Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs will go to San Francisco
The San Francisco Fine Arts Museums announced that the touring exhibit “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” will open at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park June 27, 2009, for a nine-month stay, through March 28, 2010. That would be the longest run for any single show in the de Young’s history. The exhibit, which features more than 130 artifacts from the 18th Dynasty king’s opulently appointed tomb and other ancient Egyptian sites, is expected to be a blockbuster. Museum officials hope to exceed the 1 million visitor mark set by “Treasures of Tutankhamun” in its 1979 engagement of four months at the old de Young.
Every piece in the show is at least 3,300 years old. Many of them never traveled outside of Egypt before this tour. The famous gold mask of Tutankhamun, a centerpiece of the ‘79 show, is not included this time around. Among the reasons it doesn’t travel anymore are high insurance rates.
The Tut “Golden Age” exhibit, a joint venture of National Geographic, Arts and Exhibitions International and AEG Exhibitions, in cooperation with the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, premiered in Los Angeles in 2005. It went on to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Chicago, Philadelphia and London. The show opened over the weekend in Dallas, where it will remain until moving to San Francisco.
Ticket prices and policies for the San Francisco run have not been established. Full-price weekend tickets for the Tut show at the Dallas Museum of Art are $32.50, which includes a $10 museum admission charge.
The M.H. de Young Museum (commonly called de Young Museum) is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It is named for early San Francisco newspaperman M. H. de Young.
The museum opened in 1895 as an outgrowth of the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 (a fair modeled on the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of the previous year). The building was originally decorated with cast-concrete ornaments on the façade. The ornaments were removed in 1949 as they began to fall and had become a hazard. The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake severely damaged the building.
Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and engineers Arup designed the newly rebuilt structure, which reopened on October 15, 2005. The current building is clad with perforated copper plates, which will change colors through exposure to the elements. A 144 ft. (44 m) observation tower allows visitors to see much of Golden Gate Park’s Music Concourse and rises above the Park’s treetops providing a view of the Golden Gate and Marin Headlands.
The de Young Museum was the last of seven U.S. museums to host The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit in the late 1970s.
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