ART : Go (Anywhere But) West : UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, dedicated to non-Western traditions, opens 29 years after being conceived

It’s finally happening. UCLA’s long-promised Fowler Museum of Cultural History is complete. Four inaugural exhibitions--featuring the elephant in African culture, Maya dress of the 1960s, ancient Peruvian ceramics and the Fowler collection of British, European and American silver--are ready.

An inaugural reception at the three-story $22-million building was slated for Friday night and the public will get its first look on Wednesday, when the museum is scheduled to open.

This is a major cultural event, but occasional visitors to the campus will be forgiven for thinking that the new building has always been there. Snuggled into a hillside on the west side of Royce Hall and designed by architect Arnold C. Savrann in the Romanesque style of the university’s original buildings, the museum is a nearly seamless addition to the central campus.

UCLA officials, on the other hand, will be forgiven for blinking and praising the new museum as a miracle.

Twenty-nine years after then-UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy established the museum as the Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technology; 25 years after the last of 30,000 objects in Sir Henry Wellcome’s ethnic art collection were donated to UCLA; 17 years after Chancellor Charles E. Young appointed anthropologist Christopher B. Donnan director of the museum and charged him with spearheading a drive for a new building; 14 years after the museum’s interim home opened in the basement of Haines Hall; nine years after the Regents of the University of California approved a new museum facility; eight years after the museum’s principal benefactors, Francis E. Fowler II, Philip F. Fowler and the Francis E. Fowler Jr. Foundation, made the lead gift for construction; five years after ground was broken, and four years after the last exhibition was held in Haines Hall, the university is opening what Young hails as “the premier cultural facility in the Los Angeles area dedicated to non-Western artistic traditions.”

All this in a year of economic distress, when museums across the country are struggling to keep their doors open and the university is mired in the state’s fiscal crisis.

“In my lifetime I doubt if another university will be able to put together something like this,” museum director Donnan said. The likelihood of receiving such a vast gift as the Wellcome collection has been remote for many years, and the challenge of raising money for a new museum becomes more difficult with every passing day, he said. Proposing a new museum building at the university today would be unthinkable, he added.

The economy isn’t the only thing that’s changed since the museum was conceived. Issues of cultural diversity were rarely raised in the museum’s early days, but the Fowler is opening at a moment when political correctness is a major concern in American institutions. “I think we’ve always been very, very politically correct,” Donnan said. The museum’s staff, which is predominantly female, includes blacks, Latinos and Filipinos, he said. In the exhibition program, American Indian skeletal remains have never been displayed, curators deliberately address social issues, and questions of propriety are considered in scholarly debates.

“We are positioned very well, and not from being backed into a corner, to deal with cultural issues openly and interpret objects appropriately in a context that is meaningful to the public,” Donnan said. “I’d rather be a director of this museum in Los Angeles than of any other museum I can imagine, especially in the ‘90s. We are among the most relevant.”

The museum’s $22-million cost was financed through a variety of sources. A total of about $10 million came from state funds and university resources (including privately raised funds) pledged in the mid-’80s, long before California’s financial problems became so apparent. Remaining funds were raised from private donors including the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Ahmanson Foundation. In addition, developer David Murdock donated the services of his executive architect, John Carl Warnecke, who gave Savrann the job of designing the building.

Some critics will probably decry the lack of an architectural competition and view the conservative design as a missed opportunity to put a dramatic architectural statement on campus, but Donnan said the university is very fortunate to have had “an architect who listened” and allowed form to follow function. The lengthy process of bringing the museum to completion has been frustrating, Donnan said, but it allowed plenty of time for the museum’s program to mature and make its physical needs known to the architect.

Donnan wishes the building were four or five times larger--to allow for higher visibility of the 750,000-piece collection and for expansion of the multifaceted program--but he feels extraordinarily fortunate that the 100,000-square-foot structure is twice as big as originally planned. While the museum has been well known in the scholarly community for its publications, traveling exhibitions and research, the new building will raise the institution’s public profile, attract further gifts and enhance its ability to be productive, he said.

