Heckscher Museum to sell stored artifacts

The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington is well-known for its collection of 19th and 20th century artwork -- but not so much for its ceremonial cannons, snuffboxes, stuffed bald eagle, bison head and three perfectly preserved shark snouts.

So this month, the museum began the process of shedding some of its objects that aren't central to its core collections.

"What do you do with fish snouts?" Michael Schantz, the museum's executive director and chief executive asked about the many items that have languished in storage for decades. Sell them, officials concluded.

The first items to be sold will be a selection of Egyptian artifacts, which are scheduled to be put up for public auction within the next several months. The money raised will be used exclusively to purchase new objects for the museum's collection, Schantz said.

Because the museum's collections are owned by the town, museum officials sought -- and received -- Huntington Town Board permission to sell the Egyptian artifacts.

The items are "consuming valuable space for the collections we do use, and it's simply a matter of housekeeping," Schantz said. The artifacts are stored at a Farmingdale warehouse and are not available to the public.

Keeping the excess items and trying to display them would be impractical, Schantz said.

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"The museum is not an encyclopedic museum like the Metropolitan [Museum of Art in Manhattan]," he said. "We have a small space."

The most valuable Egyptian artifact is a small painting on a textile that will be auctioned by Christie's, Schantz said. The piece, depicting Egyptian figures, is expected to sell for between $80,000 and $100,000, he said.

The rest -- mostly flints, amulets, figurines, and a mummified head -- will be sold by an auction house that focuses on lower-value items, he said.

After the sale of the Egyptian artifacts, Schantz said, the museum will probably turn its attention to some of the other excess objects -- such as a large but not particularly valuable mineral collection, etchings created on tree fungus or its shell collection. And the bison head.

John Coraor, director of cultural affairs for the town, said the varied collections in the Heckscher's archives were typical of those amassed before World War II, when museums often displayed curiosities crammed together in unchanging glass displays.

"You dust the top and that's it -- that's the way museums were in that period," Coraor said.

In the late 1940s, museums began focusing on themed exhibitions, and many of the Heckscher's objects went into storage, said Coraor, who served as the museum's executive director from 1998 to 2000.

While museum officials said they haven't decided what would be purchased with the money raised from the auctions, Schantz said anything purchased will be owned by the town.

"We can take those funds now and improve our painting collections, buy some more important Long Island artists' works," Schantz said.