Arkansas City ? Connie Bucher looked forward to a summer of sorting and cleaning artifacts when she took a job as an intern at the Cherokee Strip Land Rush Museum.

As an assistant to the museum director, she was told she’d probably be learning more by observing than by doing.

But things got busy at the museum – a Wichita Indian hut was being built outside, for instance, and museum director Heather Ferguson relied on Bucher to do much of the work setting up “Wrapped in Pride,” an exhibit of colorful clothing woven and worn by peoples in West Africa.

The exhibit will be displayed through Aug. 16.

“They’re very colorful,” Bucher said recently as she showed visitors clothing samples on exhibit. “When you take pictures, the purples and greens really come out.”

“Wrapped in Pride: Ghanian Kente and African-American Identity” comes to Arkansas City through NEH on the Road, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

It is sponsored by the Mid-American Arts Alliance, and was developed by the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles.

“It’s about African-American identity,” Ferguson said. “I’m trying to incorporate different cultures into the museum so that everyone has some ownership with their community museum.”

Besides many examples of the brightly colored cloth, the exhibit includes a wooden loom representative of those used to weave the cloth, photos and a 45-minute video showing an apprentice weaver working on different cloth patterns.

Several dignitaries and celebrities are shown in pictures wearing Kente clothing including W.E.B. Du Bois, African American writer, scholar and one of the founders of the NAACP.

Du Bois spent the last three years of his life in Ghana, where he is buried.

Ghana became an independent state in 1957. One of the photos in the exhibit shows former President Dwight D. Eisenhower greeting Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s prime minister, in his 1958 visit to the United States.

Other pictures show Muhammad Ali and his brother on a visit to Ghana, the president of Ghana, and a chief’s wife, all wearing the cloth. There also are color pictures of people clothed in Kente in parades and other special events.

“This exhibit shows the cloth, how it’s worn and why it’s worn,” Bucher said. “It shows it worn on both sides of the Atlantic. It is less formally worn here than there.”

Another section of the exhibit focuses on Kwanzaa, a first-fruits harvest festival from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1.

“It focuses on principles of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith,” Bucher said, reading from the display.

A Ghanaian proverb quoted in the display provides a good summary of the exhibit’s theme, Bucher said: “A beautiful cloth does not wear itself.”

“This has a lot to do with the overall theme of the display,” she said. “The cloth itself is pretty, but it takes somebody to wear it with character and grace to make it truly beautiful.”

Bucher said it took her and a few others a couple of days to set up “Wrapped in Pride.”

She will be a senior next fall at Sterling College and plans to be a museum curator. She is working this summer toward an independent study credit for her museum work.

“I’ve been taking a lot of pictures to document my independent studies,” Bucher said.