or a 6-foot long carpet - will be easily managed in the Mainwaring Wing's freezer room. The only aspect not easily managed is the staff, each of whom could use a donation of some Arctic gear
The weekend opening party will be held in the Stoner Courtyard Garden, destined to be one of those "build it and they will come" places, a rare city space of contemplation and reflection, a secret garden inside protective walls, yet open to the public.
The Olin Partnership of landscape architects has redesigned the original courtyard, commingling old and new, and has filled it with plants and trees, already abloom, from three continents. Garden vistas include a wide open sky, two towering Ohio buckeye trees, and the new Mainwaring Wing designed by Atkin, Olshin, Lawson-Bell Architects. The wing is masterfully integrated with the original brick design of Wilson Eyre, Jr., Frank Miles Day, and Cope and Stewardson. The new architects, with a deep respect for the level of artisanship in the Museum's exterior walls, were able to replicate them, having the brick laid in a complex monk bond, or Double Flemish, where even the horizontal bed joint of the mortar is one-inch thick (a standard joint for mortar is less than a half inch). So look closely in appreciation.
The garden contains mosaics by Louis Tiffany, a bold new fountain, the majestic ironwork of the old gates, and the stonework of Alexander Stirling Calder, son of the sculptor of City Hall's William Penn. There are bas-reliefs, an elaborate bubbling wall fountain, sculpted doorways, a keystone arch with two substantial angels, and four gatepost statues positioned high on the outer brick walls, looking, symbolically, both out and in. Raise your eyes also to the brick wall of Franklin Field across the street, and note how the white stripes on the stadium wall correspond to the Museum's axis points.
The new garden leads to the new museum entrance, where a renovated corridor is given over to "Photographic Explorations: A Century of Images in Archaeology and Anthropology." It was the task of Museum Archivist Alessandro Pezzati to select sixty black-and-white images from tens of thousands of expedition photographs from the Museum's 400 field projects to all the inhabited continents of the world in its 110 years of research. Whether from the work in the Amazon, Memphis, Ur, Tikal, or Gordion, Pezzati hopes the photographs capture the driving curiosity of UPM researchers. Yet for the final photo at the end of the corridor, he has chosen a 1969 image of a lone man surveying the land, utterly dwarfed by the desolate desert sands of Afghanistan. Pezzati's choices speak to diversity, to man's inter-relatedness, and ultimately, to his transience. And that should be a gentle reminder to both viewer and expeditioner to temper life with a sense of humility.
Free to the public. U of P Museum opening of Mainwaring Wing and Stoner Courtyard Garden. May 4 and 5. 2-4 pm. 33rd and Spruce Sts. 215 898-4000.
William Wierzbowski, Assistant Keeper, American Section, moving artifacts into a climate controlled storage room in the new Mainwaring Wing in April 2002. He is seen here with a late 19th century Native American shoulder pouch from the Great Lakes region. The pouch is made of cloth and beads. Photo: Candice diCarlo.
