The Lost Museum Symposium: Providence, Rhode Island, May 6-8, 2015

We are very excited to announce an upcoming conference taking place at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island from May 6-8 on the topic of "Lost Museums."

Speakers will include Morbid Anatomy Museum creative director Joanna Ebenstein with "Notes on a Speculative Recreation of the Lost Cabinet of Dutch Anatomist, Moralist, Museologist and Artist Frederik Ruysch; UCL's Petra Lange-Berndt with "Pedagogy of the Ruin: Mark Dion’s Academy of Things, Dresden 2014; former Coney Island Museum director Aaron Beebe on "Enthusiasm, Wonder, and “Stuff” in the New Dime Museum;" and a keynote by Rosamund Purcell. 

Tickets, which appear to be free, can be found here. Details and full schedule follow; you can find out more here. Hope very much to see you there!

Held in conjunction with the year-long exhibition project on Brown’s lost Jenks Museum, the symposium addresses the history of museums from a new direction: not their founding, but their disappearance. We know a great deal about how museums are born and how new collections come into being, but not nearly enough about how these fragile institutions pass out of existence, how artifacts decay and disappear as times and interests change.

What happens to a collection when once-prized objects are no longer seem valuable? Or when ethical standards shift, as in the movement to repatriate cultural artifacts to the peoples or nations from which they were taken? How and why are specimens and artifacts deaccessioned or traded away? How do changing ideas about the evidentiary, educational, and research values of artifacts affect what seems worth saving? How do wars, natural disasters, and other cataclysmic events shape collections and impact institutions of heritage, preservation, memory, and knowledge production? What can we learn from museums that have been forgotten and then revived in a new cultural context? Is permanence a virtue, or might we embrace notions of ephemerality in museums?

SCHEDULE

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6

TALK and RECEPTION @ Edna Lawrence Nature Lab

5:00 – 6:00 P.M. Andrew Yang | Gleaning New Meaning: Reintegrating Collections with the Expanding Ecology

6:00 – 7:00 P.M. Reception

THURSDAY, MAY 7

LIGHT BREAKFAST Pastries and fruit provided

8:30 – 9:00 A.M. 

SESSION 1: COLLECTING THE EPHEMERAL @ Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

9:30 – 11:15 A.M.

• Eric Crosby | Uncollectable: Walker Art Center Commissions
• Hanna Holling | On the Relative Duration of the Impermanent and the Aesthetics of Change in Museums
• Anthony Marcellini and Emily Zimmerman | The Museum of Obsolescence
• Christine Delucia | Fugitive Collections in New England Indian Country: The Afterlives of an Early American Museum at Yale College

KEYNOTE @ Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

11:30 A.M. – 12:15 P.M.

• Elizabeth Merritt 

LUNCH Lunch provided 

12:15 – 1:00 P.M.

SESSION 2: SOCIAL CHANGE and REVOLUTION @ Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

1:00 – 2:30 P.M.

• Jenelle Davis | Filling the Void: Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art and the Struggle for Recovery in Post-Conflict Sarajevo
• Eloisa Dodero | The Musaeum Kircherianum at the Roman College in Rome: A Lost Idea of a Museum
• Petra Lange-Berndt | Pedagogy of the Ruin: Mark Dion’s Academy of Things, Dresden 2014

TEA and TOURS

2:30 – 3:45 P.M. 

SESSION 3: AUTHENTICITY @ Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

3:45 – 5:30 P.M.

• Crystal Ngo | Original Copy: Museums and the Economy of Authenticity
• Ruth Horry | Henry Wellcome’s Lost statues of Babylonian Gods: Undisciplined Objects and Loss of Value in the Museum
• Joanna Ebenstein | Notes on a Speculative Recreation of the Lost Cabinet of Dutch Anatomist, Moralist, Museologist and Artist Frederik Ruysch
• Allison Loader | A Short Stop before the Exhibitionary Complex

PUB SESSIONS @ American Flatbread

6:30 – 8:00 P.M.

• Aaron Beebe | Enthusiasm, Wonder, and “Stuff” in the New Dime Museum
• Gigi Naglak and Hannah Sisk | Peale’s Museum: An Interactive Curatorial Experiment
• Otis Nemo
• Laurel Waycott | The New York Aquarium: A Case Study 

FRIDAY, MAY *

LIGHT BREAKFAST @ John Carter Brown Library Select pastries and; fruit provided

8:30 – 9:00 A.M. 

KEYNOTE @ John Carter Brown Library

9:00 – 10:00 A.M.

• Rosamund Purcell

SESSION 4: PRIVATE/PUBLIC MUSEUMS @ Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

10:15 – 11:45 A.M.

• Andrew McClellan | Death and the Museum: The Case of Edmond de Goncourt
• Mary Terrall | Delusions of Permanence: The Life and Legacy of Réaumur’s Natural History Collections
• Courtney Fullilove | The Hair of Distinguished Persons in the Patent Office Building Museum

LUNCH AND 2 SHOWS @ Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology Sandwiches provided

12:00 – 1:30 P.M.

• Emily Avera and Bryan Markowitz | Reanimating Phenomenal Others: How to Bring Museum Artifacts Back to Life
• Maia Wright and Kate Jarboe | The George W. Bush Library and Museum Museum

SESSION 5: LOST IN THE MUSEUM @ Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

1:30 – 3:00 P.M.

• Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh | A Philosophy of Deep Storage
• Sean Silver | The Kineton Valley Medal, Lost and Found
• Amy Kohut | More than Birds: Collection Narratives and Cultural History at NMNH 

COFFEE BREAK

3:00 – 3:15 P.M. 

SESSION 6: USING COLLECTIONS @ Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

3:15 – 5:00 P.M.

• Ethan Lasser | The Case of the Walrus Tusk: Circulating Specimens and Harvard’s Lost Museum
• Judy Gradwohl | Intentional Impermanence: Building a National Teaching Collection
• Maria Zytark | “Overdue Notice: Please Bring Back the Mummy’s Hand”: America’s First Circulating Museum
• Victoria Cain | The Weight of the Image: Lantern Slides, Education and the American Museum

CLOSING PERFORMANCE @ Edna Lawrence Nature Lab

6:30 – 7:30 P.M.

• The Jenks Society
• Hollis Mickey