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Here's Looking at You, World
| Article
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10117 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
2,171 Words |
| Author
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Julia Braun Kessler
Julia Braun Kessler is arts editor for LA West magazine in Los
Angeles. Her articles appear in Travel & Leisure and other
national publications. |
We've done it!" exults Christopher Donnan, director of the Fowlwer Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We've opened, despite the awesome odds." Less then a year old, the museum can already be counted among the four top ranking university museums of the country--along with Harvard's Peabody, the University Museum of Philadelphia, and Berkeley's Phoebe Hearst Museum--due to its impressive holdings of ancient and modern cultural artifacts.
The Fowler is the culmination of thirty years of dedication by a handful of forward-looking scholars, collectors, and university administrators. Their dream to found a museum exclusively for preserving "cultural history"--took shape first in the mind of UCLA's then Chancellor Franklin Murphy. That was back in the early 1960s. Though he was a specialist in internal medicine, Murphy took a lively interest in the arts in general. Having traveled frequently in his youth to Central and South America, he was early exposed to pre-Columbian art forms.
Envisioning a contribution to the increasing multicultural environment of Los Angles, and convinced of the value of the study of the varied peoples of the world and their cultures, he determined to bring attention to non-European artistic traditions.
Comments Donnan on this foresight, "If you've observed how the ethnic makeup has changed in the city, and, even more, if you study the predictions for Southern California for the year 2,000 when there will be increased ethnic diversity, you have to look back upon Franklin Murphy's accomplishments as either luck or genius. I venture to say that his canniness in foreseeing the trend was genius."
THE WELLCOME COLLECTION
By 1963, Murphy had already snagged a prize for his fledgling venture, the Wellcome collection, consisting of fifteen thousand artifacts from the peoples of Africa, Australia, the south pacific, the Americas India Pakistan, Southeast Asia, and Bronze Age Europe. That acquisition was a considerable honor, since established museums all over the world were soliciting these objects.
Sir Henry Wellcome, though a British citizen and knighted by the crown, had been born in a log cabin in Wisconsin and wished his collection returned to the United States acclaimed worldwide as a medical researcher, he had combed the world for native remedies and subsequently made a fourteen in
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