The Arts and Audience program of the North Carolina Arts Council awarded the Museum $6,000 to bring an exhibit, Korean Funerary Figures: Companions for the Journey to the Other World, to Wake Forest University in the spring of 2009. The grant will also support public programming at the Museum of Anthropology and Reynolda House Museum of American Art. A film series, scholarly lectures, Cultures Up Close programs, and a Family Day will offer opportunities for people from various ethic groups to mingle and learn to appreciate each other’s cultures, helping to fulfill the Museum’s mission.
The Fund for International Scholars at Wake Forest awarded the Museum and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures $2,525 to bring a distinguished Danish scholar to campus in the spring. Charlotte Horlyck is Lecturer in the History of Korean Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Dr. Horlyck’s research specialties are the art and archaeology of Korea, funerary customs and burial remains, architecture and spatiality in pre-modern Korea, and theories and methods in the study of visual and material culture. She will present a public lecture at the Museum of Anthropology and will discuss a film related to her expertise at Reynolda House. She will also present guest lectures in related courses in Art, East Asian Languages and Culture, Film Studies, or Anthropology.
The Provost’s Fund for Academic Excellence awarded the Museum $10,000 to support a workshop for 30 faculty members from Wake Forest and other area colleges and universities on Using Museums to Support Interdisciplinary Curriculum in Learning. Part of the workshop’s emphasis will be to introduce the teaching and research potential of the Museum’s online collections database to interested faculty. We anticipate that the database has potential to draw national attention to the Museum and contribute to Wake Forest’s international reputation while expanding teaching and scholarly research in exciting new directions.
Finally, the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded a $50,561 Museums for America Grant to prepare the Museum’s archives for publishing online in conjunction with the computerized collections database. (The Museum of Anthropology is one of only 12 museums nationwide to have received three Museums for America Grants.) Students will digitize documents and photographs and retired Curator Beverlye Hancock will assist Registrar Kyle Bryner in creating a catalog record for each digital image. The project will expand the Museum's educational mission by providing wide access through the Web for primary and secondary school teachers, university faculty and students, and independent researchers to archival records. The records will assist users with understanding the cultural and environmental contexts of objects in our collections, which will aid them with interpretation of unfamiliar archaeological and ethnographic artifacts. The project will permit successful implementation of the Museum's strategic and collections plans.
The rest of the Museum staff joins me in expressing deep gratitude to these sources of funding for their support for our mission.
