Museum Item of the Week

Hello All!

I've finally started my volunteer museum position at the Mathers Cultural Museum doing inventory work. I get to ware a pair of little white gloves to handle artifacts and make sure they are all there. Its pretty sweet. This will be my third week. And I've decided to have a Museum Item of the Week. Because they have a ton of awesome stuff but there always seems to be one item that stands out due to its unique nature.

Week number one was a lute. Jennifer (my co-worker) and I had been cataloguing over one hundred different lutes from around the world and they were fantastic. There were simple wood and animal skin ones from Somalia and really elaborately carved ones from Turkey. One from the eastern steppes had a removable bridge shaped like a horse. Really cool. But the lute that caught my eye was one from the American South-West. The body of the lute was made from an armadillo. No shit, complete with the little guy's hair. I wish I could take a picture for you. The top of the skull led to the neck of the lute too, just awesome. No tail though. They drew the line there apparently.

Anyway, week number two was just amusing. There were about fifteen dolls in this group, packaged together. Each little doll was dressed in her own countries traditional clothing. They each had a little tag telling which country they came from, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine etc. All had cute little faces painted with care... and the doll from Uzbekistan had a uni-brow. At first I was like "oh, someone made a Frida doll, that's so nice... wait a minute..." It just made me laugh.

So those are my discoveries in the bowels of the museum so far. I'm sorry I can't provide pictures, but more descriptions will be forthcoming. Take care.