Have some time before the show? Explore the Hudson Museum’s Holdings from Africa!
On the First Level of the Collins Center:
- Visit a mini exhibit of African Collections that will feature masks, ancestor figures, a prestige stool, weaponry and jewelry. You can also visit all of the Museum’s African holdings on-line by exploring them by clicking here.
On the 2nd Level in the Hudson Museum:
- Find the cases in the World Cultures Gallery with a map of Africa—the map will direct you to the sections of the gallery that feature holdings from this continent.
While you are in the Museum, please visit the other galleries:
Merritt Gallery Explore the Leo and Florence Shay Collection of Wabanaki brown ash and sweetgrass baskets and basketmaking tools. These extraordinary holdings, collected by Robert Anderson, a Penobscot tribal member, documents basketmaking from the 1800s to the present.
Minsky Gallery In preparation for the repatriation of a Tlingit Frog Clan helmet (HM5040), the Hudson Museum worked with an interdisciplinary group from the University of Maine Advanced Structures & Composites Center and Intermedia Program to create a replica. Explore the project and see the replica and original displayed side-by-side.
Wabanaki 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, Mi’kmaq, 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 exhibit, together with audio and video footage of fifteen Wabanaki artists. The film footage documents how raw materials are gathered 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 Wabanaki material culture, UMaine researchers 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 Northeast Archaeology Lab. Points, scrapers, adzes, awls, and 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 shows 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 draws on research of the Climate Change Institute to assess the impact of these changes on our state.