Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Happy New Year everyone. To kick off 2023, we have a very exciting guest for you. His name is Terry Chase. He’s a diorama maker, artist, geologist and all around renaissance man whose hyper realistic diorama has graced the halls of our natural history museum, as well as the majority of the world’s greatest science and nature museums. He almost never agrees to be interviewed, so we are so fortunate to have him here with us today. Here he is. Terry Chase, welcome to the show.
Terry Chase 01:11
Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Jennifer Berglund 01:19
You started making dioramas very early on, and became captivated by dioramas in the museum world early on and hunted down your mentor, essentially. So tell me that story.
Terry Chase 01:36
The first diorama I created was in junior high school. It was part of a science fair project where I was displaying fossils and I wanted to reconstruct what the paleoenvironment looked like when these fossils were alive, so I did a Devonian seascape. At that point in my life, though, I really didn’t know much about model building, and so I actually constructed most of the models out of modeling clay, and it looks really good for the Science Fair. In fact, I think I won first place in the science fair, and I was so pleased and proud that I had made that accomplishment that the local bank volunteered to put the display in their front window. I thought, “Oh, this is so great.” You know, I put the display in the front window, and I took some of my friends down to see it a couple of days later, and I was absolutely horrified because the sun coming in that window had melted all the clay and it was just pile of snot. So that was my first failed attempt at model building. When I was in graduate school at Wittenberg University in Ohio, I had the opportunity one summer to work at The Field Museum. And while I was at The Field Museum, I learned a lot of the molding and casting techniques. And of course, I was always interested in who this George Marchand, this guy that I had seen in museums all over the country. He put his name on stuff unlike me, so I always knew.
Jennifer Berglund 03:14
And he was a diorama maker.
Terry Chase 03:15
Yeah, someday I want to meet this person, George Marchand. He had a lot of exhibits in the Field Museum including a whole series of prehistoric marine dioramas that I was absolutely infatuated with. Finally, I found out that he was at the University of Michigan. So once I finished my undergraduate work, which is where I majored in biology, geology, and art, I decided to go to University of Michigan for my graduate work, partly because he was there and partly because there was a specialist there in prehistoric corals, which is something I was interested in. So when I went to Michigan, the first year I was there, I found out that George Marchand had just retired, and the coral specialists that I was interested in working with had also just retired, but George Marchand was still living in Ann Arbor, so the director of the museum introduced us and George really didn’t have anybody to pass along his techniques and his knowledge. George actually was the son of a very famous diorama maker, Andre Marchand, who came over from Paris and who studied with Rodin and was quite well known in the sculpture world. When he came to the United States, he worked for the Albany Museum in New York, and he did some of the first paleodiagramas and then later on, he worked for the Rochester Museum and did some other work for additional museums, and he would ask his sons to come to work with him during the school year, so they would skip classes and come to work with him. And when he did some major work for the New York State Museum, they got lots of experience building dioramas with him. And so George and his brother Paul, both became really well known not only for their prehistoric dioramas, but also for their models of other natural history components, including just incredible wildflower models and models of modern day animals. They became well known and did work for museums all over the world, actually. And I was so gratified that I could meet this person, but even more gratified that he seemed to want to take me under his wing. Eventually I became good friends with he and his wife. He had no sons or anyone to pass along as talents to and was impressed that he had this groupie that had followed him all over the country for all of these years, so he initially gave me molds. I worked with him and cataloging stuff, he had a collection of molds that he had sold to the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas, so I worked with him in cataloging those. He was impressed that I knew paleontology and was artistic. So I had all the natural talents that he admired and eventually gave me all of his tools. When he moved to Ann Arbor and when he moved from that Arbor to Missouri, he had actually given me his first two jobs. The first job he gave me was in doing wildlife exhibits for a Burger Ham company in Missouri. It was essentially not