Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology

Introduction

Text-to-speech Audio

Founded in 1901, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology serves as an educational resource and tool for the people of California. The location of the museum moved from San Francisco to the campus of UC Berkeley in 1931 and became the present building in 1959. This museum contains over 3.8 million objects from cultures all across the globe. The building gets its name from the primary patron, Phoebe Aperson Hearst, who fiscally supported the creation of the museum. This institution serves as a place to conduct research and educate community members about the rich and diverse cultures of the world.

Images

Photograph of the Museum taken in 1959

Museum exhibit

Phoebe A. Hearst and her crew taken during her 1899-1905 expedition

Backstory and Context

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The museum would not stand today without the patronage of Phoebe A. Hearst. This institution was created from the desire of Hearst and the University of California to have a research center for emerging disciplines. She conducted several expeditions in the 1890s where she collected artifacts from places such as Egypt, Peru, and Florida. Many of the objects collected during these expeditions served as the initial donations to the museum in 1901 when the museum initially opened. The museum would move from San Francisco to Berkeley in 1931, and the present-day structure was erected in 1959. In 1991, the museum officially took the name of "The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology."

The Museum of Anthropology has grown and changed a great deal over the years. Before the move to Berkeley, the institution was only able to display half of its expanding collections. After the move, the museum suffered a great deal due to the Great Depression that consumed most of the 1930s. The economic turmoil did not allow for the museum to thrive as a blossoming institution of academic research and learning. The New Deal would grant the ability for the institution to utilize assistance programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the National Youth Association (NYA) to build new exhibits and organize existing ones.

In the decade following the Depression, the museum was able to expand and organize its collections. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology gained a better reputation and began to see plenty of loan requests from other well-respected museums after the end of WWII in 1945.

The museum has collections from every continent and geographic region on Earth. Graduate students and anthropologists conducted the research expeditions to provide the museum with its collections of unique artifacts. Every collection has a name attached to it for the person who carried out the research, such as the Peter B. Cornwall collection that centers on artifacts from Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The classical Mediterranean, Egyptian, North American, and Australia and Oceania are only a few of the exhibits that the museum has to offer. The artifacts consist of artwork, tools, and clothing all reside within the walls of this institution.

Sources

An Anthropology Museum for the 21st Century, https://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/. Accessed October 7th 2020. https://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/about/.

EXPLORE Search our global collections, https://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/. Accessed October 7th 2020. https://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu/explore/.

Redman, Samuel. “The Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the New Deal, and a Reassessment of the ‘Dark Age’ of the Museum in the United States.”. Museum Anthropology , vol. 34, no. 1 43 - 55. Published March 1st 2011. EBSCOhost.

Porter, Benjamin W. and Alexis T. Boutin. The Dilmun Bioarchaeology Project: a first look at the Peter B. Cornwall Collection at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.. Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy,, vol. 23, no. 135 - 49. Published May 1st 2012. Academic Search Complete.