A Night of Wine Tasting

A night of friends, fun and wine!

Southwest High School string quartet provided beautiful music all night

Last night the IVDM Society Board held their annual Wine Tasting event- and a great time was had by all!  125 museum members, guests, and wine lovers from across the county joined us at the El Centro Community Center for a night of wine, music, conversation, and high stakes bidding on a range of silent auction items. All wines were from Fernando Gaxiola and Baja Wine Food.  Beautiful chamber music was provided by members of Southwest High School's talented orchestra.Interim Director David Breeckner said "It was great seeing old friends tonight, but also really exciting to see so many new faces!"  More than half the people in attendance were at their first IVDM event.

Silent Auction- bidding war!

Over $13,000 was raised this year and all proceeds from the Wine Tasting go to the museum's Endowment Fund. When fully funded, the Endowment will support two permanent staff positions at the museum: a Head Curator and a Cultural Collections and Programs Manager.  These positions are vital to retain the necessary expertise for collections management and preservation on staff.  Every successful museum program stems from the preservation and accessibility of our local collections. Best of all, through 2019 all donations towards the Endowment are being matched by a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities!  The goal of this five year grant has been to raise $1 million for the Endowment Fund and before last night, we were less than $300,000 to our goal.  Through July, the NEH grant will match donations dollar for dollar, so everyone's contributions are doubled! If you are interested in donating towards this grant, please click here.

Edgar rocked the hair and the wine pouring all night!

Endowment Challenge

-from Anne C Morgan, Head Curator

July marks the end of our fiscal year and the end of Year 2 of our National Endowment of Humanities Challenge Grant.  Through the Challenge Grant the NEH will match 3:1 any money we raise towards our Endowment Fund through 2019.

The Museum's goal is to raise $1 million by 2019 towards the Endowment.  When this goal is reached, the IVDM's Endowment Fund will fund two permanent, professional staff positions.

Want to donate to the Endowment but can't afford the whole amount now? We are also doing Pledge Cards.  People can pledge to donate this year and the pledge will go towards this year's match by the NEH.  Since April we have already raised $10,000 in pledges from museum supporters!

Last year in our last fiscal month, our members and supporters raised $22,000 to help us reach our goal of $195,000! It was a huge success! Can we do as well this year?    Please consider supporting the museum by donating or pledging to the Endowment Fund before July 20, 2016.

The Value of Membership-or, having more fun at the Museum

-from the Curator

Author Nicholas Clapp and his wife Bonnie at an Evening with an Expert

The value of membership at a museum, zoo, or any institution comes in many forms.  There's the positive feeling of supporting a group you believe strongly is important to help.  Often there are perks like behind the scenes tours, discounted admission, special member events, newsletters, etc.

Special member events, called FriendRaisers, are one of the perks of being a member at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum.  These events range from behind the scenes looks at making an exhibit to our popular series of Evenings with an Expert. All funds raised during our FriendRaisers go towards the Desert Museum's Endowment Fund, which is being matched 3:1 by a National Endowment of the Humanities Challenge Grant through 2019.  The goal of the Endowment is to raise enough money to fund two permanent professional staff positions at the museum. 

Last night, 32 members attended an Evening with an Expert FriendRaiser and listened to a fascinating talk by documentarian and author Nicholas Clapp.  Clapp discussed shamanism in Southern California, which he researched for his new book, Old Magic: Lives of Desert Shamans, published by Sunbelt Publications.

Old Magic: Lives of the Desert Shamans- Nicholas Clapp

The evening was enjoyed by all.  Members got to see the newest additions to the Museum's permanent exhibit, mix and mingle with the author and other members- forming new friendships that inspired one member to say " I feel like I've found another daughter". Clapp's talk gave everyone a new appreciation for the hard lives of desert shamans, their work and their world.  He answered questions and signed books after the talk.

Interested in becoming a member of the Imperial Valley Desert Museum Society? Click here to find out more and join today!

Members gathered to talk books, museums, the desert, and everything in between

Closer to Endowment Goal 2014-2015

-from the Director

As you all know, we are in the final days of trying to reach our goal for the NEH Challenge Grant.  Our NEH "challenge" is to raise $195,000 each year over the four years of the grant.  This money goes directly into our Endowment Fund, which will support two permanent staff positions.

If you read the IVDM blog or the Society Newsletter recently, you’ll know that in the last few weeks we are just $21,000 short of that goal.  Museum Members have stepped up this week and written checks- one for $5,000 and one for $500, and today, we received a check for $750.

We are now just under $14,000 from this year’s Challenge Grant goal, ending July 31, 2015.

We’d like to thank those of you who have supported us over the years and are as eager to see the Imperial Valley Desert Museum succeed as we are.  If you haven’t yet donated towards the Endowment Fund, we urge you to do so before the end of next week - with your small gifts over the next four years we will reach our goal of having a $1 million Museum Endowment.

