Meaning lost, name changes

THE UCLA museum of cultural history commonly known as the Fowler has spent the last 43 years compiling a world-famous collection of 150,000 artworks and 600,000 archeological objects, mainly from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Along the way, it has also collected names, including a brand-new one: the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

Established in 1963 as the Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technology and originally housed in the basement of Haines Hall, the museum launched its collection with a 1965 gift of 30,000 African and Oceanic objects from the trust of Henry Wellcome, an American-born entrepreneur who built a pharmaceuticals empire in Britain. In 1971, the campus museum acquired its second name, the Museum of Cultural History. Name No. 3, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, came with a new building, which opened in 1992 with major support from the Fowler Foundation and the family of collector and inventor Francis E. Fowler Jr.

The new name is thus the museum’s fourth moniker and signals a change of direction in collecting or programming no more than its predecessors.

“We are still committed to exploring global culture,” says Stacey Ravel Abarbanel, director of marketing and communications. The change is partly an acknowledgment that the term “cultural history” has been dropped in common usage and in museum circles, she says. In Paris, she notes, the new museum of indigenous art of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania is named for the street where it’s located, Quai Branly.

“The Fowler Museum at UCLA” is not only more succinct than the former name, “it’s less confusing,” Abarbanel says. “People don’t know what cultural history means.” The new name isn’t exactly crystal clear either, but the Fowler’s exhibition program has created a strong identity for the museum, she says.

The renaming coincides with a new rotating display of objects from the museum’s permanent collection, designed to celebrate a vast trove of material that spends most of its time in storage. The first installment, “Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives,” will open Sept. 30 with about 250 of the finest pieces from the collection, including ceremonial masks from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, and British Columbia, Canada; puppets from China; an Elut headdress from Nigeria; and an ancient Moche portrait vessel from Peru.

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Suzanne Muchnic