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August Issue 2003
South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, SC, Shows Items from Stored Collection
"The South Carolina State Museum's storage rooms are just as important as its exhibition galleries," says Chief History Curator Fritz Hamer. While this may strike some as rather radical, its truth is illustrated by the museum's new exhibit More Than an Attic: Treasures from the Palmetto State, which just opened in the fourth-floor 401 Gallery on view through May 17, 2004.
With dozens of objects of all sizes and shapes, and covering all four of the museum's disciplines, the curators hope "to give people a broad perspective on what we're trying to do by collecting the material culture, natural history and art of South Carolina," Hamer says.
The museum's growing collection of more than 65,000 objects will yield to guests such treasures as the still-unrestored ticket booth Charleston's historic Riviera Theater used when it opened in 1938; an aviation pioneer's 1930s airplane engine; fossils of Ice Age creatures recently recovered from a major excavation in the Lowcountry; recently donated toys and dolls; folk art such as carved walking sticks; and, perhaps most unusual of all, a shellacked loaf of bread baked at Fort Jackson in 1942!
The collection is still quite young, says Hamer, since the museum has only been collecting since the mid-1970s. (The equally young museum was chartered in 1973 and opened to the public in 1988). But it contains many significant items, ranging from Paleo-Indian projectile points to 1850 militia uniforms to an electron microscope and many types of art produced in or about South Carolina.
So why do the curators collect what they do? "The Museum was created not only for the present, but for the future," says the curator. "We want our future guests and researchers to have access to objects that may be rare or nonexistent two or three hundred years from now."
Thus, while the collection includes fossils that are millions of years old and artifacts made by Indians living here more than 10,000 years ago, "we are also interested in things made in our own lifetimes. So toys like race cars and Disney figures sold at fast food restaurants, even bones from 'roadkilled' animals are important," Hamer says.
And that's what makes the storage rooms so important. No more than five or six percent of the museum's collection can be shown at one time, says the curator, so the other objects must be stored and protected while they "wait their turns" to star on the exhibit floors.
More Than an Attic: Treasures from the Palmetto State will help all museum guests think like curators, and show them why these "object detectives" do what they do, how they value things most people wouldn't, and what goes into building a valuable collection for future South Carolinians.
For more info check our SC Institutional
Gallery listings, call 803/898-4921 or on the web at (www.museum.state.sc.us).
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