Illustrator John Klausmeyer (left) and collections manager Jim Moss joined the UMMAA staff this spring.

The Museum grew this spring with the addition of two new staff members: illustrator John Klausmeyer and collections manager Jim Moss.

John Klausmeyer’s connection to the Museum stretches back almost thirty years. That’s when he began working with Museum curators Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery to produce illustrations for their books and reports. Since joining UMMAA full time in January 2018, he has been hard at work on multiple projects, including illustrations and photography for journal articles and forthcoming books.

Klausmeyer has decades of experience as a scientific illustrator. His first job as a medical illustrator was at the Rutgers University Medical School. In 1984, he started working at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. His skills range from drawing and painting to digital techniques such as photo editing and computer illustration.

Jim Moss joined the Museum in March 2018 as a collections manager. Moss works at the Research Museums Center with fellow collections manager Lauren Fuka to oversee the storage and curation of millions of objects held in the Museum’s collection. One of his first projects will be to help rehouse 400 of the largest textiles in the collection. Moss, Fuka, Carla Sinopoli (curator of Asian Archaeology), and a group of local volunteers will work on this project together. The goal is to move the textiles into stable storage for conservation and easy access by future researchers. Each textile is photographed (for labeling and inclusion in a digital archive) and then rolled into an acid-free tube. Some of the textiles are so large that they require multiple photos—later, these will be merged into a composite image that shows the textile’s full surface.

Moss comes to UMMAA from the New Jersey State Museum. Previously he worked with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to coordinate student and faculty access to collections. He received his Master’s in anthropology, with an archaeology focus, from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and a museum studies certificate from the Milwaukee Public Museum.