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Africa: One Continent, Many Worlds is the largest
and most complex traveling exhibit the Museum of Natural History museum has
ever staged. The exhibit arrived in Pittsburgh in seven moving vans, having
just left the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. It has been on the
road since 1996, and has reached over two million people at 13 different
museums across the country, before arriving at its final stop in
Pittsburgh.
When the museum’s exhibition committee members saw Africa
at the National Conference of the American Association of Museums in
Baltimore, they knew immediately it was right for Pittsburgh. Not only did it
fit the museum’s newly affirmed mission to present materials of scientific
interest, it also explored a deeply fascinating subject, and it showcased
artifacts from Chicago’s famous Field Museum of Natural History.
Africa is a 9,000 plus square foot exhibit that
presents a comprehensive view of African cultural, geographical, political
and social diversity, and it uses African and African-American scholars as
narrators and designers of their own people’s stories. It has interactive and
hands-on activities, multi-media presentations, and covers West, Central,
East and North Africa as well as the historic African Diaspora. In this
exhibit “you are there” in a lively and festive marketplace in
Dakar, Senegal, and you explore the art producing regions of the Camaroon
grasslands and Zaire�and the mining and metalworking in Benin. You take a
caravan trip across the Sahara to the marketplace at Kano, see modern
eco-tourism, and learn how slavery created the African Diaspora.
Presenting Africa in Pittsburgh required creative
use of two museum spaces. The museum’s front changing exhibits gallery is
climate-controlled, but the larger rear exhibition space is not. Many
artifacts of wood, fabric and metal on loan from the Field Museum required
specific climatic conditions: a temperature of 70 degrees + or – 2 degrees;
humidity in the range of 45 -50%; lighting of no more than eight or nine
footcandles. A conservator travels with the exhibit to install it, and two
technicians set it up.
BBH, the commercial distributor handling the show for the
Field Museum, presented a version of the exhibition tailored to the two
spaces available for traveling exhibits at Carnegie Museum of Natural
History. Otherwise it could not have been scheduled. Because bronze artifacts
such as masks, dolls and religious items are so sensitive to humidity, at one
other museum BBH had to produce bronze replicas of these items. Other parts
of the exhibit, like the reconstructed slave ship, are major installation
projects, but do not require climate controlled environments.
Bringing the exhibit to Pittsburgh required a united
effort from committed individuals as well as local foundations. Esther Bush,
president of the local chapter of the Urban League, learned of the exhibit
from the museum, and became an enthusiastic campaigner to bring it to
Pittsburgh. Her dedication helped win key support from the R. K. Mellon
Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, and the Pittsburgh Foundation, as well as
support from Ford Motor Company. As chairperson of the Opening Gala, Ms. Bush
welcomed many of the area’s political and social leaders to the museum for
the exhibit.
Public Programs for
AFRICA
AFRICA: One Continent. Many Worlds
Thursday, March 15, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Join Dr. Deborah Mack, current director of Public Programs
for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, for an in-depth look at
the exhibit.
Stories of Color from Around the World
Wednesday, April 18, 7:00 pm � 8:00 pm
Nationally acclaimed, award-winning storyteller and author
Len Cabral gives a fascinating hour of storytelling that will engage adults
and young people alike.
Archaeology, Slavery, and Freedom
Thursday, April 26, 7:00 pm � 8:30 pm
Dr. Kofi Agorsah shares his research on the archaeological
evidence of the Maroon cultures–the enslaved Africans who escaped from
plantations in the New World and established villages in the Caribbean and
adjoining areas.
All programs are in the Lecture Hall: Members: $8;
Nonmembers: $12
For
details see the web site at http://www.clpgh.org/cmnh.
100,798 Fleas
The museum gets a gigantic flea collection
Devoted readers of the Flea News (no. 53) would have
seen the obituary of Robert S. Traub (1916-1996), a giant among flea
enthusiasts, whose colossal collection of 100,798 fleas has now come to the
Section of Invertebrate Zoology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The
Traub fleas automatically swelled the museum’s flea collection to
international scientific stature. In sheer size Traub’s was perhaps the third
largest flea collection in the world, and the first in number of different
species represented. Associate curator John Rawlins drove a rented truck from
Maryland to Pittsburgh to get it here.
Fleas, lest we forget, are one of the world’s great
lineages of parasites, and most are harmless to humans. Rawlins notes that
fleas are everywhere. In the Arctic and Antarctic, fleas on penguins and
marine birds survive while spending much of their lives submerged in icy
saltwater. But like ticks and mosquitoes, fleas can transmit infectious
disease from one animal to another by injecting bacteria on a blood-to-blood
basis. The infamous bubonic plague (the Black Death) carried by flea-infested
rats in the 14th century made fleas a classic subject in medical
entomology.
Traub collected fleas from all over the world. One of his
close associates was the museum’s former mammalogist Duane Schlitter, who for
years sent Traub flea specimens from mammals he collected in Africa. Some
60,000 Traub fleas are slide-mounted, i.e. embedded in a resin from the
balsam fir tree, and placed between glass plates, which gives them a kind of
immortality, like the insects from prehistoric ages forever embedded in
amber.
However tiny, fleas loom large in the field of medical
biology, and for experts on the world’s diseases and on animal life the
museum’s collection is now a major asset for research entomologists.
Scientific resources grow constantly through the acquiring of such
collections, just as this museum’s stature grew suddenly when its first
director, William Holland, after scrupulously collecting butterflies and
moths for 50 years, gave his entire scientifically documented collection of
250,000 specimens to the museum. There is a rule at Carnegie Museum of
Natural History that staff scientists cannot collect personally when they do
fieldwork for the institution, and they often donate their private
collections accumulated prior to being employed by the museum. Virtually all
of the current entomological staff have donated such collections, totalling
more specimens than even the great founding collection of Holland.
Such is the way great scientific resources in the life
sciences are assembled. There are over 11 million scientific specimens in the
entomological collections at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and now
about 103,000 of them are fleas.
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E-mail: carnegiemag@carnegiemuseums.org
