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VOLUME 114, ISSUE 42
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UNI Museum shows ceramics exhibit LEZIGA BARIKOR Staff Writer
The lastest UNI Museum exhibit came together in the last year and a half, but the idea behind it has been in the works for much longer. Last Thursday, Sept. 27, UNI Museum director Nathan Arndt saw his fouryear idea finally become a reality with the opening of “Cultural Impressions: Identities Molded in Clay.” The exhibit is made up of ceramic works from both the UNI Museum and the UNI Gallery of Art. Pieces featured in the exhibit range from 4,000 years ago to 2018. Some works are from contemporary artists, and others date pre-Columbian to Mesopotamia. The pieces are also geographically diverse, according to Jessica Cruz, the exhibit preparator and outreach coordinator of the UNI Museum. Arndt thought about doing a joint exhibit when he started at UNI four years ago and visited the UNI Gallery of
Art. “It sparked with me being new here that we had the wonderful ceramics collection in the museum,” said Arndt. “‘Why aren’t our two departments working together and looking at objects?’” Timing for exhibits never seemed to line up, but when it did, Arndt reached out to Darrell Taylor, director of the UNI Gallery of Art, to ask if he’d be interested in working on the project together. “Until the last several months I didn’t know what direction we were going,” said Taylor. “I didn’t know what his initial theme or idea was, and then once he told me it made perfect sense.” The two co-curated the exhibit with ceramic pieces showcasing both style and cultural functionalities. “One of the really unique things about pottery is that it has been something that has been a part of human experience almost since the very beginning,” said Cruz. One of Taylor’s favorite pieces from the exhibit is
by Virginia Scotchie. It is a bottomless bowl that can’t be used for the intended purpose. “They’re really an artistic expression,” Taylor said. Cruz said that even early ceramics that were mainly practical had embellishments added to them. “It’s always been something that we use, something that we still continue to use. And it also straddles this line between art and craft,” Cruz said. On opening night of the exhibit, there were around 50 people in attendance. Art professor Joann Schnabel spoke, as well as Arndt and Taylor. The original goal of the exhibit was collaboration, according to Arndt, but now he sees it as something more. “It started to dawn on me that a lot of people were creating separation between art and ethnographic, which to me was a crying shame because the stuff that’s made across the world is just as beautiful as anything being made in an art studio,” Arndt
ter. The “archaeologists” are students from an archaeological field world class, led by associate professor of anthropology Donald Gaff. The purpose of this dig is to excavate the former location of Central Hall. Gaff
said he has had the idea to excavate this area for a long time, but decided to finally lead it this year in preparation for the 150th anniversary of Central Hall’s construction. Although it burned down in 1965, Central Hall was the first building on
LEZIGA BARIKOR/Northern Iowan
“Cultural Impressions: Identities Molded in Clay” is an exhibit that features pieces from the UNI Museum and UNI Gallery of Art.
said. One of Cruz’s favorite pieces is a red Owens ceramics art piece juxtaposed next to an ancient Chinese piece done in a similar style. The Owens piece is done by a Sea Grove Potter. According to Taylor, the Sea Grove Potter community from North Carolina is inspired by Asian design. The UNI Gallery of Art has Sea Grove Pottery piec-
es thanks to donations from UNI alum Lawrence Auld. Taylor said the Gallery of Art’s relationship with its donors is essential since they have little to no budget to purchase pieces on their own. Other pieces in the exhibit also have UNI connections, including some by former UNI art professor Dean Schwartz.
UNI’s campus. “[The past] helps us to understand the present,” Gaff said. “Sometimes that’s a little abstract when you’re doing stuff from thousands of years ago. But we’re talking about a building that was here in the 1960s. There are people around today who had classes in there, who had been in the building, and so it gives us through archaeology a different look because you have official campus histories and yearbooks where some of those things are memorialized. But what often gets lost is those little day-today things, and that’s what archaeology tells us about.” The digging process itself entails skimming off about ten centimeters of soil at a time. The class screens each layer of the soil in search of artifacts. So far, the class’s findings have only been associated with contemporary campus life, such as pencils, pieces of brick and some small metal artifacts that have yet to be identified. Next semester, Gaff will
examine any artifacts they end up finding in the lab version of the same class. “Best-case scenario would be that we find something substantial, whether that be part of the foundation or just even things like finding bricks — or maybe we’re 30 centimeters down, and we find a pencil which would have been from a long time ago,” said Trenton Delp, a senior majoring in anthropology and speech language pathology and one of the students participating in the dig. “But finding something that has some substance that would allow us to paint a picture or paint a story of what might have happened.” Gaff believes the dig is helping his students learn what archeology is like in real life, as opposed to the unrealistic depictions of the field on television. Delp appreciates that the class is giving him real experience working in archaeology.
See EXHIBIT, page 4
Archaeologists dig for Central Hall ANNA FLANDERS Staff Writer
Every Tuesday and Thursday from 12:30 to 1:45 p.m., students walking by Lang Hall can witness a archaeological dig happening right on campus this semes-
GABRIELLE LEITNER/Northern Iowan
See UNI DIG, page 5