Happy New Year!

Now that we've dug out from the Great December Snow Storm of 2008 (at least that's what I am calling it) and we've put those two weeks of crazy winter weather behind us, we can take a moment to reflect on the beauty of the snow. One of our adventuresome employees braved the elements and snapped some fantastic pictures of the Burke in the snow. Enjoy!

From all of us in Communications - Happy New Year!

Photos by Loribeth Coker

Field Trip!

Posted by Karin Hoffman, communications

On January 24, 2009 the Burke is opening an in-house designed exhibit titled “Coffee: The World in Your Cup” which explores the influence of coffee on environments, human cultures and economies worldwide. Even though I am a native Washingtonian I am a new convert to the world of coffee consumption, so it couldn’t have been better timing that Julia invited me to tag along on a tour of the Tully’s roasting facility in south Seattle. The reason for the tour was to provide members of the Burke staff that interacts with the press and public an educational opportunity to better understand the roasting process.

Here are some of the fascinating pieces of information I gathered during my tour of Tully’s:

• Tully’s roasters work 24 hours a day, 6 days a week with an output of 27,500 pounds of coffee per day. What is even more amazing is that they do all of the roasting by hand, using two vintage coffee roasters from the 1950’s. No computers, just the skilled eyes and noses of the roasters dedicated to the art of roasting coffee.

This is one of the two vintage 1950’s roasters Tully’s uses to roast their coffee. They just purchased another vintage roaster that is being imported from Germany.

• There are certain beans that don’t play nice together in the roasting process. The combination of certain beans during the roasting process can result in a terrible cup of coffee. In that case the bean that doesn’t play nice (an example of a type of bean is escaping me at the moment) is roasted first and then added to the other beans prior to being packaged-up.

Green beans waiting to begin the roasting process. Some varieties of coffee consist of different types of beans blended together. You can see in this picture two tubs stacked on top of each other – each one contains the right amount of beans necessary to make the perfect blend.

• Beans aren’t the only things that find their way to the roasting facility. Roasters have found hand made nails, jewelry, and paychecks from Mexico mixed in with the green beans. Luckily for us they have installed magnetic devices that remove metal objects as well as objects that do not weigh the same as a coffee bean prior to and after the roasting process.

This metal rod is magnetized to pull out metal objects hiding in the green beans prior to roasting.

• Caffeine consumption in the roasting room is through the roof! There can be upwards of 200 cupping’s per day in the roasting room. “Cupping” is a technique used by the roasters to evaluate the aroma and flavor the coffee in order to ensure consistent production of coffee from batch to batch. Tully’s master roaster and green bean buyer drinks up to 45 cups of coffee each day and noted it has become a very expensive habit, especially if he’s traveling.

The “Bean-evator” transports green beans up to the roasting floor for roasting and back down for packaging and distribution.

And with that, I’m off to get a latté. I’m still not ready for the full strength cup of joe, which I learned, has more caffeine than espresso.

The weather outside is frightful

Posted by: Julia Swan, Communictions

For the third day in a row, the Burke Museum has closed due to snowy and icy conditions. If you, like me, are starting to go a little stir crazy cooped up inside because of the bad weather, I recommend a few good distractions:

- Grist will not only keep you entertained, it will keep you informed about the latest environmental news. If you like what you see, sign up to recieve weekly e-mails from Grist and be the first in the know.

- Find out what's crawling or swimming around at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center by reading their new blog.

- Browse the photographer Steven Kazlowski's wildlife photographs at LeftEyePro and then plan your post-snowstorm visit to see his work in The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World, closing at the Burke Museum in a little over a week (Dec. 31 to be exact).

- Finally, watch the trailer for Black Gold, a 2006 documentary about the multi-billion dollar coffee industry (note: learn more about coffee next month when Coffee: The World in Your Cup opens at the Burke!).

Happy Snow Day!

"Snowflake" the polar bear says:


Stay warm this weekend!

Swinhomish teens transform their community

Posted by: Julia Swan, Communications

I read a really interesting article today in ColorsNW about a group of teens living on the Swinomish Reservation who have made a documentary film about how two oil refineries, located on a privately owned tract of land in the middle of the reservation, have impacted the environmental health of their community.

