Mayan Chac Mool, 92-50-20/C1099
This plaster cast is a model of a Chac Mool statue originally found at the Post-Classic Maya site of Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Along with approximately one thousand other casts in the collection, this one was created in the late 19th century and was on display at the museum until the mid-1980s.
Peabody Museum collections staff have been working with Harvard Museums of Science & Culture colleagues to install objects for our exhibit, Muchos Mexicos: Crossroads of the Americas. One of the more challenging tasks was moving a 350-pound plaster cast of a statue from off-site storage, where it has lived for the past three decades, into the gallery.
The cast has an interior wooden frame and the over one hundred-year-old plaster is fragile and can break if not handled carefully, so transferring the Chac Mool from a wheeled metal storage container onto its exhibit mount required assistance from professional art handlers. For anyone doing the math, this move required two art handlers, two exhibit professionals, one conservator, and one very nervous collections manager.
But we’ve made it look easy in this 30-second time-lapse movie of its installation!
Author: David DeBono Schafer