Curators

Author: Lance Grande
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638943X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Book Description
Over the centuries, natural history museums have evolved from being little more than musty repositories of stuffed animals and pinned bugs, to being crucial generators of new scientific knowledge. They have also become vibrant educational centers, full of engaging exhibits that share those discoveries with students and an enthusiastic general public. At the heart of it all from the very start have been curators. Yet after three decades as a natural history curator, Lance Grande found that he still had to explain to people what he does. This book is the answer—and, oh, what an answer it is: lively, exciting, up-to-date, it offers a portrait of curators and their research like none we’ve seen, one that conveys the intellectual excitement and the educational and social value of curation. Grande uses the personal story of his own career—most of it spent at Chicago’s storied Field Museum—to structure his account as he explores the value of research and collections, the importance of public engagement, changing ecological and ethical considerations, and the impact of rapidly improving technology. Throughout, we are guided by Grande’s keen sense of mission, of a job where the why is always as important as the what. This beautifully written and richly illustrated book is a clear-eyed but loving account of natural history museums, their curators, and their ever-expanding roles in the twenty-first century.

Inside the Lost Museum

Author: Steven Lubar
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674983297
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our senses and orchestrate our impressions, balancing presentation and preservation, information and emotion. Curators consider visitors’ interactions with objects and with one another, how our bodies move through displays, how our eyes grasp objects, how we learn and how we feel. Inside the Lost Museum documents the work museums do and suggests ways these institutions can enrich the educational and aesthetic experience of their visitors. Woven throughout Inside the Lost Museum is the story of the Jenks Museum at Brown University, a nineteenth-century display of natural history, anthropology, and curiosities that disappeared a century ago. The Jenks Museum’s past, and a recent effort by artist Mark Dion, Steven Lubar, and their students to reimagine it as art and history, serve as a framework for exploring the long record of museums’ usefulness and service. Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every collection and exhibition. Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples. Inside the Lost Museum speaks to the hunt, the find, and the reveal that make curating and visiting exhibitions and using collections such a rewarding and vital pursuit.

The Lost Species

Author: Christopher Kemp
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651370X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
We hear routinely about dinosaurs unearthed in the Gobi Desert, about new marsupials found in the forests of Madagascar, about darling deep sea squid in the polar regions. These discoveries tend to be accompanied by wondrous feats of adventuring scientists. But just as one can experience the world in a backyard, or farther reaches of the world with a good book and a comfy armchair, scientists themselves know that the natural history museums of the world contain some of the best terrain for discovering new species. In recent years scientists have found in museum drawers and cabinets a new rove beetle collected by Darwin, a tiny lungless salamander thinner than a matchstick, a monkey from the Brazilian rainforest, and a 40 million year old beardog. The Lost Species shares the thrill of spelunking in museum basements, digging in museum trays, and breathing new life in taxidermied beings--a in a days' adventure for the scientists in this book. These discoveries help tell the story of life, and the priceless collections of natural history museums.

Inside the Lost Museum

Author: Steven D. Lubar
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971043
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
Museum lovers know that energy and mystery run through every exhibition. Steven Lubar explains work behind the scenes—collecting, preserving, displaying, and using art and artifacts in teaching, research, and community-building—through historical and contemporary examples, especially the lost but reimagined Jenks Museum at Brown University.

Dry Store Room No. 1

Author: Richard A. Fortey
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780007209880
Category : Natural history
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
'Dry Store Room No. 1' is an intimate biography of the Natural History Museum, celebrating the eccentric personalities who have peopled it and capturing the wonders of scientific endeavour, academic rigour and imagination. 'This book is a kind of museum of the mind. It is my own collection, a personal archive, designed to explain what goes on behind the polished doors in the Natural History Museum. The lustre of a museum does not depend only on the artefacts or objects it contains - the people who work out of sight are what keeps a museum alive...I want to bring those invisible people into the sunlight.' Behind the public façade of any great museum there lies a secret domain: one of unseen galleries, locked doors, priceless specimens and hidden lives. Through the stories of the numerous eccentric individuals whose long careers have left their mark on the study of evolutionary science, Richard Fortey, former senior paleaontologist at London's Natural History Museum, celebrates the pioneering work of the Museum from its inception to the present day. He delves into the feuds, affairs, scandals and skulduggery that have punctuated its long history, and formed a backdrop to extraordinary scientific endeavour. He explores the staying power and adaptability of the Museum as it responds to changes wrought by advances in technology and molecular biology - 'spare' bones from an extinct giant bird suddenly become cutting-edge science with the new knowledge that DNA can be extracted from them, and ancient fish are tested with the latest equipment that is able to measure rises in pollution. 'Dry Store Room No. 1' is a fascinating and affectionate account of a hidden world of untold treasures, where every fragment tells a story about time past, by a scientist who combines rigorous professional learning with a gift for prose that sparkles with wit and literary sensibility.

