March 23, 2010 - June 27, 2010

Commissioned through The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, and co-curated by Jody Clowes, Jo Lauria, John Perreault and Judith Tannenbaum, Ceramic Interactions is sited at three Philadelphia institutions (the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Eastern State Penitentiary and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology). Ceramic Interactions involved the commissioning of new works (or, in the case of the Penn Museum, inclusion of an artist’s recent works), in response to a piece, collection, or space housed within each venue. The artists' work offers each institution—and its public—an expanded or new context for seeing, interpreting or experiencing their collections or the way they perceive their space.

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March 26 through June 20, 2010

The 1880's and 1890's were decades of tremendous upheaval for many native peoples in Texas. Numerous Indian reservations were opened in the Oklahoma and Indian Territories during this time and large-scale efforts were made to force the Native Peoples to adopt Euro-American ways. In Citizen’s Garb: Southern Plains Native Americans, 1885–1891, explores how dress--and life--changed for the Kiowa and Comanche tribes as they gradually adjusted to the new life forced upon them by the United States government. Images of Native Americans in both citizen and native dress reflect the transition occurring between the tribes’ past and their radically different future. Other details are more subtle: a tipi constructed of store-bought canvas rather than of animal hides, for example, reflects a significant change in the material culture of the Native Peoples. The exhibition is curated by John Hernandez, Director of the Museum of the Great Plains in Lawton, Oklahoma, and is organized by the Museum of the Great Plains.

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February 5, 2011 through June 5, 2011

In the late 1990s, the western world learned about the existence of an astonishing collection of ancient, and exquisitely preserved, mummies, all excavated in the vast Tarim Basin desert of East Central Asia—a crossroads of the Silk Road. This new blockbuster traveling exhibition from China features more than 150 extraordinary objects representing the rich cultural heritage of the region over more than 4,000 years. The materials come from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Museum and the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology in Urumqi in northwest China. Jewel-encrusted vessels, masks, jewelry, clothing, highly valued silk and other textiles, wooden and bone implements, and coins testify to the remarkable international trade that passed through the region. Perhaps most remarkable, however, are three astonishingly well-preserved ethnically-diverse mummies dating from 1800 BCE to AD 400—a man, a woman popularly known as the “Beauty of Xiaohe,” and a child—and related artifacts from those burials.

Penn Museum is the first and the last stop on the east coast for this exhibition featuring mummies from China never before seen in America.

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