Clips/ Feature Article

Glenbrook class visits Egypt exhibit
By Richard Trombly | Longmeadow News : March 6, 1997

Docent Alice Mertz describes an ancient Egyptian Artifact to Carlie Berezin and other Glenbrook Middle School Students at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum on Thursday, Feb. 27. Photo by Richard Trombly

The sixth grade at The Glenbrook Middle School has been studying ancient Egypt. This was the inspiration for Glenbrook teachers Fudy Ranahan and Leonard Robbins to bring their classes to an iducational program at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.

On Tuesday, February 25 and Thursday, February 27, students participated in a ninety-minute tour of the museum's permanent collections of Egyptian, ancient Greek and Roman art.

The collection of plaster casts of reliefs and wall carvings line the building's stairwells. The gallery includes a wide variety of Egyptian vases with representatives from each of the major eras from the Bronze Age to the New Kingdom, works of Roman jewelry and Greek sculpture. There was even an opportunity to handle a few select examples of ancient handiwork.

Thursday's group was lead by Carole Berkey and Alice Mertz. They are two of the thirteen museum guides or "docents." The term is derived from the Latin "to teach," explained Amy Dane, M.H.C. Art Museum Educational Coordinator.

The docents researched and wrote the syllabus for the tour, which examined the representative cultures as expressed in art.The students, because of their classwork on the subject, were able to intelligently answer many of the docent's questions.

The program ended with a skit in which several of the students participated. They assumed the roles of various personages from the three anctent cultures meeting at a well in Rome. Dressed in clothing of the period, each student told what life was like for their character and what role they played in their society.

Many of the students said that they enjoyed the skit but, for Merideth Donald, the highlight was the Egyptian display.

She said, "I liked the ancient Egyptian exhibits best. I knew the most about them."

Robbins told his class that they would be continuing their unit on ancient Egypt with a project based upon one of the vases displayed in the museum's collection.

"It was a wonderful experience for the students and myself," he said. "This exhibit is as good as any I've seen."

Thirty-five schools have taken part in the museum's tour. Dane explained that this was the first lour that had been designed on the museum's permanent collection and can thus be offered on an on-going basis.

"I hope to do the same with our medieval collection,"said Dane. "But it always seems that there is a special collection which requires attention. We are presently working on an Holocaust exhibit."

The exhibit will run through May 11. The focus of the exhibit is the rediscovery of ancient Egypt with the Pyramids at Giza and the Temples of Luxor and Karnak at Thebes.

In the 1830s, David Roberts of Edinburgh traveled to Egypt. A theatrical set painter in London, he painted many hand-colored lithographs of the splendors he found in Egypt. Approximately a dozen of Robert's lithographs as well as a sketch from 1611, showing the first English view of the Pyramids, are on loan to the museum.

The exhibit also includes a group of mid 19th century photographs and two oil paintings of reliefs showing strikingly realistic detail, j This a a characteristic of the works by the painter, Joseph Lindon Smith. Dane said that the invention of the camera in 1839, coinciding with the beginning of steamship and railroad travel, opened Egypt to photography that same year.

"Though interest in Egypt had been increasing ever since Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, it was these technological advances that made these things accessible to the middle class from the mid1800s to the rise of present day tourism," she said.

Diana Wolfe Larkin, Guest curator and visiting assistant professor of Art History, assembled this exhibit. She also played a major role in re-assembling the museum's permanent collection.

The museum has also been providing a series of gallery talks about Egypt Fridays at 12:30 p.m. On March 7, the topic will be 'Innocents Abroad: Mark Twain in Egypt.'

Museum hours are Tuesday through Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Entrance and parking are free. For further information call (413) 538-2245.