Spurlock Museum
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| Established | September 26, 2002 |
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| Location | 600 S. Gregory Street Urbana, IL 61801 United States |
| Coordinates | 40°06′26″N 88°13′17″W / 40.1073°N 88.2214°W |
| Type | University museum |
| Director | Professor Wayne Pitard |
| Public transit access | C-U MTD |
| Website | www.spurlock.illinois.edu |
The William R. and Clarice V. Spurlock Museum, better known as the Spurlock Museum, is an ethnographic museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Spurlock Museum's permanent collection includes portions of collections from other museums and units on the Urbana-Champaign campus such as cultural artifacts from the Museum of Natural History and Department of Anthropology as well as historic clothing from the Bevier Collection of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. The Museum also holds objects donated by other institutions and private individuals. With approximately 51,000 objects in its artifact collection, the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collects, preserves, documents, exhibits, and studies objects of cultural heritage. The Museum’s main galleries, highlighting the ancient Mediterranean, modern Africa, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, East Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas, celebrate the diversity of cultures through time and across the globe.
The foundations of the modern Spurlock Museum can be traced back to 1911, when the University established the Museum of Classical Archaeology and Art and the Museum of European Culture. These were joined in 1917 by the Oriental Museum, which merged with Classical Archaeology and Art in 1929. In 1954 the Museum of European Culture joined with the merged Classical and Oriental Museum to form a single museum, which was renamed the World Heritage Museum in 1971.
From its beginnings in 1911, the museum in its various forms had operated out of a space on the fourth floor of Lincoln Hall. In 1995 a donation by William and Clarice Spurlock made it possible for a new building to be constructed to house the museum and its growing collections. In June 2000, the World Heritage Museum was renamed the William R. and Clarice V. Spurlock Museum, and on September 26, 2002, the Museum opened to the public.
The size and age of the Museum's collections made moving them from Lincoln Hall to the new Spurlock building a formidable task. The first complete inventory of the Museum's holdings since 1972 was conducted before any of the objects were packed. More than 150 fields of information were recorded on each item. To pack the more than 30,000 items took thirty-five undergraduate students two years. The packing job took approximately 10,000 cubic feet (280 m3) of bagged Styrofoam peanuts, 1,822 boxes, and 148 crates. Many of the boxes and crates for the most fragile artifacts were custom-made. The actual move between buildings took ten days.
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