Art and Artifacts is the result of ongoing student engagements with the objects in the Cravens Collection. Throughout the 2019 spring semester, graduate and undergraduate students in UB’s Museum Management course (Department of Anthropology) partnered with fourth graders from Bennett Park Montessori to study the diversity of indigenous North American material culture in the collection. The selected objects, varied in their temporal and geographic origins, provided opportunities to practice careful, hands-on observation and facilitated conversations about the storytelling capacity of objects. Presented in UB Anderson Gallery’s Collaborative Classroom, the exhibition brings together the fourth graders’ colorful interpretations of these objects and investigations of the cultural, material, aesthetic, and functional histories by students from UB.
This project is part of the Museum Management class through the UB Department of Anthropology and is supported by the Cravens Foundation Endowment.