Hudson Museum at UMaine’s Center for the Arts sets new hours

ORONO – The Hudson Museum at the University of Maine has announced new hours, effective immediately. The museum will be open 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. It will be closed Sundays, Mondays and holidays.

The Hudson Museum, located in the Maine Center for the Arts, maintains a collection of more than 8,000 ethnographic and archaeological objects. Summer visitors will enjoy access to the museum’s permanent collections, as well as its traveling exhibits. In addition to special exhibits, the Hudson Museum features six permanent exhibits, including “Realms of Blood” and “Jade: Prehispanic Mesoamerica,” which draws on the William P. Palmer III collection. With 2,228 pre-Columbian ceramics, lithics and gold work dating from 2,000 B.C. to the time of the Spanish conquest of 1532, it is considered one of the finest collections of its type in the nation.

The museum’s American Indian galleries showcase an extensive array of art and ethnographic objects from the Northwest Coast, the Southwest and the Arctic. Of local interest is the Penobscot Primer Project, which features Maine Indian baskets, birch bark work, woodcarvings and an interactive computer program on the Penobscot language.

The museum is currently hosting the exhibits “Peru: From Village to Empire” and “Across the Andes: Travels in Peru, 1934,” which continue through Sept. 1.

“Peru: From Village to Empire” traces the development of society in Peru from the Paleo-Indian camps of 13,000 years ago to the Inca empire and the Spanish conquest. It features more than 45 objects, including ceramics, textiles and metalwork, as well as 60 graphics such as maps, photographs and drawings.

The exhibit is produced by the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology in Andover, Mass., in partnership with the Hudson Museum and the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.

“Across the Andes: Travels in Peru, 1934,” is a photographic exhibition by Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt and Richard J. Cross. Roosevelt and Cross accompanied noted Peruvian archaeologist Dr. Julio Tello on an expedition in 1934, recording more than 700 images of archaeological sites, pre-Hispanic architecture, stone sculpture and vistas of the surrounding landscape.