a real big job, but of course, I made it into a big job, because they wanted to build a visitor center where they showed various wildlife dioramas representing Missouri during different seasons, so I did these really elaborate dioramas with water flowing through them. And one was a two story diorama with… …a lake in the front. And the other job he gave me was at the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum where he had sold this collection of his moles. The Permian Basin Petroleum Museum was interested in constructing an exhibit that showed what the ancient Permian Sea looked like 250 million years ago, because in West Texas, most of the petroleum is coming from these buried reefs. They drill down through the caprock until they get to one of these porous reefs, because of the porosity of the reef, the natural reservoir for storing petroleum. So most of the Permian Basin in West Texas where the oil comes from, is originating in these buried reefs. They wanted to show what the buried reefs look like when they were alive. And again, you know, it’s not a big job, but of course, Chase made it into a big job, and when we had a walk-through exhibit where they were surrounded by the reef. They ended up cutting a hole in the basement floor so the roof cascaded from the first floor down into the basement and disappeared into the basin. We had something like 200,000 models in that one exhibit. It took us about two and a half years to construct, and actually ended up moving to Midland and doing the whole operation in an abandoned airplane hangar that I leased, and so I set up a studio there and hired local people to help me. It was really kind of amazing to see it all come together, and then of course, after doing that, both of those jobs were kind of like stepping stones for other jobs in the future. And so once I distributed photographs of those two projects, then I started getting all these additional jobs from museums all over the country, including the National Park Service, so those two jobs actually launched my career.
Jennifer Berglund 07:06
Wow Did you use any of Marchand’s molds for these two?
Terry Chase 09:20
I did, in fact, because the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum had purchased his whole collection of molds, including all this Permian molds, I was able to reuse some of his models in the exhibit. But what we did, which was kind of interesting, in West Texas, there’s a locality in the glass mountains near Marathon where the fossils are silicified in a limestone matrix, and so what we did was we went to this locality, and we collected tons of limestone. In fact, the first time I went there, I had a car and I raced to Midland, Texas and bought a pickup truck so I could go back and click these tons of limestones. But we…
Jennifer Berglund 10:08
Classic Terry.
Terry Chase 10:09
Because it was the Petroleum Museum, we had a drilling company donate probably over 100 gallons of acid and we went out to Walmart, and we bought these big plastic swimming pools and we filled it with this hydrochloric acid. And we submerged these blocks of this limestone in the acid and dissolved out the fossils. So on the basis of species diversity, and relative abundance of the fossils, we can accurately reconstruct the way the reef looked. So not only do we use Marchand, some of his original models, but we also constructed hundreds of new models…
Jennifer Berglund 10:51
That’s incredible.
Terry Chase 10:52
…for this exhibit.
Jennifer Berglund 10:53
Based on real fossils.
Terry Chase 10:55
Right.
Jennifer Berglund 10:56
It’s just fascinating.
Terry Chase 10:57
As a result, we have one of the largest collections of Permian fossils in the whole country.
Jennifer Berglund 11:03
Wow.
Terry Chase 11:04
Thousands of specimens. The detail in these is incredible. Because the fossils are silicified, you can get really delicate spines and just the intricate networks of details on these fossils that are preserved so that when you dissolve them out in acid, you get all of these very intricate little details that you would ordinarily not see preserved. In fact, one of the things that we had to do, before we did submerge these blocks of acid in the acid, we had to coat the bottom of the blocks with an epoxy so that the acid didn’t dissolve out the fossils on the bottom and crush them. It only dissolved out the fossils on the surface, so that we could continue dissolving away until we actually dissolved away most of the whole block of limestone and retrieved all the fossils. We would periodically drain the acid off and recoup the fossils that were dissolved out and then we submerge the blocks in the acid to continue dissolving away. It was really bizarre because people would visit the studio and they would see all these boiling cauldrons of acid.
Jennifer Berglund 12:20
I can only imagine.
Terry Chase 12:21
Like some kind of supernatural kind of…
Jennifer Berglund 12:24
Yeah, you had told me about this years ago, and I had no idea you could do that. It’s just the most amazing thing and you’ve even done that on your property, haven’t you?
