New museum director pulls from the past, readies collections for future

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Chris Widga didn’t set out to be a museum director. It’s a role that found him carefully and slowly, much like an archaeologist excavates through millennia a few centimeters at a time.

A young Widga liked science, but he wasn’t obsessed with digs and dinosaur bones, he said. He didn’t think much about archaeology, geosciences and paleontology, or even museums such as the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum & Art Gallery at Penn State. Instead, he saw his future freestyling as a jazz musician, a performer behind the trombone.

After growing up in Nebraska, he attended the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music for two years while traveling the state for gigs, taking advantage of the then-shortage of trombone players in the region. Two years later, he switched to anthropology at the University of Nebraska, where a summer volunteer experience found him for two weeks in a hole in the badlands of Nebraska, searching for 10,000-year-old bison bones. He loved it and that experience led to yet another shift, he said, this time to paleontology.

A path to museums

Widga shifted to science because he thought it would be more stable than music. But, he said, he soon found the leap not as big as he thought.

“Musicians and scientists both take something that is highly technical and do something creative with it,” Widga said. “There are a few more creative constraints in science, but you’re still dreaming up how to test something out, or visualize processes that are tough to see, which is not all that different from jazz.”

In graduate school, at the University of Kansas, Widga dug deeper while finding another passion: museums.

“I was working in the museum the whole time. They are just one of many tools in the paleontological toolkit. Museum research collections are fantastic resources,” Widga said. “Museum collections of fossils allow us to go from measurements on bones, to species-specific climate responses, to changes in ecosystems — then back again.”

Widga was a geology curator at the Illinois State Museum before becoming head curator at the East Tennessee State University Gray Fossil Site and Museum. He became director of the EMS Museum & Art Gallery in August.

The EMS Museum & Art Gallery boasts a vast and varied collection of roughly 20,000 items, from gemstones, to industrial safety equipment, to paintings of industry.

“The collection here is so diverse and unique,” Widga said. “I have a strong background in geology and paleontology but this museum also includes fine art and historic artifacts that tell the human side of the story. That really appealed to me.”

A vision for EMS

Widga says the museum is there to serve the interests of the college; it’s there to help researchers continue their work. Because it’s visited by K-12 students, it’s there to help them discover majors within the college. His vision is to advance on these fronts while expanding the collection to better represent modern research in EMS. That includes meteorology and atmospheric science, geography and AI, energy and sustainability, and materials science and engineering.

“We are going to spend a lot of time in the coming months asking our community what they want from their museum,” Widga said. “Because the museum has to be relevant to the people that it serves.”

A solid foundation

Widga said two things attracted him to the job. First, he knew the museum was on a solid foundation. Through his research work, he frequently worked with retired director Russell Graham and Julianne Snider, long-time assistant director for exhibitions and collections who recently retired as interim director.

The duo and many others worked diligently to expand the collections, protect existing collections through securing grants and made strides towards digitizing the collections.

The second thing that attracted him to EMS was something Graham and Snider frequently talked about: The Penn State culture.

He said it’s something that stood out when he talked with them or interacted with some of Penn State’s more than 700,000 alums. They all talked about a team approach to student-centered education.

“I’ve been in academia long enough to know that this is rare,” Widga said. “I was curious to find out more about how Penn State created something where everyone feels included and part of the team.”

For generations to come

As with anyone who works on geological timescales, Widga said, he knows his work is just part of the process. He’s not just building the museum that he wants, or that researchers or the public want. He’s adding to something that came before him and will outlive his contributions.

“One of the most important parts of managing a museum is to see it as a multigenerational institution,” Widga said. “In the present, you’re concerned about satisfying stakeholders and reaching your audiences. But you’re also protecting and preserving a collection to ensure that it stays relevant to future generations.”