Lake Country has become the new home of a ceramics collection that, according to curator Dan Bruce, “would be the envy of any museum in the province.”
The collection of aboriginal ceramic pottery from Arizona and Mexico was presented to the Lake Country Museum Friday afternoon by collectors Randy Nagel and Shirley Galenkamp.
Nagel has spent some 30 years acquiring the collection. Perhaps fittingly, Dan Bruce was involved at the start. “Dan invited me to come to Mexico on an artifact-gathering trip,” Nagel told the small crowd assembled at the Museum. “I saw the first potsherds lying around, and I was hooked.”
His collection began in Mexico, he said, “and moved up into the Hopi cultures of Arizona.”
“I almost cannot believe that our relatively small community is getting such a superb collection,” Bruce commented. “It is by far the most significant collection that this Museum has ever been given.”
Nagel is “a Lake Country boy from years back.” Galenkamp used to work at the former Okanagan College.
Along with the ceramics, a few of which were on display at the Museum’s special presentation last November, Shirley Galenkamp has been collecting rare jewelry of turquoise, jade, and other minerals. It too will be donated to the Lake Country Museum, she promised the group.