New Galleries
The new Hudson Museum, located on the Collins Center’s 2nd Level, features three exhibition areas: the Merritt Gallery for temporary exhibitions and two permanent exhibits including a World Cultures and Maine Indian Gallery. In conjunction with the exhibit areas is an area for interactive activities, the Minsky Culture Lab. The new galleries allow the exhibition of objects that could not be displayed in the old Museum, and feature new interactive media and hands-on materials to explore.
Merritt Gallery
World Cultures Gallery
Previous exhibitions of the Hudson Museum’s culturally diverse collections centered on presenting one culture area per exhibit. The Museum’s collections are extraordinarily rich, but are not comprehensive. To use our collections to their best advantage, the new World Cultures Gallery—the centerpiece of the Museum’s exhibitions—presents the richness and breadth of the Museum’s holdings. It features objects that have never been on public exhibition, and allows the Museum to exhibit a greater percentage of its holdings.
The gallery consists of eight large-scale display units, including one devoted exclusively to the William P. Palmer Collection III collection of Precolumbian artifacts. Each exhibit case focuses on a specific cultural theme universal to people around the world. Visitors will be able to compare and contrast how people from a variety of cultures are similar and how they are different; how they solve basic issues; and how their environment affects their solutions.
Themes featured in the gallery include ritual and belief, status and power, home and family, transportation, adornment, foodways, and objects made for others. For example, a case devoted to status and power displays Northwest Coast Chilkat robes and tunics; African stools, staffs, and ancestor figures; a Phase III Navajo Chief's blanket and Southwestern jewelry; and Precolumbian pottery figurines of nobles, rulers and the elite.
The Maine Indian Gallery
The Native people of Maine have legends that tell of how the Creator made a being, Gluskabe. Gluskabe made the people and taught them how to respect and use the natural resources of their world, especially the trees and plants. He showed them how to make baskets, birchbark containers and canoes, and how to carve. Among the Hudson Museum’s holdings are over 500 examples of the material culture of Maine’s Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot peoples and hundreds of historic images. This assemblage includes brown ash splint and sweet grass basketry dating from 1850 to the present along with an important collection of basketmaking tools and molds, birchbark containers and implements, rootclubs, crooked knives, snowshoes, beadwork, and three full-size canoes. These objects, and collections on loan from other Museums in New England, are presented in this new exhibit, together with audio and video footage of fourteen contemporary Maine Indian artists who are masters of their traditions. The film footage documents how raw materials are gathered, processed and prepared, and how each of the artforms is made. These film segments are available to explore in two Native Voices kiosks.
Across from the presentation of Maine Indian material culture, UMaine researchers will present their research and collections. These collections have rarely been exhibited to the public and until now have been used almost exclusively for research. This portion of the exhibit includes artifacts gathered by UMaine archaeological projects and housed in the collections of the Anthropology Department. Points, scrapers, adzes, awls, or potsherds from a wide variety of archaeological sites may be found as well as evidence of the Ice Age in Maine. In addition to the archaeological collection, a time lapse presentation will be created, which will show the glaciation of Maine during the ice age, the receding of glaciers and the appearance of land, the types of vegetation and animal life that developed in the state, the changing of plant and animal species over time, and the peopling of Maine. This segment will also draw on research of the Climate Change Institute to assess the impact of these changes on our state. The multimedia segment will show not only Maine's past, but how climate change will shape Maine 500 years from now.
Featured Exhibit
The Wigwam
Now Open!
The video above is a timelapse showing the three day construction period of the Wigwam. Constructed by Barry Dana, the Wigwam now rests in our Maine Indian gallery where it can be viewed by all visitors. Be sure to stop by and explore this exciting new exhibit!
Merritt Gallery
On exhibit till May 2012
Transcending Traditions: The Next Generation and Maine Indian Basketry
Transcending Traditions opens in conjunction with the CCA’s gala and our facilities 25th anniversary. The exhibit features five contemporary Maine Indian basketmakers who represent the next generation: Jeremy Frey, Ganessa Bryant, Sarah Sockbeson, George Neptune and Eric “Otter” Bacon.
Each of these artists has been commissioned to create a masterwork for the exhibit section that will showcases their work. This piece along with other baskets made by the artist from private and institutional collections will trace how his or her work has evolved. Each exhibit section will also feature a basket made by the person who taught them how to make baskets. The goal of this project is to explore the new directions that these innovative artists are taking the tradition in the face of environmental and economic challenges.
Supported by a grant from the National Museum of the American Indian's Indigenous Contemporary Arts Program.
The exhibit was created as a collaboration between the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance and the Hudson Museum.
Coming Late May
Merritt Gallery
Carved In Stone: Sculpture from Around the World
Among the Hudson Museum’s collections are stone carving traditions from the Precolumbian civilizations of Mesoamerica and from the Native Peoples of the Northwest Coast, Arctic, Plains, Southwest, Southeast and Northeast. The range of lithic materials includes greeenstone, argillite, soapstone, pipestone, and a wide range of exotic lithics imported over vast distances. The objects range in size from Zuni fetishes that will fit in the palm of the hand to large scale Maya architectural works that weigh more than a ton. Explore the scope and scale of the Hudson Museum's stone sculptural artifacts.
This exhibit is presented in conjunction with UMaine’s participation in the Schoodic International Sculpture Symposium.
Minsky Culture Lab
The Barrens: Photography by David Stess and Kris Larson.
An exhibit of black and white documentary images of rakers in Washington County blueberry fields and in the camps. Stess from New York City and Larson from East Machias, Maine capture a harvest tradition and way of life that is rapidly being changed by mechanization.