Eureka! Alaska museum opens glitzy gold exhibit

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — All that glitters at the Anchorage Museum is not gold. Take, for instance, a new addition with a shimmering glass facade made from more than 600 panels designed to reflect Alaska’s natural splendor.

Inside the addition that opens to the public on Saturday, visitors encounter a bold, high-end interior in yellow and red. The wow factor hits right away. Very New York. Very L.A.

And it doesn’t stop there, it just takes on a new hue with the new exhibit titled “Gold” — one of the 10 most popular traveling museum exhibitions in the world.

“We have a shiny new building. We needed a shiny exhibit as well,” museum spokeswoman Sarah Henning said.

The 80,000-square-foot addition will enable the museum to take its exhibits up a few notches, she said.

“An exhibit like this would never have been possible in our previous building,” Henning said. “Now we are able to bring the world to Alaska.”

Museum director James Pepper Henry said Anchorage is evolving culturally.

“My personal view is that for any city to claim it is a great city, part of that claim is that it has to have great cultural institutions,” Pepper Henry said. “Anchorage has great cultural institutions, the symphony and opera and now the Anchorage Museum.”

London-based architect David Chipperfield came up with the design for the $106 million addition and renovation that nearly doubled the museum’s square footage. More than half the cost was paid for by philanthropist Elmer Rasmuson.

The addition has four floors. Through the front doors and to the left is the new resource center, where visitors can plug in their laptops or use desk computers to access the museum’s half-million historic photographs and 10,000 books.

To the right is the museum store, where glass cases running along one wall are filled with art made by Alaska Natives.

Also on the first floor is the Muse Cafe, run by one of Anchorage’s top restaurant owners where diners can enjoy first-class fare such as scallops with golden caviar, duck spring rolls with plum sauce and venison brochettes with a raspberry-citrus sauce.

The truly glitzy stuff is upstairs, where “Gold” is installed. It’s an appropriate exhibit in a state that was heavily shaped by gold rushes in the late 19th century and remains a major gold producer.

The exhibit was created by the American Museum of Natural History and features more than 300 objects from around the world that tell the story of gold — from a replica of an Apollo space helmet with a gold face shield to a gold Faberge Easter egg.

There are gold Buddhas, daggers, skulls, necklaces, ear spools, and nose ornaments. There are mummy ornaments from Peru, a large ornamental gold chest plate from Panama. There’s the first gold coins minted in ancient Lydia and Ionia (now Turkey), pre-Columbian gold jewelry and gold doubloons from sunken Spanish galleons.

Water Cronkite and Tom Brokaw’s gold Emmys are on display next to Susan Sarandon’s Oscar for “Dead Man Walking” and Harrison Ford’s Golden Globe.

Hard to miss is the Eureka gold bar, the largest known gold bar to come of California’s gold rush. In 1857 when it was made, it was worth $17,433. It sold for a record $8 million in 2001, a price that was likely inflated by the ingot’s story. The bar went down with the sinking of the S.S. Central America and lay on the ocean floor for 129 years before it was recovered.

Museum officials are perhaps most proud of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center that will open next spring and house more than 600 Alaska Native artifacts. The items will be on semi-permanent loan from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History of the American Indian.

Pepper Henry said the Anchorage Museum now is regarded as one of the great circumpolar museums, along with those in Russia, Scandinavia and Canada.

He expects museum attendance to increase from about 130,000 visitors annually to about 250,000.

“Our goal is to bring the best that the world has to offer right here to Anchorage, Alaska,” he said.

On the Net:

www.anchoragemuseum.org