Notes

Notes from the Director

As we start another year at the Kelsey I look forward to the range of activities and opportunities that our rich collections and lively community of scholars and friends will produce. The Museum continues its active program of fieldwork in the Near East, with Janet Richards' excavations in Upper Egypt just getting underway as I write. Janet and her team will spend three months investigating the Middle Kingdom cemetery at the important royal center of Abydos and will return in December to report on the finds. My own season at Kedesh in Israel this past summer was even more productive than I had hoped (see story).

On the exhibitions front, Terry Wilfong will work this winter on the publication of his Music in Roman Egypt show, and Robin Meador-Woodruff will mount an exhibition of the early twentieth-century panoramic photographs that are some of the Kelsey's great archival treasures (see story). Elaine Gazda is busy putting together her large show on the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii and the Maria Barosso watercolors that Professor Kelsey himself commissioned. This complex undertaking will be featured in our spring Newsletter. In the area of publications, the upcoming issue of the Bulletin of the University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology will be entirely devoted to research on the Kelsey collections and Kelsey-sponsored fieldwork.

We have had one major staffing change over the summer. Our conservator, Geoff Brown, left us to take up the directorship of the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona. Geoff had been taking care of the collections since 1990, and it was under his leadership that we built the SAFE, the climate-controlled facility that now protects our fragile collections. Geoff was the moving force behind this project, and all of us who value the collections owe him a great debt of gratitude for it. We wish him well in his new endeavors.

Sharon C. Herbert, Director

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