2014-2015 Endowment Goal Almost Reached!

-from the Director

For several years now we've slowly been building an Endowment Fund here at the Museum.  Our goal is to be able to pay staff salaries out of the Endowment, so that we are not dependent on grants to fund our necessary positions.

Last year we won a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge grant to help us in our quest to build the Museum's Endowment Fund to over $1 million dollars.  Through this grant, over the next 5 years the NEH would match 3 to1 any funds we raised.  We've held 10 FriendRaisers in the last fiscal year and raised our goal amount of $10,000.

Through donations and hard work we have raised over $173,000 of the $195,000 needed by July 31, 2015 to make the Challenge Grant's goal and continue with the NEH program.

As of last week we were $21,000 off that number.  One generous Museum Member, on hearing this, donated $5,000 last week. Another member has pledged an additional $500.  As of today we are less than $17,000 off our target number!

As our members and supporters we are hoping that you will help us reach that $17,000 by the end of July.  Please consider donating, through our website or by mail, to the IVDM Endowment Fund.  Your generous donation will be matched 3:1 by the National Endowment of the Humanities. Our staff thanks you in advance for your help!

Checks can be written to:

Imperial Valley Desert Museum Society

P.O. Box 2455

El Centro, CA 92243

Please let us know if you have any questions, feel free to email us or call (760) 358-7016 

Ceramics preview Friendraiser

-from the Curator

Tonight we had our last FriendRaiser of our 2014-2015 fiscal year.  With the amount raised tonight we have raised the projected $10,000 from ten FriendRaisers that was our goal for the NEH Challenge grant this year.  Congratulations to our Board Members for all their hard work!

This FriendRaiser focused on ceramics and premiered a short video we have been editing for our permanent exhibit.  A grant from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts allowed us to go through raw footage from the award winning, Emmy nominated documentary First People-Kumeyaay and focus on the footage on ceramics.  Frank Salazar, our Cultural Collections Project Manager edited together from this footage a video of renowned Kumeyaay ceramics artist Teresa Castro going through the steps of making a pot.  A grant from the National Environmental Education Foundation allowed Frank to work with several different Kumeyaay culture bearers and language experts to add Kumeyaay words to the video.  Videos and technology are some of the best ways to reach the younger generations and gain their interest, and have proven successful in other situations.  The hope is that seeing the language embedded in a situation will support "situational fluency" for language learning.

Attendees ate food prepared in ceramic pots, saw both newly made and older ollas that will be in our permanent exhibit, and commented on the video.  Frank is now planning on going back for some more editing to incorporate this great feedback.  We're looking forward to having the final version in our ceramics visible storage exhibit by this fall. Thanks to Conveyor Group for their help in turning these clips into a lovely, smoothly transitioning video.


 Thank you to everyone who attended this and any of the other FriendRaisers this year - you are helping us to drive this museum forward to success!

Wine, Music, and Museums

-from the Curator

Last night our Board held a successful Wine Tasting FriendRaiser at the El Centro Elks Lodge. Over 75 people came out to support the Museum, and the IVPress wrote a lovely article in today's paper. IVDM Society Board President Chuck Fisher talked about the phases of design and development of our new permanent exhibit- with lots of pictures! Cultural Collections Program Manager Frank Salazar gave a presentation on three of the grants he is currently running: Cal Humanities Community Stories, Association for California Traditional Arts, and the National Environmental Educational Foundation.  These grants focus on the importance of videos and oral history in the new exhibit, and use raw footage from the award-winning, Emmy-nominated First People Kumeyaay documentary.

The idea behind our FriendRaisers is that Museum Members and invited guests learn more about some of our programs and experience something a little different. The money raised at these events goes to the Museum's Endowment Fund to support staffing and operations.  The IVDM won a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that will match any money we raise for the Endowment 3:1 through 2019.  For this grant we are committed to holding 10 FriendRaisers during the fiscal year and raising $10,000 through them- as well as additional monies from other sources.  The Wine Tasting was our second-to-last FriendRaiser for the 2014-2015 fiscal year. Before this event we had raised a total of $9,000 towards our $10,000 FriendRaiser goal. While the donations from last night's FriendRaiser haven't been fully totaled yet, we are hopeful that between ticket sales, a silent auction, and donations from guests, we will have raised around an additional $2,000.   

Thanks to BevMo! and the Elks Lodge #1325 for supporting our event!

Member Friendraiser: Testing interactives

-from the Curator

First visitors at the 'Water is Life' topo map

Today a group of visitors attended a Friendraiser hosted by Board Member Lisa Gallinat at the Museum.  Friendraisers are designed as small, intimate events where attendees explore a behind the scenes aspect of the museum or lecture while raising money for the Museum's Endowment fund. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the donations given for this event are matched by the NEH.

