Hours: Tuesday and Thursday thru Sunday: 10am – 5pm
Wednesday: 10am – 8pm
Cost: $10 General Admission; $6 Students
Today's visit to the Penn Museum was my second. The first time I visited was for Art Heritage I (that's Ancient Egyptian arts to the Middle Ages for all non-art majors) and I had a very different viewing experience, not to mention I was able to explore more of the museum exhibits than I had previously. From the Main Entrance on the museum's first floor I visited the “primitive” cultures which starts out with Native Americans, goes into indigenous South American tribes, and finally to the African exhibit. From the African exhibit I looped back around to the Main Entrance, walked upstairs through the gift shop into the Egyptian Amarna exhibit which I sped through - stopping only at the mummies - having already seen this before. I spent some time walking through the Buddhism exhibit which displays artifacts from Asian countries influenced by Buddhism. It is also set up so you walk in a big circle, there is no “turn around” point. I was curious about the coinciding special exhibits of “Iraq's Ancient Past” and 9/11's “Excavating Ground Zero,” which seemed fairly scandalous, however, they actually put up a plaque in between the two explaining that there was a scheduling conflict and there was nothing at all political about the two presentations. The third floor holds all of the “civilized” ancient Greek, Rome, Etruscan and Israeli/Canaan galleries. It seems preposterous that the hierarchy of cultures within the museum are still as they were in the museum's early days with the most “primitive” at the bottom and “civilized” at the top. It seems as though the museum has enough similar artifacts from each culture that they could create a mixed culture exhibit of funerary practices or feast rituals/objects, these are things with commonalities among all human cultures, past and present. Does it offer a linear context in which to view objects, no. Rather it would perhaps shed a global perspective of life on the objects, more akin to our modern world.