Terry Chase 12:34
Well, it’s very interesting, because as it turns out, the studio is built on a prehistoric Ordovician stromatolite reef, and we didn’t realize this when I first bought the property.
Jennifer Berglund 12:48
And stromatolites are, just to clarify?
Terry Chase 12:50
Stromatolites are actually fossilized mud balls, and there are recent examples of these in the Bahamas and Shark Bay, Australia, where these things are currently being formed, but they’re form from the combination of blue green algae and cyanobacteria that forms kind of a scum on the bottom of the seafloor. And eventually, the scum will attract sediment that will stick to the surface and at night, the algae and bacteria will send up little filaments through this minute layer of sediment and they’ll form a new layer of the sticky matter over the surface, and so over time, you get this buildup of alternating layers of this algae and the sediment. So, sometimes these things form columns, or sometimes they’re kind of mound-shape colonies, and if you cut through the surface, you can see this original structure, which is a combination of the algae in the sediment. So it kind of is the preserved mud ball that looks like an onion if you cut it in half, it shows all of these alternating layers.
Jennifer Berglund 14:04
Yeah.
Terry Chase 14:04
And so as it turns out, there’s this incredible reef of this material under the studio and we have unearthed, some of the large blocks of it, and many of the stromatolites are silicified like the Texas specimens, so they’re weathering out on the surface. And so we’ve collected these, and there actually is an interesting associated with other fossils with this stromatolites, including a really interesting assemblage of sponges and other invertebrates. So as it turns out, we’ve actually picked an interesting place to locate a studio that does reconstructions of prehistoric environments because we’re right on top of a major paleontological area that most people don’t know about because there hasn’t been much research work in this area. And that’s one of the things that I like to pursue in my time off.
Jennifer Berglund 15:07
What time off?
Terry Chase 15:07
Yeah, which is rare.
Jennifer Berglund 15:09
You work 14 hour days.
Terry Chase 15:10
Well, I would like to eventually get back to my research where I do work. Not only the fossil assemblage that we find in this location, but my main interest on fossil corals. We have constructed exhibits for hundreds of museums all over the world, including over 100 of the National Park Visitor Centers. We’re not really very well known because we don’t ever put our name on anything. In fact, CBS did a segment on Sunday Morning a few years ago, and they said, I’m probably the most viewed, unknown artist in the country, if not the world. And they based this on all of the millions of people every week that see our exhibits. I don’t know if that’s true, but it was very flattering for them to make that calculation. Almost everybody in the whole country has seen our work, but we never put our name on anything so nobody really knows us as a household name. But we’re responsible for major exhibits, and most of the large natural history museums around the world. For example, at the Smithsonian, we do a lot of the Smithsonian’s work. The 50-foot whale is a model that we constructed here in the studio, and transported over there in seven pieces and assembled on site. Also, we did numerous other models through the years for the Smithsonian, and other big museums in this country, the American Museum, the Denver Museum. So just about everybody, if you travel at all, and you’ve gone to the National Parks, you will see our work that we’ve done, but nobody really knows about us. I don’t know, I’m the kind of person that shies away from a lot of publicity and magazine articles. We’ve had the opportunity to do interviews like this one. I’m surprised I’m doing this one. But we’ve had the opportunity to do magazine articles and that sort of thing and we’ve done a couple but every time I do that, I think, “You know, why are we doing this, it just causes problems.” When the CBS did that segment, on Sunday Morning, we had hundreds of people contacting us for job interviews. People were showing up on our doorstep, I’m not sure how they found us, but…
Jennifer Berglund 17:28
You’re in the middle of nowhere.
Terry Chase 17:30
They were showing up for tours, and you know, people emailing me and I thought, “you know, this is the reason why I like to be anonymous.” If we gave tours, every time that somebody wanted to tour, it would be a full time job for someone.
Jennifer Berglund 17:45
You give the best tours, Terry, you really do.