Discovering a mountain lion

Today our event visitors were the first to see two new interactive exhibits as part of the installation of the Museum's new permanent exhibit.  At the "Land of Extremes" visitors were introduced to panoramic images of the valley projected onto a screen. Using a touchscreen they experimented with zooming in to close up images, using icons to explore the desert and hiking destinations.  The second new interactive, "Water is Life" is a topographic map that projects images of the ocean and Lake Cahuilla as it fills and recedes in the Imperial Valley. A touchscreen allows visitors to see different animals that would have been present at different times in the Valley's history.

Although they will not yet be on every day, over the next several weeks we will be testing these interactives, working out the bugs in the systems, seeing how people use them, and how long they stay at the different stations.

Exploring the 'Land of Extremes'

Exploring the changing water projections of Lake Cahuilla

Two NEH Grants Awarded

Today the National Endowment for the Humanities released the 2015 grant awards and we are elated to announce that the IVDM has been awarded two grants: 


Preservation Assistance Grant to bring in a consultant from the Arizona State Museum to evaluate storage layout and purchase supplies to improve storage and environmental conditions for the collections. $4,255

Challenge Grant to provide seed money for an endowment to support two permanent staff positions - the Head Curator and the Cultural Collections and Programs Curator 
Award of $260,000 upon a 3:1 match of $780,000 by 2019

We'd like to thank everyone who has given to the endowment over the past year. Developing a base of broad community support was important to show NEH that we can be successful if we won the grant, and it worked. The award of the Challenge Grant is an exciting development! We were one of 16 museums across the nation to receive this grant and at the end of the project we'll have over a million dollars to support staffing. Thank you for your support!

The National Endowment for the Humanities: Celebrating 50 Years of Excellence

The National Endowment of the Humanities supports research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities by funding top-rated competitive, peer-reviewed proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers. 

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Plants & People: an Evening with an Expert- Stan Rodriguez

-Anne C. Morgan, Head Curator

Stan Rodriguez talks about native plants

This Saturday our members had the exciting opportunity to enjoy an evening with Stan Rodriguez and learn more about the plants native to our region and how they are traditionally used by the Kumeyaay.  Stan is a teacher at the Kumeyaay Community College on the Sycuan reservation, and a member of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel.  Stan is known for his engaging story-telling and wide knowledge on a vast number of subjects.

For this evening, Stan spoke with 23 members about different plants that they often see when out hiking, and how they are traditionally used.  "The desert may look barren, but there is so much here when you look." he said.  "We call it the Kumeyaay grocery store."

Stan Rodriguez

He described gathering and roasting agave, which tastes "like a cross between a pineapple and a yam" and is used for fiber as well as food.   Desert cactus, like the "confounding" cholla, can be roasted easily- "but take the stickers off first!" Stan also banished the myth of the cactus as a source of water in the desert, explaining that while the plant might be edible the water found in the barrel cactus is extremely high in alkaline and toxic to drink.






The evening was capped off with a traditional Kumeyaay stick game, which will be set up for children (and adults!) to play at the museum's Shawii Day on Saturday October 11 from 2-5pm.  There was fierce competition among the adults, and we enjoyed it so much we feel sure everyone who comes on Saturday will too!

Fun with Ceramics: an Evening with an Expert- Dr. Suzanne Griset

-Anne C. Morgan, Head Curator

Dr. Suzanne Griset explores the Museum ceramics collection with members

On Saturday we had the pleasure of having Dr. Suzanne Griset join us for a day of fun with ceramics.  Suzanne, the principle investigator and project manager with SWCA, is an expert on the ceramics of Southern California.  She was kind enough to work with us during the day, answering questions we had about clay in general and pieces of our collection in particular.   She also joined us for a Members-only Evening with an Expert and gave a presentation to 23 Museum members who wanted to learn more about our collection.

As we work to prepare our collection of ollas for display in the new permanent exhibit (opening Spring 2015) her insight was incredibly helpful.

We learned some fascinating ceramic facts from Dr. Griset:

This jar bottom became a bowl after breaking

• Pottery probably came to the San Diego area by about 900 CE (Common Era), and made it to the Imperial Valley by 1000  
• Handles are not seen on vessels in Southern California before Spanish Contact in 1540
• Cracks in vessels can be repaired by drilling small holes on either side of the crack and lacing together with yucca fiber or sinew
• Water jars have a life span of about 2 years where they will keep water cool.  After 2 years salts penetrate the clay and it no longer cools water.  They can be reused as something else, like cooking pots 
• Stucco on pots lowers the thermal fracturing of clay- which makes it ideal for cooking pots that are in and out of the fire frequently!
• After 1880 the railroad brought new people to the Southwest.  Tribes began selling pottery to the tourists and copying styles that sold well.  The forms and designs of the Maricopa peoples became particularly popular

Maricopa style ceramic frog

Want to learn more about ceramics?  Look for our Land of Extremes article in tomorrow's Imperial Valley Press!

Dr. Suzanne Griset with a few of the pots you'll see in our permanent exhibit-Spring 2015!