The Fowler Museum already is considered one of the nation’s four leading university-based anthropological museums, along with the University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

Those three museums were founded 90 to 125 years ago and, as the beneficiaries of regular archeological expeditions, the total holdings of each institution inevitably outnumber UCLA’s. But the Fowler claims larger collections of African and Oceanic art and artifacts, and, in addition, UCLA’s holdings of textiles and Latin American folk art are among the most extensive in the world.

Important Los Angeles collections that might have come to UCLA--including African and Oceanic art owned by the late Katherine C. White and the Harry A. Franklin family--have been lost to other cities or dispersed at auction. Furthermore, no university museum can compete with the vast anthropological holdings of Chicago’s Field Museum, Washington’s Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. But when the Fowler’s strengths are combined with the riches of American Indian material at the Southwest Museum and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles is an undeniably important center for the study of ethnic art.

With four new galleries totaling 19,300 square feet of exhibition space--about 18,000 of it devoted to changing shows--Donnan and his colleagues will have ample opportunity to dig into the collection and present new aspects to the public. And now that the museum is lodged in a state-of-the-art facility, loans from other first-rate institutions will be relatively easy to obtain.

The opening lineup indicates what is to come. “Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture” (through May 16), including 250 objects from 50 African cultures, is the largest of the inaugural shows. The curator is Doran H. Ross, deputy director of the museum and a specialist in Ghanaian art history, who chose one-third of the objects from UCLA’s collection and borrowed the remainder.

“I originally planned to concentrate on four other animals,” Ross said. “I had eliminated the elephant because I thought it was too cute, too charming and too loaded with cultural issues from our side. But then I realized that those issues could be used in a museum of cultural history.”

The result is a lively, didactic exhibition that examines the beast “from a cultural perspective, in terms of its meaning to African peoples as expressed through adornment, political regalia, storytelling and folklore, religion, history and art,” Ross said.

He has organized the show in six thematic sections: “The Animal and Its Environment,” “The Image of the Elephant,” “Elephant Masquerades,” “The Elephant as Material,” “The Use of Ivory in Africa” and “Ivory for Export.” After viewing a rich assortment of sculpture and utilitarian objects, visitors arrive at a Victorian-parlor setting containing such ivory vanities as a chess set and billiard balls and an elephant’s foot umbrella stand holding ivory-handled umbrellas.

“Indigenous use of ivory never threatened the species,” Ross said. It was the introduction of European firearms and the European and American market that nearly wiped out the elephant, he said. Evidence appears in blowups of vintage photographs picturing a warehouse of elephant tusks and a man resting on an immense bag of ivory billiard balls. “It took one tusk to produce about five billiard balls, so you can imagine how many were used to make the balls in that picture,” he said.

Another exhibition, “Ceramics of Ancient Peru” (through Jan. 23, 1994), is the creation of Donnan, who specializes in pre-Columbian Peruvian archeology and has supervised a number of field projects. (With his schedule divided between teaching and directing the museum, he said, his success at the Fowler is directly due to a talent for surrounding himself with extraordinarily capable people.)

The exhibition--consisting of 250 objects from UCLA’s spectacular collection--tells the story of the development of ceramics in ancient Peru, which reached its zenith in the Florescent Period (circa 100 BC to AD 600). Enormously sophisticated works of that era feature such wonders as pottery painted in as many as 13 different colors by southern Peruvians and sculpted portraiture by northern artists.

Installed in a gallery with Peruvian architectural components and accompanied by illustrated panels about materials and methods, the show blends artistic delights with educational information, as is the museum’s policy. The hit of the show is sure to be a case of three whistling bottles with viewer-controlled recordings of the sounds they make when someone blows into them or rotates them to displace water inside their cavities. Visitors who push all three buttons at once get a veritable symphony.

The third exhibition, “Threads of Identity: Maya Costume of the 1960s in Highland Guatemala” (through Jan. 24), includes about 250 textiles selected from the museum’s collection by Patricia B. Altman, curator of folk art and textiles, and research associate Caroline D. West. The gallery glows with vibrant colors and stunning patterns, but the mission of the show is to demonstrate that Maya dress of the ‘60s identified people as to age, language group, gender and community affiliations and connected them to their ancestors.