Terry Chase 17:49
This is a kind of a museum in itself. You know, we’ve got all kinds of artifacts, and we have a collection of over a million scientific specimens and a library with now over 20,000 books on Natural History, so it’s a pretty amazing place. Even when I walk around, I’m thinking, “wow, I can’t believe this place,” you know, and everybody in my family was kind of worried about what’s going to happen to this place when you die. And I thought, “well, you know, I willed the place to the Missouri State University but why should I wait until I die? I think I’ll just go ahead and give the whole operation to the university.” And that way they would be responsible for insurance and taxes. That would give us an opportunity to work together, because I already gave the university 1200 acres of my property and they built a biological field station across the road from the studio, which consists of a large building that has a commercial kitchen and classrooms, and they have dormitories for 25 students. So that already exists next to the studio, and I thought, you know, with our collections and library and our family worried about what are they going to do with all this stuff, I thought it makes sense to go ahead and give the operation to the university.
Jennifer Berglund 19:14
Let’s describe the magnitude of this campus that is your studio.
Terry Chase 19:19
Well, we have altogether about probably a little less than 2000 acres. It’s right on Bull Shoals Lake, which is one of the lake that the Corps of Engineers created when they dammed up the White River. So we’re one of, I think, five lakes along the White River. And you know, when I first bought this property, it was about almost 50 years ago. In fact, next year is our 50th year of being in business. I decided to move here initially because my mentor George Marchand who I worked with at the University of Michigan, where I did my graduate work, he retired and he moved to Branson because he likes to fish, and 50 years ago, Branson was just a sleepy little community. But I wanted to continue working with him.
Jennifer Berglund 20:08
And now Branson, by the way, is considered the Las Vegas of the Midwest.
Terry Chase 20:12
For me, it’s like a trip to hell when I go over there, but
Jennifer Berglund 20:15
Yeah, you avoid it at all costs.
Terry Chase 20:17
We’re isolated from Branson. It takes about, oh, 45 minutes to an hour to get to Branson from here. So this area is mostly wooded and not very well populated. We have plenty of acreage here so it’s a very natural setting, and we’ve constructed about 11 buildings. It’s well landscaped. We have lots of plantings. It’s kind of like a Camelot. I’ve created my own little Mecca here in the middle of nowhere.
Jennifer Berglund 20:48
Truly you have. It’s one of the most incredible places I’ve ever been. It’s like this kind of Willy Wonka land of museum design. You literally walk in a different building, and it’s like its own kind of magic, essentially. You have a whole building that is for making giant fiberglass models of things, and then you have like a whole building that’s for painting models, and a whole building for various collections. And then when you walk in your main building, like where your office is, you have a little library, and then off in the back rooms, you have pieces of just the most beautiful diorama models you’ve ever seen, and pieces that you’ve collected from other museums, as well as the ones that you’ve created yourself. I don’t mean to create additional tourism for your studio, but it’s just a magical, magical place. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Terry Chase 21:40
Right now the studio is choked with hundreds of taxidermy animals. We have a contract with the Cleveland Museum in Ohio, to clean and restore hundreds of their taxidermy animals for their news zoology gallery that we’re in the process of constructing so, I mean, we have elephants, and tigers, and gorillas, and all kinds of stuff. It’s just absolutely incredible, and it’s taking up a lot of our space but it’s really kind of a bizarre kind of feeling to walk through the studio now and see all these exotic animals that they shipped to semi truckloads of animals, and there’s a third one on the way so you can imagine how much space that takes up. Do you ever stop for a minute and be like, “how did I end up here”? I can honestly say that I have such a passion for what I do that I feel the same way today as I did the very first day I started. There’s a gifted program of high school students that toured the studio every summer as part of a curriculum that they have, and I always tell them, you know, kind of like a graduation speech, I always say, you know, you can always find ways to combine your interests. I’ve found a way to combine my interest in science and art. And I said, if you find a way to actually combine your interests as a means of your life’s work, then you will always be happy and it will eventually pay off. I knew probably when I was in grade school, that this is what I wanted to do because I was always interested in the combination of art and science. But all through school, you know, the counselors would tell you, “Well, you know, you’re going to have to decide one way or the other because art and science through school, you’re going to have to take so many different courses, and there’s no way you’re going to be able to combine the two eventually. I mean, especially in college, you’re going to have to major in one or the other.” Well, in college, I had a triple major in biology, geology, and art. You don’t have to listen to what the counselors tell you. Go with your passion. Go with your passion for your life’s work, and you’ll never regret it. And you