By WILLIAM YARDLEY | The New York Times
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – It was not the expansive new mural depicting evolutionary history that brought Sandy McKean down to the Pacific Science Center on a rainy winter weekday. Nor had he come to linger over the elegant displays about Ethiopian culture.
The reason Mr. McKean paid the $20.75 admission fee for “Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia” was because he wanted to see the bones. They are 3.2 million years old but, for him, electric with urgency. This was the first American exhibition tour of the famous Lucy fossils, 47 skeletal fragments of a female hominid whose discovery one day in 1974 altered the study of human history.
“This is like a dream come true for me, to see the actual skeleton,” said Mr. McKean, 64, who is retired from a job in computers. “I can’t think of a more amazing and interesting thing than to study human beings and our ancestors.” He added, “I would think people would be lining up and down the block.”
Yet as the exhibition prepared to close on March 8, six months after it opened amid the freefalling economy, lines had been rare. Attendance had been less than half of what was projected.
Instead of being a boon for the Pacific Science Center, the kind of premium-priced blockbuster that would help cover its losses in other areas, the show stands to lose about $1.25 million, according to officials at the science center.
But the sour economy does not seem to explain all of Lucy’s troubles. A rare December snowstorm played a role, and Bryce Seidl, the center’s president and chief executive, has suggested less intuitive reasons like the feverish focus this liberal city had on the election of President Obama and his transition to office.
In addition, an Ethiopian organizer of the show has raised questions about how effectively the science center presented and marketed the show. Ethiopian leaders have long viewed Lucy, and the American exhibition tour in particular, as a way to improve perceptions about their country, and to make money. [The money goes to the dictators’ pocket.]
“Ethiopia has an image problem,” said Gezahgen Kebede, the honorary consul general [Woyanne cadre] at the Ethiopian Consulate in Houston and one of the leading proponents of bringing Lucy to the United States. He said his country was still defined by the famine of the 1970s, and this exhibition offered a broader view. “The bigger thing in my opinion is to teach people about Ethiopia,” he said.
Although many museums nationwide are struggling, laying off employees and scaling back exhibition plans, the recession has not hurt every blockbuster that has opened over the last year. Since it opened in October at the Dallas Museum of Art, the show “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” has broken all of the museum’s attendance records. At the Field Museum in Chicago, an exhibition called “The Aztec World,” which opened in October, has also been a success. The general adult entrance fees on those shows are higher than admission was to Lucy.
Yet at the end of its six-month run in Seattle, the second stop on what is supposed to be a multicity, multiyear tour of the United States, Lucy had drawn only about 100,000 people. The exhibition has no confirmed next destination, and at least one museum that had considered hosting the show in the future, the Field, has decided against it. But Mr. Kebede said negotiations were under way for the show to open in New York this summer.
Lucy opened in Seattle in early October, just as the breadth of the collapse in the financial markets was becoming clear. “We opened at a time when people were shutting their wallets,” Mr. Seidl said. “Then you add the weather to it.”
In a city that gets little snow, several days of significant snowfall paralyzed streets right in the middle of the holiday season. The weather also inspired parents to push their homebound children, a crucial target audience for the exhibition, out onto sleds rather than downtown to a museum.
Mr. Kebede acknowledged the economy and the weather as challenges but said he had been told by contacts in Seattle that the museum had done a poor job of planning for the show.
“The Seattle people, they just flunked it because they really didn’t do their homework in terms of solid advertising and how to penetrate the demographics,” said Mr. Kebede, who had not seen the exhibition in Seattle. “There are people in Seattle who didn’t know this exhibit was there.”
Mr. Seidl said the science center had spent more promoting Lucy than it had on previous large shows. He noted that an exhibit about the Dead Sea Scrolls in 2005, when the economy was stronger, drew twice as many people in half the time.
Disputes over exhibiting Lucy began long before Seattle. When the show’s organizers, the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Ethiopian government, first agreed to bring Lucy to the United States, several museums and scientists said the fossils should not leave Ethiopia except for scientific purposes. Some accused the Ethiopian government of seeking profit at the risk of damaging Lucy.
“The one thing you heard a lot is that it was too fragile,” said Joel A. Bartsch, the president of the Houston Museum. “Is it important? Absolutely. Is it irreplaceable? Absolutely. But it is not too fragile.”
Lucy spent about a year on exhibit in Houston before going to Seattle. The show drew about 210,000 people over 12 months, Mr. Bartsch said, and was regarded as a success.
“My understanding is they had gone with a younger demographic, a lot of kids,” Mr. Bartsch said of the Seattle show, which he had not seen. “We kind of did a higher-end more adult demographic. You’re trying to explain an idea. Lucy the object and artifact is phenomenal, but really what she’s about is the idea she represents, that she’s an ancestral cousin to the human line.”
Yet Donald C. Johanson, the paleoanthropologist who plucked Lucy out of an Ethiopian ravine 35 years ago and is one of few people close to Lucy who has seen both exhibits, said, “I enjoyed the Seattle presentation much more than I did the Houston one, because I think Seattle put an enormous amount of effort into placing Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, in a broader framework.”
Mr. Johanson said he particularly liked the display of prehuman skulls that suggested a kind of evolutionary ascendance on the way to the exhibit’s focal point, the Lucy fossils. He also noted a lighter feature he liked, a display that used soda bottles, filled with varying amounts of fluid, to show the difference in brain capacity between humans and Lucy.
Those enhancements cost money. The Pacific Science Center paid a fee of about $500,000 to the show’s organizers, Mr. Seidl said, then spent almost $2 million more to renovate its exhibition spaces, add an audio tour and enlarge the exhibition’s section on Ethiopia, including the country’s role in farming coffee. Admission also included tickets to an Imax film about the Nile River.
“This is never a business that’s comfortable,” Mr. Seidl said. “Our job is not to build big bank accounts. It’s to serve underserved people, inspire kids, that sort of stuff.” The science center, in addition to several other museums nationwide, is not planning any exhibitions that charge premium ticket prices. Future shows — like “G.P.S. Adventures,” an exhibition about “geocaching” opening March 28; “Animal Grossology,” opening May 23; and “Animation,” opening Oct. 3 — are “real family-friendly, right for the economy,” Mr. Seidl said. Mr. Kebede, of the Ethiopian consulate, said he hoped Lucy would travel to New York this summer in an arrangement with Running Subway Productions, which has helped host huge shows like “Body: The Exhibition,” the controversial exhibit about human anatomy. A spokeswoman for Running Subway said it was too early to comment on any plans.
“This is going to be a big thing,” Mr. Kebede said. Next year, he said, he hopes Lucy will travel to China for an exposition in Shanghai.