Raven exhibit will remain at Wichita Art Museum through end of the year

A unique traveling exhibition that tells an important Native American tale is getting an extended stay at the Wichita Art Museum.

The exhibition “Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight,” which opened Feb. 1 at WAM, 1400 Museum Blvd., will stay on display through Jan. 17, 2021, instead of closing at the end of August.

Getting to keep the exhibition — billed as an immersive theatrical gallery experience because it combines glass art with video projections, sounds and storytelling — for a few extra months will help offset the months the public couldn’t visit the museum because of being shut down for COVID-19 precautions, said WAM director Patricia McDonnell.

“To some degree, we’re replacing the months we were closed, and it wasn’t seen by the public,” she said. WAM was closed from March 16 to June 23.

“We’re really pleased to get to keep the show,” McDonnell said. “I knew it would be amazing and it has exceeded my expectations of what the experience would be like.”

McDonnell said visitors are raving that the exhibition is one of the best, if not the best show, that WAM has exhibited.

“We haven’t seen a project like this before in Wichita, so people are enamored,” she said.

The heart of the exhibition is the Tlingit creation story of the Raven and how he transforms the world from darkness by stealing the light being hoarded by an old man in his clan house and bringing the moon, stars and sun to the people. The Tlingit — pronounced either Tlin-git or Klin-kit — are indigenous to the Pacific Northwest, primarily in Canada and into Alaska. Singletary, the artist, is of Tlingit heritage.

The exhibit’s booking has managed to work out fairly well for WAM. When WAM officials booked the exhibition a couple of years ago with the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, it had already planned for an extended stay beyond the three to four months it usually allows for an exhibition.

“That proved clairvoyant. We really lucked out,” McDonnell said in a previous interview.

The exhibit was supposed to head next to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., for a yearlong show starting this fall. Because of the COVID-19 shutdown, Smithsonian staff have been unable to prepare the gallery space in time to accept the exhibit so that allowed the show to stay in Wichita. McDonnell said.

The show is still expected to travel to the Smithsonian for an exhibition run in 2021 and then go to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. According to Museum of Glass officials, exact dates are still being worked out for the remaining tour.

Extending “Raven and the Box of Daylight” did mean WAM had to “scramble” its exhibition bookings for this fall, McDonnell said. WAM had planned to open two paired exhibitions Sept. 26 under the combined title of “Paper Dreams and Modern Masterpieces.”

The fall exhibition would have brought together a survey of Alfred Mauer’s works from the Weisman Museum in Minneapolis — where McDonnell had once been curator — and WAM’s “incredible collection” of American modernism works on paper, McDonnell said. That exhibition has been postponed until likely 2022, she said.

As a companion event to the “Raven and the Box of Daylight” exhibition, a free curator talk with Candice Hopkins, which was to have happened this past spring, has been rescheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 13. Hopkins is also of Tlingit heritage and is a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation. She’ll give an illustrated talk on her exhibition “Art for a New Understanding,” organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and featuring approximately 80 works created by indigenous artists in various mediums from the 1950s until now.

WAM public hours through Aug. 2 are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays, closed Mondays and major holidays.

Until Aug. 2, visitors ages 55 and older and others who are immune-suppressed may gain early entrance at 10 a.m. Tuesdays through Fridays. After Aug. 2, WAM expects to open to the public at 10 a.m. Tuesdays through Fridays. Capacity is currently limited to 400 visitors; face coverings required.

Admission is $10 adults, $5 for those 60 and older, $3 for college/university students with ID and youth ages 5-17, free for WAM members and children under 5. Admission is free on Saturdays. To accommodate WAM members for the time of WAM’s closure, WAM has extended general memberships by two months.

For more information, visit wichitaartmuseum.org.