The young men, still in high school, created the film March Point to raise awareness about environmental and tribal issues. They were supported by a non-profit called Longhouse Media, whose Native Lens program brings digital media training to Native youth in rural and urban settings. Tracy Rector, the co-founder of Longhouse Media, sums up the reasons for making March Point: “We hope this film will give the audience a window into the unique beauty of the Coast Salish people and their way of life. Also, it is our desire that March Point will bring awareness to the issues of environmental racism and the resulting disparity of big corporations on tribal lands and near people of color.”

Watch the trailer for March Point and support this great film:

The Myth-Information Keeps Coming

Posted by: Rod Crawford, Curator of Arachnids

As of today, the Burke's "Spider Myths Site" is newly updated. The new version includes nearly 75 separate false beliefs about spiders. These are not just ancient legends either – every one of these (more-or-less ridiculous) stories is seriously believed by people today. If you haven't been there lately, why not revisit the site and find out how much of what you "always knew" about spiders is wrong?

Besides updating older content, I've added several completely new myths.

Do you recall hearing somewhere that "you are never more than three feet from a spider"? Not true – and this is one of those rare cases where we can trace all stages of how an almost-true statement grew into a myth.

If you're an educator, perhaps you've seen a lesson plan involving the "fact" that spiders don't stick to their own webs because of oil on their feet. It's false.

Maybe you read somewhere that spiders can evade pesticides by "holding their breaths." For how long? Fifteen minutes, several hours, 2-3 days, a month – it varies depending on where you read it. All false.

Perhaps you've heard the really off-the-wall story about a spider that supposedly lays its eggs inside banana fruit, to be eaten by us hapless mammals. You'd think nobody would believe something that crazy, but they do!

Spider myths even appear in sober medical journals. Here's a page about four harmless spider species that medical researchers thought posed a medical hazard to humans, based on far too little evidence. Even though those reports are disproven now, the beliefs they started will probably never die.

So visit the Spider Myths Site, read and enjoy!

Mad hatters wanted!

Guest Writer: Lynn Sullivan, Museology graduate student

When most of you think of the Burke you probably think of fossils and artifacts, but I want to let you know that if you look hard enough you might see a white rabbit that can lead you down a hole into your own version of Alice in Wonderland. My rabbit hole led me to the ethnology collection where, for the past quarter, I have adopted my own Wonderland-esque persona in doing my practicum with Collections Manager extraordinaire Becky Andrews. The role I chose was the mad hatter or more specifically the mad hat-mount maker! Many of the hats in the ethnology collection are stuffed with acid-free tissue paper which does not support the fragile hats properly or help them maintain their form while in storage so they need to have a “mount” created to keep them propped up. Following in the footsteps of another intrepid Museology student, I have sought to make as many hat mounts as is humanly possible over a period of 10 weeks. Was I foolhardy...yes. Did I have fun getting in touch with my inner craft person…YES! Did I conceive of a new standard for good days vs. bad days…yes (btw, a good day is one where you don’t cut yourself or glue your fingers together).

But what is hat mount-making you may ask… I shall tell you!

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First one starts with collecting the necessary archival building supplies (ethafoam, coroplast, tyvek) and tools (gloves, pencil, tape measure, and utility knife). Then the side-kicks must be rounded up, because it just isn’t mount-making without…

Sticky (the worlds slowest-heating-has-more-glue-stuck-to-it-than-comes-out-of-it-glue gun), Cutty (the only ethafoam knife that you will ever need, so coveted that students have been known to rush out at 5am on Black Friday to buy their own), and Maki (the sushi knife of death, mortal foe to flat ethafoam that must be carved out).

With this ramshackle gang of characters as back-up, I begin the process of fitting a square peg in a round hole. First thing you should know, ethafoam sheets come in large rectangular planks. Northwest Coast cedar-bark and spruce root hats tend to be more…ahh…how to put it …ROUND! Yes, one must cut tapered circles out of square planks. After doing this several times, you should eventually manage to have your own leaning tower of ethafoam that must be glued together in exactly the right place so that it all perfectly supports the hat. Any attempt to glue more than one piece at a time will inevitably lead to disaster. Once your little beauty is perfectly glued you will realize that more foam must be shaved off the sides to actually make it fit how it fit about 2 minutes earlier. Without further delay, you must swath that baby from top to bottom in tyvek in order to keep the ethafoam from rubbing against the hat. Next cut a piece of coroplast mat to the perfect size and glue the mount on the mat. Place hat on mount, return hat to shelf, and repeat with the next hat.

