The Lompoc Museum may not appear any different from the outside—it’s hardly changed since the building was constructed as a Carnegie Library more than a century ago in 1911—but its upper floor showcasing local and national Native American artifacts is getting a facelift, with most of the display cases in the place receiving a much-needed paint job and reorganization of the priceless artifacts contained within them.
For the museum’s director Lisa Renken, the project is a long time coming, she told the Sun.
“I’ve been here since ’98, and I’ve been the director since ’01, and all that time I’ve wanted to get in and redo the cases,” she said. “Because it’s kind of an old-fashioned display that was more just, ‘here’s all the neat things,’ and not a lot of interpretation.”
The trend in museums over the last couple of decades has been to show less and say more, Renken explained, and though the Lompoc Museum won’t hide any of its Chumash baskets, stone mortars and pestles, or other Native American artifacts, the reorganization of the exhibit provides more interpretation for visitors.
It’s also designed in a more cohesive way that spotlights the collection of Chumash artifacts in the center of the room, and the rest from national tribes is relegated to the back wall of the showroom. The push for reorganization was part of the strategic planning put forth a few years ago by the museum’s board, but the renovation of the Stone Pine Hall—next door to the museum—pushed back the plans a bit.
“All of the cases have been emptied and redone, except for these,” Renken said, pointing to some cases with huge mortars and pestles. “Frankly, they’re huge and heavy, but we’ve talked about increasing the interpretation for these as well.”
The upper level of the Lompoc Museum is dedicated entirely to Native American artifacts that were donated to the museum by Clarence “Pop” Ruth when the Carnegie Library first became the Lompoc Museum in 1969. There’s also a gift shop upstairs, which has been updated and also showcases a large collection of Native American tourist items crafted mostly in the first half of the 20th century.
The museum’s basement houses a vast variety of artifacts from Lompoc’s city history, from its time as a frontier town to its agricultural expansion. There’s also space downstairs for changing exhibits, Renken said, to keep the museum’s selections active. But upstairs, with the remodel and reorganization, the mission is to provide an immersive exhibit of local Chumash culture.
“It’s just more logically laid out,” she said. “You want to make it easy for people to get an impression of these groups—and so our focus is the Chumash—so by walking around, we really want them to get a feeling for what the Chumash life was like.”
Renken said that the project has received hours of support from the Lompoc Museum’s team of dedicated volunteers, from painting the cases or retouching original library cases to carefully moving and reorganizing the various artifacts. There’s still much to be done, she said, but locals are more than welcome to come in and view the progress.
Arts Editor Joe Payne can get lost in an exhibit of arrowheads and baskets. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 12-19, 2015.