The expanded Anchorage Museum brings Alaska into focus
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
Great fishing, stunning natural surroundings and amazing wildlife may be the biggest draws to Alaska, but a recently completed expansion has put the Anchorage Museum high on the list of must-see attractions in the 49th state.This is something that I learned on the last day of a weeklong visit farther south to the Kenai Peninsula that concluded with a day in Anchorage before my flight home. While kayaking, hiking, horseback riding and fishing on the Kenai allowed me to experience the allure of Alaska, the museum offered an awe-inspiring overview of the state’s culture, history and geography.
The $106 million expansion, completed in May after nearly four years of construction plus fundraising that began in 1999, brought a sleek 80,000-square-foot wing to the downtown facility, and the exhibitions inside are more than worthy of their new digs.
The Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center forms an impressive centerpiece to the new wing. Representatives from Alaska’s native cultures helped curators from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History interpret and select about 600 culturally significant objects from the latter’s collections. The objects are arranged in parallel glass cases that form rows down the middle of a rectangular space. Each case is dedicated entirely to a separate cultural group: the Iñupiak, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Northeast Siberian, Athabascan, Yup’ik, Unangan, Sugpiaq, Eyak, Tlingit, Tsimshian and Haida. Objects such as hunting implements, clothing and elaborate ceremonial items show the similarities and differences between each group. Together, they paint an inspiring portrait of how these groups not only survived, but thrived, for centuries in some of the harshest weather conditions on the planet.
The Imaginarium Discovery Center, which closed its separate facility last year to relocate into the museum’s new wing, is clearly the liveliest exhibit space. More than 80 hands-on displays provide glimpses of science in action. Parents seem to have as much fun as kids doing such things as seeing infrared profiles of themselves projected onto a screen behind them and creating auroras with a magnetized metal sphere.
My favorite space is the Alaska Gallery, which provides a powerful look at the history of Alaska and its people from the times of its earliest occupants nearly 10,000 years ago to the present day. As a history buff, I found it interesting to learn more about the early history of the native cultures, the arrival of Europeans, the discoveries of gold in Alaska’s various regions in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries and the territory’s strategic significance (statehood did not occur until 1959) during World War II. A section of the gallery focusing on oil and the Trans Alaska Pipeline raised provocative questions about our nation’s future energy policy.
I spent nearly half a day in the museum, and the only thing I could think about on the plane ride home was how much I wanted to come back to visit more of the places that I had just learned about.