October 17 to
June,
2004
Rangos Omnimax Theater

Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees
By M.A. Jackson
There
have been two great Janes of the jungle—Tarzan’s
Jane and the primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall. Both
have had plenty of screen time thanks to B movies
and National
Geographic specials, respectively. But Goodall
is the only Jane to have an Imax movie all about
her. Jane
Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees is a 40-minute
look at Goodall’s four decades of groundbreaking
wild
chimpanzee research in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream
National Park.
Goodall narrates the film that opens
with black and white archival footage of her
early years at
Gombe—although
there wasn’t much to see during her first
few months as the chimps ran from her in terror.
But Goodall’s
persistence paid off as the touching scene of
her first physical contact with Fifi, an infant
chimp
brazen
enough to approach the human intruder, attests.
In addition, Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees provides
a comprehensive overview of her work, introduces
young researchers continuing Goodall’s
work, and features contemporary footage of Goodall
at
Gombe with her now-famous
chimpanzee subjects—Fifi (now a mother
herself), alpha male Frodo, Gremlin, Gaia, twins
Golden and
Glitter, and Titan.
Although an animal lover
since childhood, Goodall stumbled into her
life’s
work. In 1957, she was hired to assist noted
paleontologist/ anthropologist Dr.
Louis Leakey on a fossil-hunting dig in Africa’s
Olduvai Gorge. It was Leaky who arranged for
Goodall to travel
to study the behavior of the chimpanzees at
Gombe. In 1960, Goodall started her adventure—she
was 26-years-old and had never seen a chimpanzee
in the
wild.
Filmed in 1999 over a four-month period,
Jane Goodall’s
Wild Chimpanzees features rare footage
of chimpanzees interacting in their community,
playing with one
another (and their baboon neighbors), grooming,
hunting, communicating,
and using tools to find food.
It was Goodall
who discovered that chimps use tools—a
revelation that literally revolutionized
the understanding of chimp behavior. Goodall
also proved that chimps
have distinct personalities, hunt for and
eat meat, and participate in war-like behavior.
Today,
Goodall spends the majority of her time promoting
the preservation of chimpanzees
and
the environment
through touring and speaking engagements.
But her work continues as the longest running
research
project of
its kind.
Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees provides
viewers with a better understanding of Goodall’s
passion for primates. The chimps she studied
have distinct
personalities and traits that mirror human
behavior—from
tender and sneaky to grouchy and troublesome.
After seeing the movie it should come as
no surprise—as
it did to Goodall—that chimps are human’s
closest animal relative (we share nearly
99 percent of the same DNA).
Although chimpanzee
populations are on the
decline—there
are fewer than 150,000 chimpanzees in Africa
today while in 1900 there were one to two
million—without
Goodall’s research and preservation
efforts,
Wild Chimpanzees could very well
have been eradicated by now due to poaching
and
habitat loss. Jane Goodall’s
Wild Chimpanzees is so inspiring
viewers may find themselves changing their
names to
Jane and moving
to the jungle
.
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National
Chemistry Week:
Earth’s Atmosphere and Beyond!
October 24-25, 2003
Carnegie Science Center
10a.m.-5p.m.
This year Carnegie Science Center presents its 5th
Annual National Chemistry Week on Friday and Saturday,
October 24-25. The activities will honor the innovators
and pioneers of aviation and atmospheric chemistry,
and the date coincides with the 100th anniversary of
the Wright Brother’s first powered flight.
The
theme of Earth’s Atmosphere and Beyond will
be featured at over 25 tables with chemistry-related,
hands-on science experiments, activities and demonstrations.
These events are designed for all ages and are hosted
by corporations, societies and universities. All-day
shows are featured at Carnegie Science Center Theater
during these two special days.
In celebration of National
Chemistry Week, Carnegie Science Center is also
hosting a Girl Scout Overnighter
on Friday October 24. The activities presented
will allow participants to earn a National Chemistry
Week
Girl
Scout Patch.
Sponsors for National Chemistry Week
in Pittsburgh include The Pittsburgh Section of
the American Chemical
Society, The Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh,
Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh,
and Bayer Corporation.
Funds contributed to the event help support underserved
Girl Scout overnighter and school group visits.

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Copyright (c) 2003 CARNEGIE magazine. All rights reserved.

