A fishing boat on the sea is inlaid on the neck of Golberg’s guitar “Troller.”
Audio tours, new art and rehousing and cataloging collections are on the horizon for local museums that received more than $28,000 in grant funding from the Rasmuson Foundation and Museums Alaska.
The Haines Sheldon Museum and The Hammer Museum are two of 13 Alaskan museums to receive grant funding from Museums Alaska, a nonprofit that supports museums and cultural centers across the state.
Through the grant program, funded by the Rasmuson Foundation, museums apply for grants to acquire artworks from contemporary artists and to improve collection management practices.
The Hammer Museum received $12,325 to purchase Lantern devices to create an audio tour of the museum. The money will also pay a staff person to complete 100 recordings that detail the history of the hammers on display in the museum that boasts “the world’s largest hammer collection.”
“It’s something we’ve had on our radar for probably ten years now,” museum director Dave Pahl said. “A guest will punch the number of the exhibit into a keypad and hear the full story about the object being displayed.”
Pahl said the project will also help create a digital record of the museum’s exhibits and will facilitate social distancing for future tourists.
“You don’t have to be in a person’s face telling them about hammers,” he said. “They’ve got this device they can get the whole story from.”
The Sheldon Museum received $8,149 to rehouse and organize archival collections and digitize photographs related to Haines House, a former Alaska Native boarding school house. Sheldon Museum collections manager Zack James said the rehousing project will aim to protect a trove of old documents and photographs from degradation.
“We’re going to have somebody come in, rehouse a lot of the old pictures and archival documents and go through and see what’s not entered into our computer and databases,” James said. “We’re going to try to make it easier to find things.”
The museum also received $8,500 to purchase a nautical-themed guitar titled “Troller” by Rob Goldberg. Goldberg has been the recipient of two past Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Awards.
James said the guitar will fit nicely with the planned redesign of the museum’s main gallery that will focus on natural resources and their impact on the history of Alaska and Haines.
“The thought of the Goldberg guitar is that it would be a good representation of local resources since it features a gillnetter on the front,” James said. “Also, back in the ’60s and ’70s when logging was big and the sawmill was still running, a lot of the high quality of spruce wood was being sent to Japan for instruments. It would go into Yamaha guitars.”
The museum is also seeking a grant to hire a curator to assist with the redesign.
“It’s a pretty big job. It’s going to take more than a year,” James said. “Hopefully we can start next year and then maybe we can shoot for opening the year after that.”
Museums Alaska awarded $140,835 to organizations across Alaska, along with nine Alaska artists in its second round of funding this year.