Your path: Dabrowski Serves as Consultant
Jan Dabrowski Serves as Consultant to Anchorage Museum
In February 2008, an exhibition titled Yuungnaqpiallerput (the way we genuinely live): Masterworks of Yup'ik Science and Survival opened at the Anchorage Museum of Art and History in Anchorage, Alaska. It will continue through October 26, 2008.
From 2005 through 2007, Jan Dabrowski, chair of Marylhurst University's Science and Mathematics Department, served as a consultant to the museum as the exhibit was developed.
The exhibit features the museum's extensive collection of native artifacts from the Yup'ik people who have lived in western Alaska for thousands of years.
The overall exhibition was designed by Presentation Design Group in Eugene. OMSI designed and built the hands-on exhibits that explain the technology and science expressed in the artifact collection.
Dabrowski's role was to help develop ideas for the hands-on exhibits and to evaluate the exhibit prototypes for effectiveness.
The hands-on exhibits show a number of concepts in simulated situations. These include:
- Listen for the Seals – How did hunters listen through the kayak paddle to hear seals underwater? Visitors listen through a wooden paddle to detect faint underwater sounds in a tank of water.
- Bentwood Hat – How did the conical "bentwood" hat focus and amplify sound from prey at a distance? Try on different sized conical hats made from thin wood sheets to hear how the hat made distant sounds louder, and also helped identify the direction to the source.
- Snow Glare – How did slit goggles reduce glare and improve vision? Examine an intensely lit "snowy landscape" and see how the goggles made it possible to see objects on the bright surroundings.
- Practice Stitching - What kept the waterproof seal-gut parkas from leaking at the sewn seams? Using outsized materials and tools, visitors practice the waterproof stitch technique and see how seal-gut is joined to make the garment Yup'ik hunters owed their
lives to.
