Maxwell Museum Blog
The new exhibition space created opportunities for the Museum to expand its public presence. Two other long-term exhibits—“Evolution” and “Nature, Culture and Man”—were developed, that, along with the Southwest exhibit, allowed the Museum to balance its place-based commitment to, and legacy of research in, the North American Southwest with a focus on broader theoretical concerns of 1970s anthropology.
Between two and four temporary exhibitions, developed in-house or arriving on loan from other institutions, were mounted each year. Many featured the Museum’s collections, while others came from far afield (e.g., the 1984: “Twenty five years of Discovery at Sardis” developed at Harvard and Cornell). In the early 1980s, Museum staff created one of the Maxwell’s most ambitious exhibits — "The Chaco Phenomenon" — which opened at the Museum in June 1983 and toured the US from 1984-87.