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I’ve been thinking alot about my parents lately - maybe it’s the holidays. In any event, it made sense for my sister and I to take a ride down to Philadelphia today, where a painting that once belonged to my parents now graces the corner of one wall in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s American Art Collection. The painting is “Doorway in Tangier” by the artist Henry O. Tanner, an internationally acclaimed African American painter active in the late 19th century and into the early part of the twentieth. While in Paris, Tanner apparently befriended my grandfather’s cousin Philip, a talented but less well-known painter who later became a newspaper cartoonist. Tanner gifted the painting to Philip, who in turn presented it to my parents as a wedding present. My father took delight in its historical provinence; my mother, an aspiring artist, in Tanner’s evocative use of light and color. It held a cherished place in our living room and when my parents passed on, we called around to see which museum might appreciate its significance and similarly honor it. The folks at PMA were and continue to be most gracious, welcoming us during our now annual pilgrimage. No question that the very best legacy is one in which certain values and attributes are passed down from generation to generation. Still, it’s a bit of a thrill to know that a work by such a culturally important artist lives on through a remarkable “regifting” process and at the same time to see a familiar fixture of our childhood hanging so importantly next to a plaque bearing my folks’ names.
A geology student in England discovered a new dinosaur species — A scientists in Germany, looking through a museum’s fossil collections, stumbled across a rock slab that captured a shark eating an amphibian, while the amphibian was in the act of eating a fish. Again, the fossil had been lying in a museum cabinet for years before a researcher stumbled across it and recognized its meaning. Meanwhile, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto rediscovered an 80-foot dinosaur skeleton they forgot they had. A nearly-complete skeleton of a Borosaurus arrived in 1962. But because the museum didn’t have enough space to display it, the bones went into storage, spread over many cabinets until workers lost track of what was where. An employee, looking for skeletons to borrow from other museums, ran across an old newspaper clipping describing the fossil. So, when your Mom tells you to keep your room clean, there’s a reason – she doesn’t want you to lose any dinosaurs!
Scalzi wasn’t the only one to visit the Creation Museum! Scientist Tom Robey paid a visit, and found a 500 million year-old fossil in the nearby Wal-Mart parking lot.
I hedged my bets that I could find something good if I sought out that beacon of American consumption. I was hoping for something like I bought as a 10 year old from the Field Museum of Natural History. I wasn’t disappointed with the 45 minutes I spent scrambling over clay-slickened rocks behind the bargain center’s loading dock…In under an hour, I had unearthed ample evidence of life extinct for more than 500 million years And I didn’t know this. The Creation Museum is built atop one of the richest fossil beds in the world. Imagine that!
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11/30/2007 
