Although the Catalina Island Museum’s current exhibition “The Strange and Mysterious Case of Dr. Glidden” has been open for less than a week, it has already garnered national attention. Before the exhibition opened last Saturday, the Los Angeles Times released an article on the show on its website: The article appears to have unleashed a torrent of interest in the subject of the exhibition: the controversial amateur archaeologist, Ralph Glidden, who, in the 1920s, excavated scores of Native American burial sites on Catalina Island.
Although the Catalina Island Museum’s current exhibition “The Strange and Mysterious Case of Dr. Glidden” has been open for less than a week, it has already garnered national attention. Before the exhibition opened last Saturday, the Los Angeles Times released an article on the show on its website: The article appears to have unleashed a torrent of interest in the subject of the exhibition: the controversial amateur archaeologist, Ralph Glidden, who, in the 1920s, excavated scores of Native American burial sites on Catalina Island.
“We have felt all along that the exhibition has great historical significance both to the island and to Native Americans,” said Dr. Michael De Marsche, executive director of the museum. “But we are surprised by how quickly the word has spread. Within hours of the Times’ article, the Associated Press contacted us for photographs that could accompany their own article about Glidden’s life and work. When that article surfaced on the Internet, newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News placed their own accounts on their sites.”
According to Gail Fornasiere, the museum’s director of Public Relations and Marketing, interest in the exhibition has continued to build, and the story has now gone international.
“The Daily Mail of the United Kingdom contacted us and asked for a large number of photographs on Tuesday,” Fornasiere said. “They specifically asked for shots of our installation of the exhibition. They had obviously done their homework and researched the museum’s website. They wrote a lengthy story about the exhibition, which is now accessible on the web.”
The exhibition presents for the first time a trove of photographs, diaries, letters and journals only recently discovered.
It also explores Glidden’s controversial life. Working between 1919 and 1928, Glidden unearthed thousands of artifacts and, perhaps his greatest discovery, an ancient cemetery containing hundreds of burial sites. Desperate for money, public attention and respectability, he later opened a “museum” dedicated to his research.
Utilizing skeletal remains as a macabre form of decoration, the museum’s unsettling interior attracted scores of tourists and was, in Glidden’s own words, “unlike anything else anywhere in this country.” But an introductory panel into the current exhibition condemns Glidden’s “total disregard for the sacredness of human remains.” The ultimate result of his research was anything but positive. He failed to follow any type of scientific method while excavating, and inflicted “near permanent damage … on research into Native American life on Catalina Island.”
“The Strange and Mysterious Case of Dr. Glidden” exhibition will be open through Sept. 29, and can only be viewed at the Catalina Island Museum.
The Catalina Island Museum is Avalon’s sole institution devoted to art, culture and history. The museum is located on the ground floor of Avalon’s historic Casino and are open seven days a week, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call (310) 510-2414 or visit CatalinaMuseum.org.
