On their socials this week AMNH has announced that the Northwest Coast Hall will be reopening after its renovation on May 13th. From the hall's page on AMNH's site: "The revitalized Northwest Coast Hall features new exhibits developed with Indigenous communities and showcases the creativity, scholarship, and history of the living cultures of the Pacific Northwest." I understand that the hall was dated and that other than an interactive touchscreen it hadn't been upgraded since the 1960's but I wish they would've kept the green color scheme of the hall. It fit in so well with the totem poles and the fact that I had seen a hall relatively unchanged since when the renowned anthropologist Franz Boas created it in 1900 felt special... almost like time travel. From an AMNH webpage on Boas: "Boas, who was born on July 9, 1858, worked at the American Museum of Natural History from 1896-1905, during which he organized and led the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902). This undertaking set our to investigate the links between the people and the cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America and the Eastern Coast of Siberia. Ostensibly the goal of the expedition was to prove the Bering Strait Migration theory which postulated that the North American continent was populated by the migration of Asian peoples across the Bering Strait. However, Boas was more concerned with documenting the cultures on both sides of the Northern Pacific that he and many other anthropologists feared were soon to be lost to colonialism and acculturation." Source I remember walking through the hall in 2000 cutting through it to get to another hall and being awestruck by the grandeur and antiqueness of the space. I'm going to miss it. At least you can still tour the old hall on Google Maps! If anyone in the NY area could go out and get photos of the new hall and add them to the AMNH gallery that would be great. Source
