The entrance to the new galleries features a pair of towering amethyst geodes that are among the world’s largest on display. Photo by D. Finnin, ©American Museum of Natural History.
Artnet has a story about a the AMNH's new Hall of Gems. The new hall has been dedicated to "Nature's Art". The Artnet article is interesting with both pictures and descriptions. If you're in NY, don't miss this new exhibit.
Four years ago, the Halls of Gems and Minerals at New York’s American Museum of Natural History closed for long-overdue renovations. The cavelike space, deliberately designed to evoke the feeling of the mines where many of the specimens on display had been excavated, had been essentially untouched since 1976.
This week, it reopens to the public and features some 5,500 objects, from polished diamonds to rough-hewn sandstone.
“I think it’s fair to say that no space, no gallery is quite as glittering as these new halls,” museum president Ellen Futter said at the press preview.
The 11,000-square-foot halls have traditionally been one of the museum’s most beloved attractions, and the museum is predicting that it will be a major draw for tourists returning to the city.
“There is something truly elemental and visceral about our connection to the minerals and materials of the earth on which we live,” Futter said. “Didn’t we all collect rocks as children?… And who among us doesn’t appreciate a spectacular gem?”
Remade by exhibition design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates courtesy of benefactors and new namesakes Roberto and Allison Mignone, the hall is virtually unrecognizable from the dark gallery with carpeted ramps and floor-level display cases it used to be.
“I called [it] the jungle gym and the nanny-dom,” George Harlow, the museum’s curator of the department of earth and planetary sciences, said at the press preview.
This grouping of topaz gems includes the Brazilian Princess, a 221-facet, 9.5-pound pale blue topaz that once was the largest cut gem in the world. Photo by D. Finnin, ©American Museum of Natural History.
