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From the Maker’s Hand: Selections from the Permanent Collection
Opening September 8, 2005
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology offers its latest interpretation of human ingenuity with the exhibit, From the Maker’s Hand: Selections from the Permanent Collection.
Visitors to the exhibit can see the living and historical cultures of China and Africa in one section. The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Peru, North America, and the Mediterranean are represented through many fine archaeological examples in another section. While the artifacts are diverse in origin, taken as a whole they underscore the notion that throughout history, humans have been innovators.
For millennia, humans have fashioned objects with their hands to produce and prepare food, cloth bodies, communicate with the gods, offer entertainment, and beautify the world. They have borrowed from one another’s cultures, exploited new materials, and adapted the objects of their lives in response to social, political, and environmental changes. The record of human productivity reveals a diverse range of creativity across cultures, with fundamental similarities as well as differences.
Selections from Africa include many examples from the Yoruba of Nigeria—a strong interest of former museum director William Bascom. Additional West and Central African cultures are represented through a variety of ceremonial masks, carvings by the Kuba of Congo, kente cloth, brass gold-weights, and other items of the Ashanti from Ghana, and various items from the Ivory Coast and Cameroon. The cultures of Eastern and Southern Africa are presented through a range of clothing, household, decorative, and ceremonial items including snuff and smoking paraphernalia, and jewelry.
Highlights of the museum’s collections from China include clothing and decorative household items, porcelain and glass snuff bottles, writing brushes and other implements. The museum also has an interesting collection of pigeon whistles on display—the whistles were secured to the birds and made sounds as they flew. Religious and ceremonial items included the stunning bridal crown of enamel and kingfisher feathers that was last exhibited in 2002 during the museum’s centennial. While most artifacts represent China’s predominant Han culture, the exhibit does include a pewter ewer from the Islamic Uighar culture of Xinjiang.
Frequent visitors to the Hearst Museum of Anthropology will recognize some of the archaeology on view. Included are Greek and Roman vases, ancient Peruvian textiles and ceramics, the carved marble statue of Plato that may in fact be the most accurate likeness of the scholar, and the polychrome stela of Egyptian Prince Wepemnefret, one of the best-preserved in the world.
New artifacts from the archaeological collections include a cat mummy from ancient Egypt excavated by Egyptologist George Reisner, and a painted Peruvian textile discovered by Max Uhle—the father of Peruvian archaeology. Both of these items are offerings to the gods, and made of perishable materials. Because of their fragile nature, it is rare to see such items today.
Ancient Egyptians would make offerings to the goddess Bastet, usually depicted as a female with a cat head. Sometimes the bundled offerings contained feline-substitutes, such as mummified birds or reptiles. Whether these substitutes were sold to the devout in order to make a profit with cheaper (or more easily obtained) ingredients, or whether cats simply became scarce during the era of Bastet-worship is up for debate. What we do know from X-ray is that the cat mummy on view in the exhibit contains just that.
From the Maker’s Hand is one in a series of presentations drawing on the museum’s vast collections of approximately 3.8 million objects. The new exhibit is complemented by the ongoing exhibits of the Native Californian Cultures Gallery and Recent Acquisitions and by the special exhibit Tesoros Escondidos: Hidden Treasure from the Mexican Collections. Together, the four installations offer visitors an overview of the range of human creativity from around the globe and from ancient times to the present.
Media Contact: Sandra Harris
(510)-642-7610 or sanharris@berkeley.edu
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