Published on Show Me Mizzou Aug. 27, 2024
Story by Dale Smith, BJ ’88
Nearly a decade after moving off campus, two Mizzou museums are back home and open for business. The Museum of Anthropology and the Museum of Art and Archaeology share newly renovated space on the ground floor of Ellis Library across from Memorial Union.
The return makes it much easier for the museums to carry out their central mission: teaching. For instance, a chemistry class recently used X-ray spectroscopy of pigments to confirm that a painting suspected of being a forgery was in fact a fake.
The Museum of Anthropology’s crown jewel is the Grayson Archery Collection and Library. Its 5,500 bows, arrows, quivers, thumb rings and associated books and fine art from six continents put it among the world’s largest and most comprehensive such collections. The displays include sandals of fiber and leather dating back 8,000 years, recovered from a Missouri cave, and a wall of skull casts tracking human evolution from almost 4 million years ago to the present.
The Museum of Art and Archaeology has a collection of 16,000 works, some of which visitors can view in rotating exhibits and two permanent displays. The Gallery of European and American Art is a roughly chronological short course in art history from the 13th to the 19th centuries. The Saul and Gladys Weinberg Gallery of Antiquities includes a dramatic painted mummy shroud, as well as Greek and Roman coins, glass vessels, terracotta figurines and Roman imperial portraits.
Masterpieces dispensed
Anyone who fancies owning original artwork should check out the Art-o-Mat at Mizzou, a satellite “gallery” with 200 worldwide locations. For a $5 token available at the Museum Store, visitors can select from 22 artists, whose work is showcased in a rehabilitated cigarette vending machine. Tug the knob below the chosen creator, and a work of art the size of a cigarette pack — prints, paintings, carvings, batik, paper mache and more are available — drops into the tray below. The pieces are crafted by 300 juried artists in five countries. Proceeds support the museums and the makers. For more about the project, visit artomatic.org.
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