Egyptian Gallery at Bass Museum

The Bass Museum of Art invites visitors to experience the ancient world at their new Egyptian Gallery, featuring Florida’s only mummy on permanent display. Opening in April, the ongoing and permanent exhibition offers a unique opportunity to learn about one of the world’s oldest and most mysterious civilizations from its surviving objects, including an Egyptian sarcophagus and mummy.

This project was conceived when the Bass Museum’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, Silvia Karman Cubiñá, identified an Egyptian Painted Sycamore Fig Wood Sarcophagus and Mummy from Dynasty 25 or early Dynasty 26 (760-600 B.C.E.) in the museum’s collection. "With the opening of the Egyptian Gallery, the Bass Museum will appeal to a wide audience of art, culture, archeology and history lovers; children and adults alike. It will serve as the place in Miami to experience a long history of object-making and what these objects say about humankind from 700 B.C. through the present,” said Karman Cubiñá.

During the opening celebration in April and throughout the first year the gallery is open, the museum will mount an ambitious series of public programs to accompany the exhibition and advance understanding of the customs and objects of Ancient Egypt. Special educational outreach efforts include IDEA@theBass Family Days and lectures by visiting curators and collectors.

The museum recruited Dr. Edward Bleiberg, Curator of Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum, as Consulting Curator of the project to research and interpret the vast hieroglyphic paintings on the surface of the Sarcophagus.

Dr. Bleiberg began his study in July 2009 and is currently translating the hieroglyphic drawings on the inner sarcophagus to obtain more information about the mummy. Like most of the surviving Egyptian mummies, the Bass mummy is destined to remain shrouded in mystery. But it is this very type of ancient mystery that continues to intrigue Egyptian enthusiasts throughout the world, and will no doubt serve as a rich platform through which to build the story of the museum’s Egyptian Gallery.

The Egyptian Gallery will be permanently housed in a 460 sq. ft. first floor gallery centrally located and close to the museum's entrance. The gallery will showcase the sarcophagi, mummy and twelve objects of Egyptian antiquity on long-term loan from the Brooklyn Museum, Lowe Art Museum

and Private Collections. These objects are roughly from the same period as the Bass sarcophagi and provide a representative sampling of what would typically have been placed inside the tomb to assist the dead in transitioning to the afterlife.

Visit Bassmuseum.org for more details and for ticketing / membership information.