N is for Nifty ...n ... Natural ...

 

Hello and welcome! to another A-Z series on M-i-V... 

All through April I'll be posting on the broad theme of Museums & Monuments Across the World - mostly those I've been to and a few on my bucket list that I haven't been able to visit yet. Museums are one of my favourite ways to get to know a culture, they sum up what those peoples want to preserve and pass onto their grandchildren, the facets they want to show their foreign visitors, how they perceive, present and preserve their own storyline and that of their interactions with the world. Come museum hopping with me!

N is for North West

N is actually an easy letter to write to, because every nation in the world has what it calls a National Museum of Something or Other. There's the National Museum in Delhi, which I've visited some 15-20 years back. Among other things, I recall seeing a burial site from Harappan times complete with a woman's remains with conch shell bangles still encircling her arm bones, the exact same type of bangles that are used by Bengali women in my hometown as marital jewellery even today in an unbroken tradition going back 3500 years. 

There are the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, also the Natural History (a total bonza candidate!) of the UK, all of which I've been to. A quick search on the Net shows that there are more than 100,000+ museums in the world designated as National Museums! You see what I mean by easy?

The  interior of the Natural History Museum in London, UK.
 The building itself is beyond spectacular!

Natural History Museum, stained glass to die for -
one could go there only to revel in the architectural
 elements and take in the exhibits as an afterthought.

However, as you know, I am no great fan of easy. So today we're going farther North. North West to be precise. Far beyond Europe or UK. Across the pond to Raleigh, North Carolina and a cluster of museums that I visited 2023-24 winter  - the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the North Carolina Museum of History and the NC Museum of Art. 

The NC Museum of Natural Sciences. An area of over 300,000
 sq ft and the largest such institution in SE USA. It also has facilities
elsewhere in the state. Contains a vast collection of
over 2.5 million specimens. 

The NCMNS has its exhibits spread over 7 floors,
includes dioramas of various life forms found in NC, 
prehistoric Mesozoic life as well as reconstructed
skeletons of dinosaurs.

The star of the show. The Acrocanthosaurus 
skeleton in the atrium.

The NC Museum of Natural Sciences is the most visited museum in the state with over a million visitors annually. Certainly it was busy when I went in during the winter holidays. Read more about the museum by clicking the link here. 

N is for NC Museum of History

In contrast, the NC Museum of History was more compact and basic. The oldest human settlement in the NC area goes back some 14,000 years. However, bulk of what I saw was focussed on the post colonisation period after entry by Europeans. Pre-Columbian Native American history is quite sketchy and from my SM posts at the time, the narration in the audio referred to Native Americans  as 'Indians' which felt uber strange to me. No detailed history of the separate tribes, only some reference to the way things panned out between the two sides, Europeans and Native Americans.  The museum is currently closed for renovations, coming back bigger and better and hopefully more in-depth treatment of Native American history. 

North Carolina Museum of History. This section
 called 'The Story of North Carolina' takes up the
entire lower level gallery space.

Archaeological evidence of human stone tool usage in NC. There
are very few exhibits after this till the 16th century when the
Europeans first came. In a country that's eye deep in research
and research grants that definitely felt a bit weird to me. 

I was mega-chuffed with this section of the museum
 as you can easily imagine. I'm sure I used this for
my posts in A-Z that following April. 

What I wrote at the time was - the museums that I've visited (in NC) have been super interesting, not always in terms of the depth of the collections or the age of the exhibits but in how the whole attempt is to engage young minds from the very start, the efforts at creating a community long term, the discerning marketing - and I mean that in the most positive sense, not the usual commercialisation con that's meant by it nowadays.

A whole gallery was devoted to a schoolchildren's organisation called the Tar Heel Junior Historians' Association with child members of different age slabs and from various schools participating in programmes and competitions. Creating an appreciation of history and how it is made and studied - from the role of everyday lists and journals to doctors' prescriptions to architecture, from regular print and AV media to social media. A palpable sense of continuity - today's ordinary events lived by ordinary people turning into history tomorrow. Exactly my idea of the primary work that a museum should be doing.

And finally... the North Carolina Museum of Art

During my visit there was an exhibition titled 'Dutch Art in a Global Age' which is where I spent the lion's share of my time. The special exhibition presented paintings and objects d'art from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, complemented by five of NCMAs own Dutch masters' paintings - it explored the interfaces between colonial expansion, commercial networks of trade and their impact on Dutch art. There were works by celebrated Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Gerrit Dou, Rachel Ruysch and others.

Art fan at the exhibition. Wooded River Landscape with Shepherd.
Jacob van Ruisdale. Painted 1650-55. Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Since I had written on this topic before (for WEP's prompt Antique Vase) I obviously found it mega fascinating. The whole exhibition highlighted the connections between exploration, colonial expansion, trade, exposure to new products/cultures and their impact on art - both on how it was created and how it was consumed. As the Dutch VOC ships explored new routes and opened up the world, the commerce in tobacco, sugar, pepper, hitherto unknown fruits and flowers, ceramics from China etc became incorporated into the painting of Dutch still lifes. Tobacco, for instance, became a subgenre of stilleven by itself. As did breakfast items, often depicting sugar. I learnt a few new things, feasted my eyes upon lovely colours and objects and felt thoroughly satisfied with the use of my time there.

Rene Descartes. By Johann Suyderhoef. Engraving.
Around 1650. The French philosopher found it easier to
write in the comparatively tolerant Netherlands after he
angered the RC Church in France. 

One of the stillevens of fruits introduced from
foreign lands.

An exposition on how colonial expansion impacted art.
There were maps too, charting the routes the Dutch ships
took. And similar ones on how demographics changed
and a merchant class grew and along with that
a demand for secular art depicting the new
luxurious lifestyles.  

All in all, a day extremely well and enjoyably spent.

The museum has an area of 164 acres and an annual footfall of over 1 million. Read more about the NC Museum of Art by clicking the link here.

I find it makes me a bit uncomfortable that a state with a 14,000 year deep history has comprehensive archaeological/historical evidence preserved only for the last 500 or so. Most of the Native American history that I saw at the NC museums are through modern day recreations in pictures/tableaux and audio visual animations. It bothers me vaguely. What about you?

I understand that there is a Museum of Native American History in Arkansas which has actual Pre-Columbian to Paleo artefacts, 10,000 of them! I don't quite understand how such a huge period has yielded a few thousand items only...but better a few than nothing at all I guess, will have to check this one out when/if I get the chance. Have you been there? If so, what was your experience like?

 ~~~

Thank you for visiting and reading. Have a wonderful A-Z if you are taking the Challenge and a wonderful April if you're not! 

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2026