What I learned most from this experience is that no, I’m not crafty, but that any time given to the Burke and its wonderful staff is a gift in itself. Working with staff at this museum teaches you more than you could ever learn in a book. The staff is smart, dedicated, and always willing to take time to help you get better at your job.

And if you are really lucky… you too may wind up making a hat mount that can also be used for next year’s Star-trooper Halloween costume.

Thoughts on a recent Burke Museum commission

As Washington state's museum of natural history and culture, the Burke Museum works with numerous cultural communities. Our museum staff works very hard to respect the perspectives, traditions, and desires of all community groups with which we collaborate.

We recently posted about a trip to the Museum of Glass to watch Tlingit artist Preston Singletary create an original work of glass art for the Burke's ethnology collection. A few years ago, while at the special opening of Fusing Traditions: Transformations in Glass by Native American Artists, Preston created a small glass killer whale while working in front of the museum entrance, near a replica of the Haida "Howkan Whale Monument." This year, when the Burke commissioned Preston to create a glass piece for the museum’s collection, he chose to create a killer whale. Recognizing and understanding the distinctions between Haida and Tlingit culture, the Burke never viewed the commission as a recreation of the Howkan Whale Monument, but as a celebration of Preston’s body of work, which often includes imagery of killer whales. The following is a statement from the Burke Museum and the Museum of Glass about the commission.
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Joint Position Statement: Burke Museum and Museum of Glass

The Burke Museum and the Museum of Glass respect Native peoples and acknowledge their cultural perspective. The Burke Museum acquired the dorsal fin of the Howkan Whale Monument known as “Single Fin” in 1953 (cat. no. 1-1682), purchased as part of the Walter Waters collection. Moses Koohl-keet commissioned this monumental whale sculpture from Haida carver John Wallace around 1880 as a memorial to his uncle, head of the Brown Bear House, a branch of the Quetas Ravens. Curator Bill Holm began carving a replica of the monument (cat. no. 1988-75/1) in the 1970s, and completed it in 1985, when it was installed in front of the Museum during the Museum’s centennial year. On that occasion, several elders and members of the Hydaburg community, who trace their ancestry to Moses Koohl-keet, attended the centennial ceremony when the replica whale was unveiled, and they were acknowledged as the hereditary owners of this clan symbol.

In 2005 the Burke Museum hosted the traveling exhibit, “Fusing Traditions: Transformations in Glass by Native American Artists.” Preston Singletary and several other artists demonstrated glassblowing techniques using a mobile hot shop. At that time, Singletary created a small killer whale sculpture in glass, while working outdoors in front of the Howkan whale replica. In 2006, the Museum contacted Mr. Singletary, hoping to acquire that glass whale for an exhibit being planned featuring its contemporary Northwest Coast art collection. Since it was never completed and had been destroyed by Singletary, they discussed the possibility of acquiring another glass sculpture from him.

The Burke Museum is looking forward to acquiring an original work of glass art by Tlingit artist Preston Singletary, who has been commissioned by a generous donor to create a piece that will be donated to the Museum upon its completion. The work will be made during Preston Singletary’s Visiting Artist Residency in the Museum of Glass Hot Shop on November 22 and 23, 2008.

An invitation to watch the creation of this new work of art included a killer whale design created by Bill Holm in 1986 that was inspired by the Howkan whale sculpture, and has been used as the logo of the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art at the Burke Museum. This invitation said that the artist will interpret the monumental Howkan whale in glass. More accurately, the commission itself was inspired by Singletary’s body of work, which includes imagery of killer whales. The intentions of the donor who has commissioned the work, the Burke Museum who hopes to receive the work, and Preston Singletary who will create the work, were not to replicate the Howkan whale monument in any way. Singletary is Kagwaantan Tlingit, and the killer whale and brown bear are his family crest symbols. The artist will complete the commission with an original killer whale in glass.