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SALT LAKE CITY -- A year from now, the Utah Museum of Natural History near Red Butte Garden at the University of Utah will be in the midst of a major move to its new building. Right now, specialists are at work on the details for the new exhibits.
The museum has more than a million items in its collection, from a Mammoth tusk to Native American art.
More than 2,400 pieces will hang on the walls of the new museum, and each of those treasures gets a custom wall mount.
As you stroll through the Utah Museum of Natural History, the diversity and splendor of Utah's past comes to life. You probably wouldn't notice the pieces of brass that mount the baskets on the wall, and that's the idea.
"These objects are fragile. We don't keep them just for a short period of time. They actually belong to the people of Utah, so we want to preserve them as best as possible," said Museum Director Sarah George.
The museum recently converted its space for traveling exhibits into a welding and mount-making shop. The director says it is rare for an in-house staff to custom-make more than 2,000 mounts for a new museum.
The painstaking project enables staff to individually design and craft the mount for the object and make it safe enough to withstand a magnitude-4 earthquake.
Mount maker Bill Thomas said, "We make a stem and some appropriate things to clip the item in to, to hold it securely and make it look its best. Then we often do a little camouflage painting to make the mount disappear."
The new Native Voices Gallery exhibit will feature each of Utah's five Native American nations, one of several main galleries in the new museum.
They need to build mounts for an extraordinary range of items to display, from a whale vertebrae to large tortoise shells to a tiny water shrew, which is a rodent.
"They might bring us anything from a dinosaur femur to a pot to a basket," Thomas said. "We have to find a way to build a mount for it and put it on the wall."
A Native American quiver for arrows, made of horsehide, presented a unique challenge because of its shape and delicacy. But, the designer reveled in the task.
Supervisor of Exhibit Services Will Black said, "Everything is unique. When you come to work it's never the same. I'll never do anything like this again."
The new museum is under construction next to Red Butte Gardens in the Foothill Cultural District on the campus of the University of Utah. The current museum closes at the end of this year, and the new museum opens in the fall of 2011.
E-mail: jboal@ksl.com