know, some people, especially young people, they think, “Well, you know, I want to go with something that I make a lot of money. I want to be a physician or a rocket scientist, but it’s not really what I’m interested in. I’m really interested in math and ballet. Well, there must be some way that you can combine math and ballet. Just figure out a way to do it and do that for your life’s work, you know, it’s not a hard thing to do, and you’ll always be happy. Students come through here, and I always get a thank you note at the end, and they always say it was like a life experience to go through your studio and I’m thinking, you know, how many young people have I actually influenced because I know that whatever you do, you can have an influence and you can change the life of a young people in just one encounter. I was thinking when I was younger, my father worked with a man who had a large mineral and fossil collection. And I remember the first time I went over there, I thought, oh my gosh, this is so fantastic. This is what I want to do. I was still in grade school. And he would give me specimens every time I would go over there. It was so fantastic. They would take me on field trips, we go fossil collecting. It was just wonderful, and it changed my whole life. You know, I was initially interested in astronomy. Astronomy? Well, it quickly changed to geology. He was also an artist. So we had a lot in common, and it just was magical to be able to make his acquaintance. And I think, you know, one encounter here at the studio could change a young person’s life forever. And when you get responses back, that was a life changing experience, I’m thinking, “well, there’s another one that I influenced.” We’ve always had an apprenticeship program. We’re starting up again this year after a two year lull because of the pandemic. But I’ve trained over the years in apprenticeships and employees. I’ve trained hundreds of people to do this kind of work. Probably everybody that’s doing this kind of work in the whole country has some connection to the studio now which is a pretty amazing accomplishment. Sometimes people say, “Well, you know, people go through your studio, that you train them, and then they go off and they start their own business. Aren’t you worried about them competing against you?” I’m thinking actually no, because I have taken what was almost a lost art, and I’ve opened up the opportunity to so many people. And it’s just gratifying to know that so many people are carrying on my work.
Jennifer Berglund 26:52
In our Museum of Natural History, you’ve done quite a bit of work. You made dioramas for our New England Forests exhibition, as well as for our gallery of Marine Life. You’ve restored our taxidermy in our Great Mammal Hall, and now this week, you will be restoring and installing our giant paper mache octopus in Northwest Labs, which is going to be just amazing. We obviously love you at Harvard. Tell us a little bit about the projects you’ve done for us.
Terry Chase 27:26
We modeled all the prototypes. When we make these models, we usually model the prototypes out of wax or clay, and then we’ll make molds of them. And we cast them in various kinds of plastic materials. So for the Marine diorama, which goes from shallow water to deep water, showing the characteristic fauna and flora of the New England coast, we had to model, oh, I don’t know how many species there are. There’s probably at least 30 or 40 different species represented in those exhibits. But one of the interesting things that we have done with that exhibit and we’ve done on a number of other exhibits is we don’t really have to tell people that it goes from shallow water to deep water, because we can do that with the lighting effects. So in this exhibit on the right hand in, it’s a shallow water, and we have lighting effects that create shimmers and wave highlights over the surface that move at a relatively fast pace and are bright colored. And as you move to the left end, which represents the deep water, these wave highlights slow down and they undulate more slowly and they are kind of a more blue color. So intuitively, when you stand in front of this exhibit, you understand that it goes from shallow water to deep water and we don’t even really have to say that in the interpretation. We also did other models for that gallery, some models that we suspended in the space over the walkways. But the marine diorama is the biggest one. We also did a smaller diorama which shows a typical tide pool, which is a cross section from above water to below water. So we show some of the characteristic fauna and flora of the typical tide pool. So it was an interesting project for us. The forest gallery, we had a big part in designing that whole space. We went through several designs until we finally figured out one that everybody was comfortable with. It’s more than dioramas. It’s more sections of exhibits that are encased in vitrines. When we do these exhibits, I take along quite a diversity of personnel. So we have cabinet makers and installers that are local, local people here in southern Missouri, most of them have a high school education, but some of them don’t have much more than that. And there are many really fine craftsmen in this area who do things like woodworking, and welding, and electric work. And so we can employ all these really fine craftsmen. In addition to people that have doctoral degrees in Entomology. My degree is in Invertebrate Paleontology. So we have quite a diversity of educational staff members. And that can be a little bit of a challenge, because after a while, you know, becomes like a dysfunctional family. They all have different problems to solve and different kind of communication skills.
