The Institute of Texan Culture

If I had not already set a precedent for naming the title of these blog posts after the institution I visited, I would have seriously considered naming this particular post "Goosebumps and Geekery." Because I enjoyed this particular place so much that it's kind of funny and almost embarassing in hindsight (yet I very much want to go there again and geek out over it all, again).

The University of Texas at San Antonio's Institute of Texan Culture, housed in the HemisFair Park, is a magical place to a cultural history nerd like me. It features exhibits on practically all of the different cultural groups which have contributed to Texan history and culture.

Just inside, past the neon Texas flag, is an introduction to the first people of Texas, who could be referred to as Native Americans by some (but the exhibit includes different theories of transcontinental migration routes that led them to this continent) or American Indians (except at that point this patch of land did not yet even have one of the six different flags which have represented its political climate, a la Eddie Izzard, with the American one being the last). So the exhibit did refer to them once or twice as Indians when discussing trends and features which applied to all of the different people groups, and then each population by their preferred name when distinguishing between them. Portions of the exhibit also showed that these people groups were still alive and active today, with modern reinterpretations and creations. A particularly mindblowing subsection of the exhibit was built like a series of deep dark caverns with inset displays of pottery that connected traditional philosophies with material goods of multiple eras and modern science on the nature of the cosmos. That's where the "goosebumps" part of the alternate title came in, and it wasn't just because of the air-conditioning.

After spending about an hour and a half in this one portion of the museum, I began to make my way over to the Dome Theater in the center of the museum for one of the regularly scheduled shows, and realized I had just spent a good chunk of time in what might have been about 5 or 10 percent of the whole museum (which was much bigger than I thought it would be from the outside). So I realized I needed to pick up my pace a good bit so I would have a better chance of actually seeing most of it before the end of the day. (The dome show was pretty nifty too, by the way, displaying photographs featuring people of many ethnicities and cultures set to dramatic music and minimal text to proclaim that all of the faces flashing above and around you were integral to the fabric of Texas society).

I ended up spending a total of four or five hours in the museum, and would have spent longer if it weren't for the fact that I was starving because it was mid-afternoon and I needed to eat some sort of lunch. The exhibits have been carefully put together for decades, with most including a space where a docent (often in historical or traditional costume) could step in and facilitate conversations with visitors. I ended up asking one volunteer about when a particular part of an exhibit had been put together, because I actually couldn't tell for sure when it had had been designed. There were several opportunities for people to touch and interact with some of the objects. Exhibits which had been recently developed utilized technology in some really neat ways. And in each exhibit there were particular names and faces, actual people telling stories of their own experiences and their own heritage. I stepped inside a real (non-replica) sharecropper's cabin that had been constructed circa 1900, and listened to oral history interviews of African-American Texans who had been sharecroppers themselves. I love it when a museum exhibit on cultural history is less of a specimen display and more of an exercise in individual and communal memories. And I took a ridiculous amount of photos (allowed everywhere besides a thought-provoking exhibit on genocide) to remind myself of different curatorial touches I particularly enjoyed.