Time In A Bottle

Exhibit just a taste of vast UA collections

Allyn Lord, director of the Shiloh Museum in Springdale, shows off the carillon from Old Main at the University of Arkansas. The musical instrument was awaiting installation as part of “From Archaeopteryx to Zapus,” an exhibit on the history of the University of Arkansas Museum, which opens Monday.
Allyn Lord, director of the Shiloh Museum in Springdale, shows off the carillon from Old Main at the University of Arkansas. The musical instrument was awaiting installation as part of “From Archaeopteryx to Zapus,” an exhibit on the history of the University of Arkansas Museum, which opens Monday.

How does one represent a collection of 7.5 million pieces with 220 selections?

Allyn Lord, director of the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, spent a lot of time answering that question.

She started with four broad categories - archeology, history and ethnology, geology and zoology - and factored in diversity, “the wow factor” and memories visitors might have of the days when the University of Arkansas Museum had a public face.

Then she asked curators of the university’s collections to make suggestions. And finally, Lord went on a white-glove shopping trip with Mary Suter, curator of collections for the UA Collections Facility in north Fayetteville.

“It sounds like fun,” Lord says. “But it was so difficult!”

The objects finally selected will be on show at the Shiloh Museum beginning Monday in “From Archaeopteryx to Zapus,” subtitled “an exhibit on the history of the University of Arkansas Museum.” But it’s more than that, Lord says, because the museum collections remain extant and active.

“That’s one of the things I want to tell people,” she says.

“The museum collections are still available to researchers and other museums and institutions. It was the public dimension that was lost” when the museum closed.

This year marks the 140th anniversary of the UA’s first collections in geology in 1873, Lord points out. Over time, the museum exhibits grew to take up the fifth floor of Old Main, the university’s oldest building. A “temporary” move to Hotz Hall, a dorm, lastedfrom 1974 to 1986, when the museum got its own home in an historic structure that had been a men’s gymnasium. The museum closed to the public in 2003.

Suter says more than 200 people a year still visit the Collections Facility for research or group tours. The Shiloh Museum exhibit is the first one to focus on the history of the museum, to thebest of her knowledge.

Over the years, University Museum visitors got to see a wide spectrum ofrare treasures - materials from Ozark bluff shelters;

ceremonial masks from Mexico and the islands ofthe South Pacific; a complete collection of Hopi kachinas; a Pleistocene mammoth found northeast of Hazen in 1965;

a pressed glass collection of more than 3,000 pieces, one of the largest in the southeastern United States; and the George Gibson basket collection, which includes every kind of basket made by the nationally recognized Ozark Mountain craftsman.

Lord more or less tried to get a little bit of everything.

The Shiloh exhibit, which continues throughout 2013, will include mounted birds;

turtles, snakes, lizards, frogs and batfish preserved in alcohol; stretched “study” skins of various mammals;

bluff shelter materials; an entire Plains Indian exhibit;

the Fayetteville meteorite;

and, of course, the cast of an archaeopteryx - the transition between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds;

and a zapus - a jumping mouse.

“It really is A to Z and everything in between,” Lord says.

Whats Up, Pages 17 on 02/01/2013

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