Time Capsule Exhibition
Premieres in Germany

Only a fraction of the more than 600 cardboard time
capsules that Andy Warhol filled with objects of his
daily existence have been opened, let alone unveiled
to the public in an exhibition of their own.
But the
Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany, has been
collaborating with The Andy Warhol Museum
to create the first display of multiple entries in
Warhol’s curious, three-dimensional diaries.
The entire contents of 15 boxes will be shown this
fall at the Frankfurt museum in the exhibition Andy
Warhol Time Capsules.
The exhibition will be returned to The Warhol for
a similar display during fall 2004. While in Frankfurt,
the items will be intermingled with pieces from the
modern art museum’s permanent collection of works
by Warhol and other contemporary artists.
“
The scale of this show is immense,” says John
Smith, The Warhol’s assistant director for Collections
and Research. “Each box has 200 to 300 single
objects in it. Multiply that by 15 and you realize
how many different single pieces we’re dealing
with.
“
It would have been difficult for us to take on
a project like this on our own,” he continues.
To organize a tour of the exhibition required
this kind of really
close collaboration.”
Such collaborations
also give the museum opportunities to build exhibitions
it might not be able to afford
independently. “It’s one exhibition,
but both institutions will show it in completely
different
ways,” Smith says.
The Warhol Director Thomas
Sokolowski points out that the institution’s
role as custodian of Warhol’s
legacy includes more than preservation and
study; it also means sharing his output with
other audiences
so that they might be able to understand and
appreciate
his work, and therefore, his life.
Because Warhol
apparently was the world’s biggest
packrat, curators had a tough time trying to
decide which of the 100 or so inventoried boxes
would go overseas.
“
We really tried to look for a selection of
boxes that seemed to represent the full range
of what the Time
Capsules are about,” Smith explains.
The goal, of course, was to show the most interesting
capsules, “without
losing sight of the fact that what makes these
things interesting is that a box might contain
a half-dozen
drawings from the 1950s, and in that same box
might be Warhol’s electric bill.”
Assistant
Archivist Matthew Wrbican says the chosen boxes
contain about four-dozen drawings.
One has
200 strips of photo booth snapshots. Another
features a
pair of Clark Gable’s shoes. They were
still on their shoe trees when Gable’s
widow mailed them to Warhol after catching
a gossip columnist’s
report—planted by Warhol—that he
was collecting celebrities’ shoes. Archivist
excavators found them in their original cardboard
mailing box, which
previously held cans of house paint.
It’s
hard for Wrbican to single out some of the
most exciting objects because, for him, a seemingly
innocuous receipt or unpaid bill might hold
clues that
lock pieces of Warhol’s puzzling life
together. Collectively, these items also uncover
many previously
hidden layers of his personality.
“
His humanity comes out in some of this material,” Smith
says.
He notes the boxes’ contents also
provide evidence that no one escapes the onslaught
of minutiae that
rules much of our daily lives.
“
Whether you’re an artist or an accountant,
you still get your electric bills and junk
mail,” Smith
notes with a laugh. Warhol’s boxes offer
insights as to just how much information we
encounter on a day-to-day
basis. And whether we like it or not, we have
to find ways of processing that information;
it just so happens
that Warhol’s method was far more eccentric
than most.
But who doesn’t fantasize about
tossing bills in a box and simply ignoring
them?
Warhol’s practice, Smith observes, “is
a way of dealing with it and not dealing with it at
the same time.”
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The
Summer of Andy
Continues Into Fall
The “Summer of Andy” days may be getting
shorter, but three important exhibitions remain on
display at The Andy Warhol Museum: Keith Edmier and
Farrah Fawcett; The American Supermarket; and Clown
Paintings: From the Collection of Diane Keaton and
Others.
Colleen Russell Criste, assistant director for
External Affairs, notes, “The Summer of Andy
concept has given us the chance to wrap our arms
around the museum’s
wide range of public events, including these special
exhibitions, the Good Fridays weekly happy hour and
performance series, our films, our wine tastings,
and more.”
The Edmier/Fawcett exhibition, continuing
through October 5, is the result of a two-year
partnership between
the original Charlie’s Angels icon and Edmier,
who invited her to become the subject of an artwork.
Instead, she became his collaborator, and together
they created drawings, photographs, and the exhibition’s
focus, life-sized nude sculptures of one another.
In the process, they scrutinized and deconstructed
both
the ties uniting and the barriers separating fans
and stars.
In 1964, Warhol and fellow Pop Art pioneers
Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Artschweiger, Robert
Watts,
and Tom Wesselman
combined their work in a groundbreaking exhibition
at the Bianchini Gallery in New York. The American
Supermarket, on display through October 5, is
a re-creation of that reality-blurring exhibition,
itself a re-creation
of a core element in the growth of consumerism.
Similar in nature to Warhol’s cookie jar collection,
Clown Paintings represents more than a simple
fascination with kitsch. These amateur paintings spoke
to their
collectors with an emotional intensity that’s
even more evident when viewed together. They
can be seen through October 26.
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Copyright (c) 2003 CARNEGIE magazine. All rights reserved.