The Mathers Museum of World Cultures presents a new exhibit for the year 2013, “In The Kitchen Around The World”, which will be on display in addition to the already-installed exhibits from 2012. This exhibit will run until November 15, 2013.
“In The Kitchen Around The World”: an exhibit that presents objects used in preparing food and food service from different areas of the world. It breaks down into two categories: what the viewer perceives as familiar, such as plates, cups, and dishes, and what is unfamiliar, such as a Peruvian corn toaster and an Ecuadorian grater. The goal of the exhibit is to look at what other cultures have come up with as solutions to help them in cooking or eating food, allowing the viewer to make comparisons to the solutions that are similar or dissimilar to their own.
Other exhibits include:
“Picturing Archaeology”: Described in their words and illustrated by their images, the research and fieldwork of 13 Indiana University archaeologists is presented in Picturing Archaeology at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures/Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology.
“Rhythms of the World”: a free audioguide tour of musical instruments from around the globe featured in exhibits throughout the museum. The audioguide includes narration and musical clips of the highlighted instruments.
“Living Heritage: Performing Arts of Southeast Asia”
This exhibit highlights some of the performing arts in Southeast Asia, including artifacts of the manohra dance (from Thailand), Sudanese puppet theater from Indonesia, and folk music from Vietnam.
“TOYing with Ideas”
Toying with Ideas examines toys across cultures, as well as throughout decades of American history, to analyze and question how toys have come to influence social roles, gender roles, and early childhood identity.
“The Day in Its Color: A Hoosier Photographer’s Journey”
This exhibit presents a survey of Charles Cushman’s extraordinary work, an archive of photographs that is the largest known body of early color photographs by a single photographer, 14,500 in all, most shot on vivid, color-saturated Kodachrome stock. From 1938-1968, Cushman—a sometime businessman and amateur photographer with an uncanny eye for everyday detail—travelled constantly, shooting everything he encountered as he ventured from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to San Francisco, and everywhere in between. His photos include portraits, ethnographic studies, agricultural and industrial landscapes, movie sets and media events, children playing, laborers working, and thousands of street scenes, all precisely documented in time and place. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen, or even envisioned, in color.
“Thoughts, Things, and Theories…What Is Culture?”
Thoughts, Things, and Theories…What Is Culture? examines the nature of culture through the exploration of cultural traditions surrounding life stages and universal needs.
“From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web: The Origins of Everything”
This exhibit examines history on a large scale, through the exploration of cosmic, biological, and human origins.
“Unfinished Business: One Hundred Years of Quilt Blocks”
An exhibit presenting elements from unfinished quilts will be presented in conjunction with the Indiana Heritage Quilt Show.
Museum is open Tuesdays through Fridays, from 9 am to 4:30 pm, and Saturdays and Sundays, from 1 to 4:30 pm. Check website to see all of the Mathers Museum’s exhibits.