Treasures of Clay - page 4

Still to come, next winter, is a 1000-square foot public exhibition space. Adjoining both lab and vault, the gallery will have interior windows offering visitors an up-close opportunity to watch the conservation professionals and students at work. A plasma screen monitor will call up any pot in the collectionat the push of a button, and turn it around 360 degrees in virtual space, to show off its beauty in the round. [2]

As a preview, a ceiling-high glass case is already exhibiting 120 of the museum’s most sterling pots, from the very earliest pieces to contemporary work by living Native artists.

Chris White, project coordinator, arranges the showcase wall of the Pottery Project Interpretive Gallery. These pots are some of the finest examples in a 20,000 pot collection that represents 2,000 years of pottery-making in the Southwest and Northern Mexico.

“It was a Herculean effort to get this funded over the last eight years,” Odegaard says. The museum managed to raise some $2.5 million, enlisting the help not only of the Gila River, Salt River, Pima Maricopa and Akchin Indian communities, but also from the feds and from private donors, including Agnese N. Haury, widow of legendary UA anthropologist Emil Haury.

At the tail end of the Clinton Administration, the collection was designated an “official project” of Save America's Treasures, a millennium preservation program spearheaded by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. Odegaard even got to go to a reception at the White House.

[2] The plasma screen monitor will allow access to only selected pots in the collection.—Ed.