Altman and West have systematically developed UCLA’s Guatemalan textile collection by visiting hundreds of highland villages. In the exhibition they present a representative sampling along with information about Guatemalan weaving and scenes of daily life. Video interviews with Maya women who left Guatemala during the recent civil strife and have been forced to abandon their traditional dress to get menial jobs in Los Angeles bring the exhibition into sharp contemporary focus.

The fourth, and smallest, inaugural exhibition is a permanent installation, “Reflecting Culture: The Francis E. Fowler Jr. Collection of Silver,” in honor of the museum’s namesake. Fowler was a St. Louis inventor and entrepreneur, best known for developing and marketing Southern Comfort whiskey, who moved to Los Angeles in 1944.

He was an eclectic collector of decorative arts, guns and coins throughout his life and began acquiring silver in the ‘30s. Fowler established his first museum in 1968 in Westwood and moved it four years later to larger quarters on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. He died in 1975, but the museum continued to operate until 1985 after a major portion of the silver had been pledged to UCLA along with financial support for the new building.

The glittering metal objects from Europe, Britain and the United States seem far removed from the earthy artifacts that generally characterize the museum’s non-Western collection, but the silver does indeed reflect cultural history. “We wanted to demonstrate how silver functioned in individual people’s lives and in the larger society,” said Betsy D. Quick, the museum’s director of education, who organized the show with Henrietta B. Cosentino, senior editor. The curators selected about 230 of the collection’s 350 objects for the installation.

While presenting everything from a three-foot-long German wine caddy in the shape of a sailing vessel to a simple American communion service, the installation interprets silver in social contexts, exploring such themes as women silversmiths, drinking customs, silver as gifts, national styles and business aspects of silver production.

The galleries, located around a square central courtyard, compose the museum’s public space, along with a gift shop, a 326-seat auditorium and an amphitheater. Behind-the-scenes museum space includes a library, a conservation laboratory, three seminar rooms, storage facilities and the Center for the Study of Regional Dress. In addition to the museum, the building houses classrooms and facilities for UCLA’s archeology department and the World Arts and Cultures Program.

Director Donnan takes particular pride in the way the architectural design serves the building’s programs and functions--housing collections and facilities for exhibition, research and teaching in workable proximity. Located between Royce Hall’s auditorium (often used for performing arts programs) and UCLA’s dance building, the museum’s auditorium and amphitheater will provide opportunities for interdisciplinary, multicultural collaboration, he said.

A Brief History of the Fowler Collection

How the Fowler Museum of Cultural History’s collection was built:

1965-67--The trust of Sir Henry Wellcome, an American-born entrepreneur who built a pharmaceuticals empire in Britain, donated about 30,000 pieces of ethnic art to UCLA, forming the cornerstone of the Fowler’s collection. The gift included vast holdings of African and the South Pacific art and numerous works from South and Central America, British Columbia and Alaska.

1976-79--University patrons William Lloyd Davis, Richard B. Rogers and his wife, Elizabeth L. Davis Rogers, all of Los Angeles, donated a collection of textiles and clothing from the Kutch region of India.

1980-91--Los Angeles collector Jerome Lionel Joss, whose name is on one of the Fowler’s four galleries, donated his collection of African and Indonesian art.

1982-87--Donald and Dorothy Cordry of Cuernavaca, Mexico, donated an 1,100-piece collection of Mexican textiles and folk art.

1983--The Francis E. Fowler Jr. Foundation and Fowler’s sons, Francis E. Fowler II and Phillip F. Fowler, pledged a collection of 350 silver objects, along with an undisclosed sum of money to support construction of the museum.

1986-91--Los Angeles collectors Herbert L. Lucas Jr. and his wife, Ann Lucas, who have a gallery named for their family at the Fowler, donated a collection of pre-Columbian Peruvian ceramics.

1991--Robert and Helen Kuhn of Los Angeles donated a 144-piece collection, including a large group of African musical instruments, representing 30 peoples, and additional artifacts from Africa and pre-Columbian Peru.