UWM Grad Students Collaborate with Public Museum

A birch bark vessel sat on a plastic stand. Painted on the outside of the vessel, mounted Cossack musicians plucked their banduras and clashed cymbals together. Behind these musicians, a Cossack host clad with pikes, swords and rifles filled the surrounding landscape. After about 30 years of storage in the anthropology collection at the Milwaukee Public Museum, museum members could observe this container at the Inside Out event on April 26.  

The birch bark vessel was likely crafted in Severodvinsk, Russia. Similar containers were often used to store dry goods, but sometimes they were used as drinking vessels. This container was gifted to the MPM in 1915. After 1972 the container was displayed in the European Village exhibition until superficial and structural damage caused its removal in the 1990s. Recently, the vessel returned to public view as part of a temporary display on birch bark by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate student Arthur Omeara. 

“I am very passionate about history, and I think that everybody else should be,” Omeara said. “I am very good at getting other people excited about things that I am excited about.”

Omeara and other students who prepared to present delicate objects for the Inside Out event are in the Public History Graduate Program specializing in Museum Studies at UWM. UWM collaborates with the MPM to provide the hands-on experience of working at a museum. 

Graduate student Catherine Lee also prepared for the event at the museum. Her presentation focused on a Kenyan ornament consisting of iron, glass beads, copper wiring, leather and fur. This makes storage of the object complicated as each material requires a different temperature and humidity. The object was hung vertically on display in the 1990s but this caused stress on the object. Eventually it was taken down. 

“It’s been really neat to work here at the MPM during class and to be able to interact with their family audience,” Lee said. “The public never ceases to surprise you. They are a dynamic bunch and that’s what I love about it.”

The graduate program’s instructor, Dawn Scher Thomae, is the curator of collections in the anthropology department. Along with instructing students, Thomae is responsible for about 520,000 objects. These objects include all the museum’s archeological collections, along with items from the indigenous Americas, Africa, and the Pacific. Thomae and other museum staff are currently deciding which of these half a million objects will be on display at the MPM’s new location set to open in 2027. 

“The process is onerous,” Thomae said. “It has to fit our larger thematic direction, which is the interconnectedness of nature and culture. At least we have that covered because people use their environment to create and to survive.”

Indre Gavenaite, a museum guest who grew up in Lithuania, wants the new museum to include representations of European culture similar to the European Village exhibition present in the current museum.

“I think it is important to have something like that in Milwaukee,” Gavenaite said, “like different heritages and how it was back in the day.”

Another museum guest, Mushka Lein, also appreciated the current museum’s representation of her cultural heritage. 

“I always look for the Jewish house because we’re Jewish,” Lein said. “That’s always special for us.”