LITTLE ROCK — Of the 230 objects about to go on display as part of the Arkansas Arts Center's "World of the Pharaohs: Treasures of Egypt Revealed" exhibit, guest curator William Peck's favorite is a blue chalice cup in the shape of a lotus.
"It is the epitome of Egyptian art and design. The lotus is highly symbolic of life and death in Egyptian culture; it echoes life and death, it blooms in the morning and closes at night, reopens in morning. Nothing in Egyptian art is not a symbol. Everything in their culture has to do with eternal life," he says.
The exhibit itself is about eternal life as well as the "average life" of an Egyptian, says Joseph Lampo, the museum's in-house curator and deputy director of programs.
"We wanted to be able to tell stories about the objects," says Lampo, who praised thecraftsmanship of many of the pieces and the range of materials from which they are made: alabaster, limestone, wood, ceramics.
The exhibit, the interior of which took two weeks to build, will wind through 7,500 square feet of gallery space dedicated to various themes: the household; religion and the gods; the Egyptian man and woman; luxury goods; kingship and the role of the pharaoh in society and others.
Peck, an expert in ancient Egypt and a professor at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, was hired to create the themes and group the objects around those themes.
"When you enter the exhibit, one of first things you see is a kind of symbolic Nile River ... an invocation of the Nile," says Peck, an archaeologist and lecturer who wrote Drawings From Ancient Egypt. "Sitting on that is a model boat, an ancient Egyptian model. The models were in tombs forthe benefit of the spirit; they aren't toys. We have a boat and a granary. Then you see this colossal Ramesses II fragment. This is where we start to explain the pharaoh as pivotal to everything in life as the representative of the gods."
The majority of the objects date from 3,000 B.C. to A.D. 30, just after the Roman occupation, says Peck, who narrated part of the audio guide for the show. The earliest object is an arrowhead that dates from the fifth millennium.
The items, with the exception of two mummies, are on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which Peck calls one of the great collections of the world and one of just three major collections of Egyptian art in the United States. The other two are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Brooklyn Museum.
"Boston has long been a center of study of Egyptian art, starting at the end of the 19th century," Peck says."They sponsored excavations in Egypt in conjunction with Harvard University. Often curators and archaeologists had appointments at both the museum and the university."
The Boston collection is best known for works excavated by George Andrew Reis ner between 1905 and 1947. Most were excavated near the Great Pyramid in Giza.
The objects in the pharaohs exhibit come from those excavations as well as purchases made by the museum at the beginning of 19th century, Peck says.
The Boston museum didn't want to loan mummies for conservation reasons, Peck says. The mummies at the Arkansas Arts Center come from the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, Okla., and theUniversity of Quebec. They are at the exhibit's end.
Peck thinks people are drawn to such exhibits because of their antiquity and monumentality.
"People think Egyptians were fixated on death ... it's the opposite. They loved life. If they could afford it, they wanted to take it with them," he says.
Among Peck's other favorite items in the exhibit:
A solid-gold casting of a ram-headed god, a standing figure.
Fragments of the upper halves of a statue of a man and wife, which Peck describes as a "very telling kind of image of familial love" that shows the "obvious affection, devotion, commitment between husband and wife."
A scribe's palette.
A relief carving, excavated at Giza, of two men named Qau and Idu, who may be father and son. "One has his arm raised with a curved stick [a throwing stick used to hunt birds]. The other figure is behind him, with a similar stick. They are sportsmen.But everything is symbolic ... the symbolic meaning is that they are combating the forces of evil."
A limestone image of a woman bending over, milling grain on a grindstone. "It is graceful; she's on her knees, a perfect image of how much labor went into bread, for instance."
Lampo singled out a number of alabaster pieces as well as a beaded dress made of Egyptian faience, a quartzite material. The beads were found in a coffin and the dress was reconstructed using drawings on tomb walls that showed similar dresses.
And he noted a few items came from the Mediterranean, demonstrating the Egyptian trade.
Due to the costs involved, there is no exhibition catalog, Peck says. But there are extensive labels and wall panels with background material on the items.
Style, Pages 60 on 09/20/2009