The Kenai Cultural Center’s Grand Re-Opening and Ribbon Cutting were on Wednesday, Jan. 15. and is full of new artifacts representing Early Kenai.
The Grand Re-Opening included its first rotation of displays, followed by a luncheon that included information about the 2025 Exhibit Schedule and the new lecture series.
Samantha Springer, the Executive Director of the Kenai Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center, says it wasn’t easy to redo the entire Cultural Center and thanked Danielle Lopez-Stamm, the new Cultural Center coordinator, for her dedication to accomplishing something “that at the time was unattainable.”
Springer hired Lopez-Stamm to take on the “huge project overtaking.”
Her vision for the Cultural Center was to make it more educational, rotated, and organized. She also wanted it to be kid-friendly, coordinating with area schools so that everyone of all ages could enjoy themselves in the Center.
“When I first started working here I realized that kids just were not interested in this, and I wanted to fix that and bring to life a kids section so that they would want to come here… I wanna bring forth my anthropology background and kind of get kids excited and want to know about what an anthropologist or an archaeologist does.” Lopez-Stamm says.
The Cultural Center houses the city of Kenai’s 4,000-artifact collection, dating from pre-contact times to the present.
Exhibits will be swapped out monthly with new exhibits.
The guest speaker for the month of January will be Dr. Adam Dunstan, professor of anthropology, who will be giving a lecture on Water & Land Connections in Pre-Colonial Kahtnu on Jan. 29th at 2 pm.
For children, there are kid-centric exhibits, fun worksheets, and arrowheads they can trace as an archaeologist would at a dig site.
Admission to the Kenai Visitor and Cultural Center is free, and everyone is welcome to learn more about the city’s rich history.