The Daily Lobo talked to the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology to get updates on how it’s doing amid the COVID-19 pandemic along with the start of school coming up.
Maxwell is gearing up to reopen to the public on Aug. 17 with some new exhibits and opportunities.
This Q&A addresses current and future happenings at the museum with director Carla Sinopoli.
Q: Can you discuss the museum’s current and future operations?
CS: We will see what they will be as the pandemic continues to develop. So when we were shut down in March 2020 we shifted … to a lot of online activities — online exhibits, online posts, events and so on — and we want to continue doing that even as we physically reopen because that was a way to engage a much larger audience than we normally do. (We were) really getting people from all over the world to know more about UNM and our collections and what we do.
But we are also returning to doing these physical exhibitions and (and we have our) Brazil exhibit, (which is a tribute to the Brazil National Museum that burned down in 2018), as our first new temporary exhibition that will be opening on Tuesday. We still have up, from before our closure, the amazing photography exhibit by Rapheal Begay, who’s a Diné photographer who recently earned his (Bachelor of Fine Arts) here at UNM and it’s called “(A) Vernacular Response” ... These are really his photographs of his time on the Navajo Reservation. And if people haven’t seen that exhibit, it’s just incredibly beautiful, and that will be up through October.
And then we (are in conversations with the Wheelwright Museum about hosting their current exhibition called “Indigenous Women: Borders Matter” at UNM in December) … featuring the work of contemporary Native women artists that’s currently at the Wheelwright Museum and (may) be traveling down here. So we have a lot of exhibits planned.
We’re kind of going to start slowly on our public events so we won't be having a big grand opening occasion this week; we want to make sure it’s safe before we invite large crowds of people into the museum, so probably in early November is (when) we’re thinking we’ll do a big lecture around the Brazil exhibit but that’s not solidified yet.
Our other big fall event of the year is a Navajo rug auction which takes place the third Saturday in November out at Santa Ana Pueblo at (the Prairie Star Restaurant & Wine Bar in Bernalillo) … And then we work with a trading post in Arizona — the Burnham Trading Post — that brings down textiles from weavers and markets them, sells them there. The weavers get 80% of the money which is great because, as you can imagine, Native artisans have really suffered during the pandemic, and we make a little bit of money … It’s really fun. They usually bring a couple hundred textiles and other artifacts and it’s an auction, so if folks haven’t been to auctions, those are fun to go to.
So that’s kind of what we’re doing; we have a pretty full schedule of exhibits planned for the next two years that will roll out every few months. We’re also going to begin planning for renovating our two (“Ancestors” and “People of the Southwest”) exhibits, which have been both up for a number of decades now and are due for an overhaul. So we’re going to be busy.
We are offering a free student membership program from when we open to the end of the month: the first 75 students that come in will get a free membership in the Maxwell Museum and that will include special invitations to all our events but also some behind-the-scenes tours of the collections. We’d love students to become members of the museum. Members get a 20% discount in our gift shop. If you haven’t been, we have a very nice gift shop, which may be open on Tuesday — we’re in the final stages of doing some upgrades to the gift shop so our goal is to have it fully open.
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Q: How does your staff feel working with the University’s COVID-19 regulations and during the pandemic overall?
CS: I think we did not open as early as some museums did around the state because we were concerned about keeping everyone safe; we’re a fairly small space. But I think everyone is feeling comfortable with the mask regulations. We certainly support that and I can speak for myself and I think for all the staff that we were very pleased when vaccines were mandated on campus.
We are committed to keeping our visitors safe. We host a lot of K-12 classes including students who are too young to be vaccinated so it’s a high priority for us to be sure that everyone follows safety regulations and guidelines.
Q: Do you have any current collections or future collections that particularly stand out to you?
CS: We recently received an archeological collection from a site called Treasure Hill, which is a Mimbres-period archeological site down near Silver City, and it is a very important collection because it comes from the work of an archeologist named LaVerne Harrington, who owned the site and protected it from looting for many decades and carefully documented the materials. And she has passed the collection onto the University of New Mexico and the Maxwell to be held in trust and cared for properly. That’s an exciting one we’re going to begin processing this year, working with volunteers and perhaps students to catalog it and organize it and get it in good shape. We recently have also accepted a collection of Native American baskets that was just brought in.
We’ve had a lot of interest in donors finding homes for their collections this year. I think as people are taking stock of their lives and their possessions during the pandemic, a lot of people have reached out to us. We haven’t been able to accept many things; we make sure the collections we accept are legally owned, and ethically excavated and recovered, and fit the mission of the museum so we turn down a lot of very generous offers as well. But we’ll be working on those collections and working on some of our Central American textile collections too this year. So there’s always stuff to do here.
Q: Do you have anything else you’d like to tell the community?
CS: (I’d like to tell the community) just how excited we are to welcome people back to the museum. I think I said in some email I sent out to our members (that) I've spent a lot of hours wandering around the museum while we’ve been closed and looking at the objects, enjoying the collections, and it’s not the same when other people aren’t there enjoying it too. So I think we're just excited to see what the year will bring and to, once again, be able to welcome people back.
Megan Gleason is the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at editorinchief@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @fabflutist2716
