Issue date: 9/26/07 Section: Features

Media Credit: Damon Casarez

Fabric, wood, paint and metal buttons factor in making Martell Juggler come alive. Now carefully-crafted Martell, along with the rest of a wooden cast of characters, can be seen on display in the Anthropology Teaching Museum located in room 426 of McCarthy Hall.

The exhibit, "A World of Puppets: Expressions of Culture," is the first of its kind at Cal State Fullerton.

Anthropology graduate student and curator Justin Stewart worked hard preparing and setting up the exhibit to the very last detail.

"He would be here late at night working on it, putting in countless hours," Tannise Collymore, an administrative assistant for the anthropology department, said.

Stewart also spent time collaborating with the Conservatory of Puppetry Arts in Pasadena by selecting most of the 80 puppets from the Alan Cook collection.

Cook partnered with the conservatory to share his estimated 4,000 puppets that took him seven decades to collect.

"[Stewart] worked very closely with us [the conservatory] in selecting the puppets and some of our best pieces are in the gallery as a result - the rare Bunraku puppets, Tony Urbano's portrait of Phyllis Diller, hand puppets from Mexico's Teatro Nahual … all in all, it is a great survey of puppets," Cook said in an e-mail interview.

Specific reasons helped Stewart choose certain puppets out of the thousands he had available to him.

"I broke it down by region and I wanted the puppets that best represented that group or culture," Stewart said.

In the end, he said it was impossible to have all nationalities represented equally. Stewart added that he would have liked to see the Vietnamese water puppet make an appearance but the conservatory did not have one in their collection.

Looking at the finished product, Stewart said he has a hard time picking his favorite puppet, but instead points out the posters on the wall because they pay tribute to the old graphic artwork of Europe.

"[The posters] remind me of those old champagne commercials," Stewart said. "They also speak to everyone as much as the puppets do."

After cleaning the glass cases, fiddling with the lights and inspecting the puppets, Stewart learned something new about his colorful and diverse puppet friends. For instance, the Japanese geisha puppet survived a Chicago fire and the Korean marionette duo performed on a television program.

Continued...

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