Jennifer Berglund 30:50
Having myself done a bit of work on ships, I think you kind of run into the same thing, where the people that are kind of wrangling everyone, most of their job is just figuring out how to help people get along. And that’s such an important job. So I think it’s amazing that you can be a person who is in charge of the creative aspects of your job, you’re in charge of the science, but you’re also in charge of managing group mentality and happiness.
Terry Chase 31:20
I take a personal interest in everybody, and you know, some of these younger people, they almost seem like my progeny, like my sons, and in some cases, their family life is not so great. And so you know, I’ve become their father figure. So it’s gratifying that I can serve as an example. One thing that we’ve never really talked about, which is kind of interesting.
Jennifer Berglund 31:46
Yeah.
Terry Chase 31:46
I didn’t think I was actually going to bring it up. But you know, as an undergraduate, I felt this calling to be a minister.
Jennifer Berglund 31:55
Really?
Terry Chase 31:56
And yeah… …it was very strong. My advisor in geology was kind of upset by the whole possibility. But I talked to my minister at the time. He sat down and he said, “you know, Terry, you have talents and abilities that are unique. Most people don’t have those kinds of abilities. And you can always serve the Lord as an example in your life in what do you do.” And so I’ve really use that as a pattern for my behavior. All through my career, I’ve tried to serve as a model for honesty, and morality, and serve as an example to all my employees. And so not only have I trained people to do exhibit work, but I think I’ve also kind of had a major influence on their life, their life values. It’s gratifying to know that I really have influenced so many people.
Jennifer Berglund 31:58
Really? I’m glad you brought that up, too, because one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, in this industry, in this incredible career that you have had and continue to have, what do you think your legacy is in the industry and the field, and I guess, now that you bring that up, just kind of in your life?
Terry Chase 33:22
My greatest legacy is probably the work that I leave behind, because most of these exhibits that we do are not ones that they scrap. You know, after 35 years, most museums say, “you know, after 35 years, it’s time to get some new exhibits.” But the kind of dioramas that we do tend to be things that museums will continue to use forever, and some of the exhibits that we do are very permanent. I mean, when we build trees, for example, we make them all out of welded steel. And these things are going to be around, you know, through the Armageddon. I’m sure they’re still going to be metal trees standing at Chase Studios. But anyway, one of the legacies is the work that we leave behind, and we’re actually working on a book now called “Life and the Ancient Seas,” where we’re showcasing the hundreds of reconstructions we’ve done a marine animals and dioramas around the world. That’s one thing that we’ve actually featured in the calendar that we did that celebrates our 50 years in business. We picked twelve different dioramas that represent life in the ancient seas through geologic time, arranged chronologically. So we’ve put out this commemorative calendar that celebrates our 50 years in the business. But we’re also producing a much more extensive coffee table book called “Life and the Ancient Seas.” aside from our legacy of exhibits, of course, is our legacy of all the people I’ve trained, who continue doing this kind of work and who probably will train more people in the future to do this work. So I’ve taken basically what was almost a lost art, and I’ve turned it around and made it accessible to a lot of different people. And I say, it was almost a lost art because back in the 60s, when most of the diorama work was considered kind of old fashioned, these museums that have row after row row dioramas, these exhibits were considered almost like pretty pictures in a calendar. They had no educational value ,and in the 60s, dioramas were considered old fashioned, and they were replaced by big graphics and interactive exhibits. So that model building and dioramas were considered passé. And most of the people that knew how to do this, had either died or retired, and so there was nobody coming along that actually knew how to do the work. I was very fortunate to be able to work with George Marchand who not only knew all of these techniques, but was trained by his father before him. So I’m actually the third generation of model builders to continue this work and pass it along to a whole new generation. So the people I’ve trained is a major legacy for me. Plus, maybe the third thing is everything I leave behind in the studio, because as I said, we have collections of over a million specimens, the library, and even though it’s going to go to the university, the University is partnering with us on a natural history museum. So we’ve already designed and are planning to build what will be the largest natural history museum to be built in North America in the last century. We’ve made a scale model of this, and we’re actually,
Jennifer Berglund 37:05
Which is absolutely incredible. I’ve seen it.
