Cravens exhibit creates center of excellence

UB's Anderson Gallery opened the Cravens World exhibit Sunday, which offers students and the public the chance to see a collection of priceless artifacts from worlds over. With over 1,100 objects dating as far back as 4,500 B.C., the exhibit will draw people from all around the world interested in studying cultural material to the university.
Annette Cravens obtained the collection over a 40-year period travelling the world, and donated it to the College of Arts and Sciences in 1998. Cravens has difficulty accepting that her name is attached to such an incredible exhibit, but gave the school the collection so that the public could grasp how incredible the objects are.
"What I really wanted to do for the public … is to teach people to see," Cravens said. "Instead of getting it out of a book or off of television is that people will come and see it and really experience it, because half the time you get a picture and you don't know what size it is."
Bruce McCombe, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, made Peter Biehl, associate professor of archaeology, the director of the project in December 2008. Since then, Biehl has been working with other students and faculty at the university to bring the project together.
"I came to this university three years ago, and discovered that we have all this talent out there and I just contacted them. I invited them to raise money via research projects, and really and truly interdisciplinary project came together," Biehl said. "All work was exclusively done by UB faculty and students, and that is what we are proud."
Currently only the first phase of the project is complete. Phase two will involve renovating a room east of the main exhibit, and creating a research room west of the main exhibit that will be the home to world-class studies.
"In the research room we will have a top notch laboratory where people from all over the world, who are specializing and interested in this collection, will come and study the objects," Biehl said.
Beginning next semester Biehl will begin a seminar series on artifacts from the Near East and Europe that will result with each student writing up 100 pages to be published in a scientific catalog on the collection. Students will also create their own exhibits using artifacts from the collection, explaining all they have learned but also giving them public exposure.
Following Biehl's series other professors will do the same process over a three-year period, at the end of which the university will have a full-fledged scientific catalog on the collection.
Another important aspect of the project is the Outreach Program, which is headed by Sarah Robert, assistant professor in the graduate school of education. This program will teach students from surrounding school districts about social studies through the collection.
A unique part of the program is that it enhances learning through a hands-on experience.
"Around the building [visitors] will see some of the objects are out of the collection… so that people can pick them up carefully and learn about museum handling of precious objects and also experience what it is like to hold an artifact," Robert said.
The first students to learn from the exhibit will be a group of Cheektowaga central schools middle and high school students, but Robert hopes students from many other districts will follow. Students will come to the gallery as a part of their social studies classes for a field day, a day of research – just as a social scientist would.
Robert believes the experience will elevate social studies to more than just textbook learning, and create a learning space for students to enhance what they gain in the classroom. This different type of learning is a change that has been taking place throughout the teaching world.
"Picking up an object here that is 1,000 years old and being asked to think about where it is from, who made it, what meaning did this have for those people and what we can learn about human experience from this object, that is the direction that social studies education is taking," Robert said.
Mark Goff is one of the four graduate students that helped design ways to teach students using the artifacts. The future teacher feels that getting students away from textbooks and seeing things will help augment their learning experience.
"It is getting kids to process, getting them to think critically. It is more than just telling them Pearl Harbor happened December 7, 1941, it is getting kids to think more than about dates," Goff said.
Students at the gallery's opening welcomed the new learning experience.
"I got to see the [artifact] and how if feels rather than just look at a picture of it," said Jordan Summers, a local sixth grade student.
The way the collection is displayed is another aspect of the exhibit that makes it more than exceptional. A transparent case, housing 126 objects, is in the center of the exhibit, while another 451 artifacts are displayed in wall-cabinets and drawers, all the while geographically organizing the collection.
Designed by Mehrdad Hadighi, chair of the Department of Architecture, and department adjunct instructors Christopher Romano and Jose Chang, the display is truly remarkable. The team had to organize the diversity of the collection, but also find a way to show it all.
"This idea of open storage, which is a common storage system for museums… tends to be more storage than display," Hadighi said. "We were trying to work in a way that we could accommodate the storage of the objects, but at the same time have an inventive way of displaying them so that the separation between display and storage was not so radical that all of that could happen at the same time."
Hadighi believes the exhibit will receive acclaim not only because of the incredible artifacts on display, but also because it is a unique environment to display the objects and what the exhibit does for the community. The architect also thinks it is important to note that the project is a collaboration between lots of different facets of the university.
"There are a lot of people in the university that have been involved and that is the interesting part of it… It is one of the advantages of being in the university," Hadighi said.
Those who visited the exhibit also appreciated how accessible the artifacts were. Noting that the Buffalo Museum of Science has great cultural artifacts but doesn't display them, viewers enjoyed the fact that a great collection of everyday pieces is on display right here in Buffalo.
"This collection shows things that are not just the famous big master works, that people may find hard to access. They are things that were used by people in their daily lives, so they are more accessible to the viewer perhaps than say a statue of a Roman emperor or a sarcophagus from ancient Egypt," said Daniel Reiff, a Kenmore resident viewing the exhibit. "These are things that people can have a closer intimacy with."
There are many great aspects to the exhibit, but Biehl feels one thing is more important than anything else.
"It is for the university, and makes it a center of excellence in cultural heritage and material culture studies," Biehl said. "[It] will bring people from across the United States and world together, [but] most importantly it is for students to learn about authentic artifacts, about history and the past and that they learn everything from A-Z."

E-mail: arts@ubspectrum.com