In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the UI Museum of Natural History, the rarely viewed Philippine Collection will be showcased at the Old Capitol. The exhibit, called The Museum Goes to the Fair: Rediscovering the Philippine Collection at the Museum of Natural History, will open with a free reception at 5 p.m. Friday.

The museum will only display approximately 100 artifacts from the 700 of the collection because of limited gallery space and duplicated artifacts.

“We had to make some hard decisions to narrow down our selection,” said Byron Preston, who prepared the exhibit.

The artifacts will give a cross section of Philippine lifestyle and culture.

“It shows people a different aspect of our collections because it is a major anthropology collection, and we’re known for our birds and mammals,” said Sarah Horgen, a project assistant at the museum.

The Philippine Collection was gleaned from the Philippine Reservation at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, also known as the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. World’s Fairs were fashionable in the 19th century for emphasizing and demonstrating the latest innovations in science and industry, as well as displaying cultural diversity. These fairs displayed lifestyles of many diverse groups of people to a public who had a limited knowledge of different cultures.

The Philippine Reservation was popular among the approximately 20 million people who attended the St. Louis World’s Fair. The reservation consisted of reconstructed villages in which Filipinos exemplified everyday life and rituals and put on performances for visitors. The popularity of the reservation was also accredited to its expansive size and the United States’ colonization of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.

The Natural History Museum’s collection was “gathered by one of the leading lights of the Museum of Natural History,” Preston said, referring to the former museum Director Charles Nutting. The rest of the artifacts were spread among other educational institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Philadelphia Commercial Institution, now known as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The current exhibit at the Old Capitol is designed to be similar to the reservation seen at the St. Louis World’s Fair. This gives visitors a glimpse of a historically significant group of people plus a history of the 1904 World’s Fair. Coinciding with the exhibit are showings of the movie Meet Me In St. Louis, documentaries, lectures, photo presentations, activities for children, and more, lasting for the duration of the exhibit, which runs until February 2010.

“[We are] hoping to start a trend of rediscovering the treasures in Macbride Hall, whether [it] be the Philippine collection or upcoming Arctic Exhibit,” Preston said.