Terry Chase 37:08
We’re also now talking to Crystal Bridges, which is an art museum in Arkansas, that Alice Walton, who is the heiress to the Walmart clan, she has built a really impressive art museum called Crystal Bridges. And one of their original plans was to partner the Art Museum with a Natural History Museum, because one of their themes is how American art was influenced by nature. So they have always planned on this Natural History Museum, but Alice has actually built the Art Museum. She decided she was going to expand the Art Museum by 35%, and connect it with a children’s museum that’s close by with some elaborate playscape. And then the museum was involved in some expensive health initiative, so the board decided, even after we had negotiated with them for building the Natural History Museum that the board decided they were going to have to table the plans for the Natural History Museum, until all these other accomplishments came to pass. And so after these things were accomplished, we are again in negotiations with Crystal Bridges to do the Natural History Museum, so we’ll see. Once the Natural History Museum gets going, then the whole operation, will turn its attention to constructing that, and we probably won’t do much work for other museums, because we figured it’ll take about five years for us to construct this museum.
Jennifer Berglund 38:49
I mean, that’s a short period of time, I would think just with the magnitude.
Terry Chase 38:54
Well, we’ll have to employ just about everybody in the country, all the people I’ve trained and everybody else doing the work to come back and help us with this project. Probably will be working with over 100 model builders in the process of doing this, but if we can accomplish that, then that’ll be a fourth legacy that we’ll be leaving behind.
Jennifer Berglund 39:18
A magnum opus.
Terry Chase 39:21
Not only have I led a fulfilling life that I am completely infatuated with, but I’ve also left a lot of impressions behind for museums and private individuals, so it’s very gratifying.
Jennifer Berglund 39:39
I can attest to that. That’s certainly the case with us at Harvard and certainly all of our exhibit staff, and definitely myself, and actually my parents. My dad and my sister, the three of us actually flew out to your studio because I’d been out there and you so graciously hosted us there. Cooked us dinner, gave us a place to stay, and this was four or five years ago at this point, and it’s still a big topic of conversation. It was just an amazing…
Terry Chase 40:08
It would be an even bigger topic of conversation if you came to visit now because we’ve added on to the studio and we’ve added on to my house. And so my house features a 1940 school bus that was turned into a bedroom.
Jennifer Berglund 40:26
No way.
Terry Chase 40:27
We had to actually build the building around the school bus. I found it on the property. It was an old rusted school bus. It had lichens on it. It was like an art piece, you know, and I thought, “That is really a beautiful structure.” It’s kind of weird, yeah, but you know, after all, I’m an artist and artists sometimes do weird things. So I’ve resurrected a lot of pieces of old rusted junk and whatever and turned them into art pieces. I’ve always had this fascination with found art and that’s just another piece of found art.
Jennifer Berglund 41:09
Terry Chase, thank you so much for being here. It is always such an honor and a pleasure to talk to you.
Terry Chase 41:16
Well, it’s an honor for me, too. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Jennifer Berglund 41:24
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli, and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to Chase Studios, and to Terry Chase for his wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a couple of weeks.