2:54 p.m., Aug. 21, 2009----During my summer at the Hearst, I have been involved in preparing a number of archaeological and ethnographic artifacts for two outgoing loans. The traveling exhibits -- including one to the San Francisco International Airport Museum and one to California State University in Bakersfield -- help the museum present its collection to a wider audience outside its own small gallery space.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

These loans represent only two of the five upcoming exhibitions the museum is preparing for at a time of budgetary crisis in the state of California. Staff members at this university museum are being called upon to work with increasingly limited resources and uncertainty of the future. The experience I am gaining as an intern at the Hearst is highly valuable -- I have had little experience with archaeological and ethnographic collections before this summer. But the work I'm doing is also important for the museum, where the helping hands of volunteers and interns help make these important traveling loans possible. Visibility and public outreach are essential tools in making people care about a collection and in making a case for supporting museums that have been hard hit by the economic downturn.

One of the great things about working at the Hearst is its collection, which includes a wide variety of artifacts from Native Californian basketry to Egyptian antiquities. This summer I have assessed the conditions of and carried out treatments on a number of Egyptian artifacts, including a sandstone head of the goddess Hathor, a painted stucco mummy mask and a selection of glazed steatite scarab beads and faience amulets. Egyptian mummies -- including an unidentified human and an alligator mummy, both wrapped -- have also been frequenting the lab this summer.