Pamela Hearne Jardine, a former collection keeper at the Penn Museum and a renowned advocate for Native American art and culture, passed away on April 28 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 82. 

Born in Milwaukee, Dr. Jardine attended Milwaukee-Downer Seminary (now University School of Milwaukee) and graduated from Scripps College in Claremont, California. Afterwards, she earned a master’s degree and a PhD in American civilization from Penn. 

In 1982, Dr. Jardine became the American collection keeper at the Penn Museum. She curated numerous major exhibits that toured the globe, including River of Gold: Precolumbian Treasures from Sitio Conte, which appeared most notably at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was an aficionado of cloth materials and built two exhibitions around them, The Gift of Spiderwoman: Southwestern Textiles at the Penn Museum and The Silent Language of Guatemalan Textiles at the Arthur Ross Gallery. 

In 1989, she was promoted to manager of the American collection, and for the next decade, she curated numerous traveling exhibitions, including The Royal Tombs of Ur and Pomo Indian Basket Weavers: Their Baskets and the Art Market. She also worked closely with indigenous consultants on a long-term gallery installation that featured cultural perspectives of Native American peoples of the southwest – the Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo. Posthumously, her work with the Blackfeet tribe will become an exhibit at the Penn Museum.  

Dr. Jardine retired from the Penn Museum in 1998 but continued her involvement on a part-time basis, joining Penn’s 25-Year Club in 2007. After retiring from Penn, she worked as a curator at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, reviving the Rand Gallery, which included new acquisitions of up-and-coming indigenous artists, and curating the popular exhibit Virgil Ortiz: Odyssey of the Venutian Soldiers. 

Dr. Jardine is survived by her daughters, Shelley Hearne (Kathleen Welch) and Alexandra Jackson (Doug); her brother, Paul Haberland; her sister, Anne Emerson (Minnow); two grandchildren, and other family members. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the American Indian College Fund in memory of Pamela Hearne Jardine or on the website collegefund.org. 

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