The Museum of Texas Tech University is one of the country’s largest on a higher education campus. It opened in 1929, thanks to the efforts of the Plains Museum Society, a group of people that wanted to preserve the history and culture of the region.
This year marks the museum’s 90th anniversary and executive director Gary Morgan says the celebration will go throughout 2019. He says the museum isn’t just one of the nation’s largest.
“It’s certainly the most diverse university museum in the country, given that we cover—as I often say—art to dinosaurs, with a collection of nearly 8.5 million items in our collection,” he says. “Many people in Lubbock, even those who attend our events and our exhibits, don’t realize the size and the complexity of this museum and of course we’re not just about exhibits, we’re about all the research that’s associated with our collections. Our support for our research is both here and all over the world.”
The kickoff to the anniversary celebration begins tomorrow evening, during the Museum by Night event, from 6 to 8 p.m. It’s open to the public.
“We are unapologetically a family friendly night,” he explains. “This will be a night with birthday cake. This will be a night with games. There will be a little history about the museum, so people will learn a little bit. But it’s mostly going to be just a fun night. There’s going to be a DJ, there’s going to be karaoke.”
Most every event throughout this year will include some acknowledgement of the 90th anniversary. April 6th will be STEAM Day, which adds art into the mix with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. May 4 will be Dino Day, which brings hundreds of youngsters in to look at the museum’s dinosaur collection. The museum will hold its annual Day of the Dead celebration the evening of Nov. 1.
In the middle of the year, the museum will stage a 90th Anniversary Collections Exhibition.
“What we want to do is have an exhibition that kind of looks at the way the collection of this museum has evolved—where it started, how it expanded and why, how those collection activities related to significant historic events related to west Texas and at the university and so forth. That will be an exhibition where you can walk through and you’ll see works of art. You’ll dinosaurs and fossils. You’ll see beautiful clothing, technology and other history items—things from our anthropology and ethnology collections. All together in one exhibition,” he says.
The Plains Museum Society, with the help of Tech professor William Curry Holden, eventually became the West Texas Museum Association, which continues to support the museum that’s set along Fourth Avenue on the north side of campus.
The initial museum space at Tech was housed in the basement of what is now Holden Hall. The first phase of the current museum opened in 1970, several months after a tornado hit the downtown area.
“Being established in these new facilities, really was transformational for the museum. It opened up the opportunity to be running a proper public program when previously in Holden Hall it was extremely constrained.”
Now, the museum is about 200,000 square feet, including the back of house areas where many collections – some internationally recognized – are stored. Morgan says the natural history and paleontology collections are known by researchers around the world. “All of those things really created the image of an institution of some substantial credibility,” he says.
Morgan says expanding the museum is under consideration, a move that could make a visit more interactive.
“We have plans for the future and we’re advanced in exploring master plans for how they could translate into an expanded facility, which would look at the best of museums, the best things that science centers are doing. Science centers being a type of museum where people do a lot of hands on activity. Instead of a reliance on collections, people tend to be more involved with interactive activities,” he says.
The museum’s anniversary, Morgan emphasized, isn’t just about its run until now.
“When we celebrate our 90th, there’s as much thinking ahead for the next 90 years as we are looking back over our shoulder on the last 90.”