Nature's Memory

Author: Jack Ashby
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1802063846
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A behind-the-scenes tour through the world's greatest natural history museums, revealing how their hidden secrets can help us in the fight against climate change Zoologist Jack Ashby spends his life working in Britain's natural history museums, and in Nature's Memory he guides us through a series of extraordinary collections, from marvellous mounted whale skeletons and impossibly tiny insect cabinets to buried treasures in vast museum storehouses. But look more closely at these displays: all is not as it seems. While most exhibits succeed in communicating feelings of wonder and awe - a vital function when less people than ever before have access to the outdoors - Ashby argues that the version of nature natural history museums present does not always reflect reality, with specimens revealing more about the biases of curators than they do about the species they represent. Likewise, the ways in which museums have traditionally told the story of their own histories has disproportionately elevated the contributions of certain kinds of people whilst diminishing the work of others, often ignoring their complex colonial heritage altogether. But Ashby contends that these issues are precisely why it's such an exciting time to be a natural historian, for while society shapes museums, so too can museums shape society - for the good. And as we face the existential threat of cataclysmic biodiversity loss, natural history museums will emerge as indispensable resources in the fight against climate catastrophe. Weaving together fresh historical research, entertaining zoological trivia and insider stories from Ashby's distinguished natural history career, Nature's Memory is a charming ode to the joys, eccentricities and planet-saving potential of the world's best-loved museums.

Curators and Culture

Author: Joel J. Orosz
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817312048
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
The author researched ten museums founded prior to 1870, using primary sources. Those chosen comprised a geographically diverse sample of pre-1870 American museums and covered a range of disciplines, among them art, history, and natural science.

Museum Lighting

Author: David Saunders
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606067281
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Author David Saunders, former keeper of conservation and scientific research at the British Museum, explores how to balance the conflicting goals of visibility and preservation under a variety of conditions. Beginning with the science of how light, color, and vision function and interact, he proceeds to offer detailed studies of the impact of light on a wide range of objects, including paintings, manuscripts, textiles, bone, leather, and plastics. With analyses of the effects of light on visibility and deterioration, Museum Lighting provides practical information to assist curators, conservators, and other museum professionals in making critical decisions about the display and preservation of objects in their collections.

Curators

Author: Lance Grande
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619275X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Book Description
Natural history museums have evolved from being little more than musty repositories of stuffed animals and pinned bugs, to being crucial generators of new scientific knowledge. They have also become vibrant educational centers, full of engaging exhibits that share those discoveries with students and an enthusiastic general public. Grande offers a portrait of curators and their research, conveying the intellectual excitement and the educational and social value of curation. He uses the personal story of his own career-- most of it spent at Chicago's Field Museum-- to explore the value of research and collections, the importance of public engagement, changing ecological and ethical considerations, and the impact of rapidly improving technology.

Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads

Author: Stephen T. Asma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195347463
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
The natural history museum is a place where the line between "high" and "low" culture effectively vanishes--where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blend happily together. But as Stephen Asma shows in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, there is more going on in these great institutions than just smart fun. Asma takes us on a wide-ranging tour of natural history museums in New York and Chicago, London and Paris, interviewing curators, scientists, and exhibit designers, and providing a wealth of fascinating observations. We learn how the first museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Peter the Great's lover. In contrast, today's museums are hot-beds of serious science, funding major research in such fields as anthropology and archaeology. "Rich in detail, lucid explanation, telling anecdotes, and fascinating characters.... Asma has rendered a fascinating and credible account of how natural history museums are conceived and presented. It's the kind of book that will not only engage a wide and diverse readership, but it should, best of all, send them flocking to see how we look at nature and ourselves in those fabulous legacies of the curiosity cabinet."--The Boston Herald.