by Jeremy Hunt
Daily Lobo
For the last 75 years, Maxwell Museum has been UNM's time machine for experiencing human evolution and learning about societies of the past.
Curator David Phillips said that the museum is the best way for students to learn about history, because it offers a hands-on learning experience.
"It's less boring (than textbooks). There's only so much learning you can do in a book," he said. "It's the same reason chemistry classes have lab sessions and computer classes have computer programming."
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Maxwell Museum became the first public museum in Albuquerque in 1932. It was founded as the Museum of Anthropology. It was renamed in 1972 in honor of Dorothy and Gilbert Maxwell, who donated money to make an expansion possible.
The 75th anniversary will include lectures from the museum's previous directors on their favorite subjects, Phillips said.
Phillips is the curator of the exhibit "Beyond Borders," which displays photographs and artifacts from the Casas Grandes region of Mexico and PaquimÇ, Mexico.
Artifacts like an 800-year-old comb make history come alive, Phillips said.
"Suddenly, you think of someone waking up with tangled hair in the morning," he said.
Catherine Baudoin, who is a co-curator of one of the exhibits, said the museum helps clear up misconceptions people have about other cultures.
Baudoin is the co-curator of "North by Southwest," an exhibit showcasing photographs and artifacts from the Bering Sea region in Alaska. The exhibit will open March 9.
People don't realize the complexity of that region, she said.
"They aren't called Eskimos. There's a tremendous amount of people from that region," she said. "It would be like us saying our Native-American groups in the Southwest are one big group - one big happy family."
Phillips said that instructors don't take full advantage of the museum, because they're not aware of what's
available.
"They just don't know what we have. If you don't know something is there, you don't go looking for it," he said. "What you see on public display is just the tip of the iceberg."
Instructors can access the museum's archives and take classes to look at the artifacts. The best way for instructors to take advantage of Maxwell's archives is to go to the museum before classes begin and see what is available in the museum's database, Phillips said.
Baudoin said the "North by Southwest" exhibit is interesting because the artifacts came all the way from Alaska. It's not common for so many artifacts from Alaska to turn up in New Mexico, she said.
The exhibit has Alaskan artifacts from prehistoric times as well as modern paintings. There are wood and ivory carvings, parkas made from seal intestines and engraved walrus tusks, Baudoin said.
Phillips said people are attracted to the historical artifacts.
"What we find is that people are naturally intensely curious," he said. "We draw them in with their curiosity, and hopefully, they go away learning something or knowing something they didn't know before.
