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Museums and the Center

Can I help your museum? For further information, e-mail me.

Some people envision the Center for Bead Research as a museum. That isn't the case.

We do have some permanent displays (Beads from the Four Corners of the Earth; 20^th Century Beadmaking Map) and some rotating displays (though they don't rotate very fast). We have plenty to see, but are not geared to handle many visitors. It helps that we are in relatively remote Lake Placid, NY.

There are now three museums dedicated to beads and two others in the planning phase. There is the Bead Museum in Glendale AZ, the Bead Museum and Learning Center in Washington, D.C. and a museum run by John and Ruth Picard dedicated to the African bead trade in Carmel CA. There are plans for a museum dedicated to Asian beads in Thailand and one dedicated to beadwork elsewhere in Asia.

General collections of most museums include beads. Few know what to do with them. Some display them, but with little information. Many just store them away. I have worked with large (the Smithsonian, the British Museum) and small (Merbok, Pondicherry) museums around the world. Sometimes the work is my own research. At other times, the relationship has been more active.

I am a Research Associate of the Department of Anthropology of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and an Honorary Researcher at the National Museum of the Philippines. I have also been working for a couple of years with the Archaeology Department of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I am honored to be a friend of the Six Nations Indian Museum.

I have been a consultant to several museums. They include: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the American Museum of Natural History in New York. the Denver Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution and the Pondicherry Museum, where I designed displays and wrote a guide to the Arikamedu beads).

I have lectured or held workshops of some sort at the Haffenreffer Museum (Brown University), Peabody Museum (Harvard), Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), Denver Museum of Natural History, the Wheelwright Museum (Santa Fe NM), National Museum of the Philippines (Manila), Singapore National Museum, Sarawak Museum (Malaysia), Surabaya Museum (Indonesia) and probably others.

Can I help your museum? For further information, e-mail me.

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