Mark Dion & Colleen Sheehy collaborate to spotlight the University's outstanding collections.

With the rise of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the cabinet of curiosities was eclipsed by the development of the modern museum. The idiosyncratic private collections were dispersed into natural history museums, art galleries, and libraries and the objects were categorized and displayed in increasingly standardized ways.

American artist Mark Dion has been disenchanted with the conventional practices of the modern museum for most of his career. He explores the format of the cabinet of curiosities to revitalize the museum goer’s experience, and now he is introducing this concept to the Weisman Art Museum. “I want to blur the lines between current classifications. I want to present nature as a set of ideas, which don’t fit neatly into categories,” Dion says. “The cabinet of curiosities, with its unexpected juxtapositions and combinations of objects, encourages people to think about relationships among things and to decode meaning for themselves.”

A University Collection Sampling

Charles Babbage Institute of Computer History Contains collections connected to the history of computing and information systems. Phillip S. Hench and John Bennett Shaw Collections of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes Largest public collection of its kind in North America. The Performing Arts Archives Material from Minnesota’s performing arts companies; more than 6,500 movie posters and 15,000 still photos from films. Cereal Disease Laboratory Cultures of several thousand isolates of rust fungi in liquid nitrogen; seeds of more than 1,600 lines of wheat, small grains, and grasses. The Swedish Royal Decrees Collection Approximately 3,000 edicts on everything from home brewing to warfare. Ames Library of South Asia Collection’s main focus is British-Indian interaction. University Archives The history of the University, including 90,000 photographs. Literary Manuscripts Collections Literary materials of Minnesota writers; 6,200 World War I and II posters and more than 10,000 photos from these conflicts. Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine Rare books and illustrations from 14th century to 1900; pharmacy paraphernalia; historical medical instruments.

Dion is a soft-spoken man whose modest demeanor belies his accomplishments. At 39, he has had dozens of exhibitions around the world, from Berlin to Caracas and from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv. In recent years, he’s been invited to create installations for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Tate Modern Gallery in London. His exhibition for the Weisman is the brainchild of Colleen Sheehy, the museum’s director of education and an adjunct faculty member in American studies.

“I’ve wanted to collaborate with Mark for years,” says Sheehy. “With the sesquicentennial observance here, it seemed like the ideal time to spotlight the importance of the University’s outstanding collections.”

“He was reluctant at first to commit to such a huge effort, but after he came and took a whirlwind tour of the University and met with museum staff and collection curators, he got excited about what he saw.”

To convince Dion to accept the assignment, Sheehy proposed developing the Weisman exhibition in collaboration with students. She and Dion would teach a special class—The Making of Collections, Knowledge, and Museums—that would examine the origins and development of Western practices of collecting and exhibiting, with emphasis on the cabinet of curiosities and its impact on the emergence of the public museum. As a major component of the course, the students, Dion, and Sheehy would serve as cocurators of the exhibition —“Cabinet of Curiosity”—researching and selecting objects from more than 30 University collections, many of which are little known outside of scholarly circles.

They recruited nine students for the fall semester class. Dion was in residence one week each month of the semester, and he and Sheehy shared responsibility for leading class discussions and advising the students on their research. Each student had the chance to select several collections to investigate based on his or her interests, and the balance of the collection searches fell to Dion and Sheehy. The detective work began with meetings with collection curators to identify the treasures that might be included in the installation. It was a mammoth undertaking.

The hunt Despite her long-time interest in natural history, B.A. student Alison Gerber, an art major, had her share of surprises as she scoured the Bell Museum of Natural History’s entomology, mammal, fish, bird, reptile, and amphibian collections. “Some of the specimens really creeped me out at first,” says Gerber. “Just as I was getting used to one thing, I’d open another drawer and be shocked again. But I became more comfortable after working with the curators. I found out amazing things about storage methods, how to prepare specimens for display, and who uses the collections.” Gerber’s contributions to the exhibition include the spiral tusk of a narwhal; the skeleton of a howler monkey; a selection of colorful dried and mounted scarab beetles and butterflies; and a preserved cavefish, one of a family of freshwater fishes that cannot see.

Jean-Nickolaus Tretter, an M.S. student in interdisciplinary studies with specializations in library, museum, and archival studies, chose to work with several collections. Closest to his heart is the Tretter Collection of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) Studies, which Tretter himself donated to the University. The collection yielded one of the jewels of the exhibition: a miniature model of the lighthouse on Fire Island, New York, made of hand-cut and soldered stained glass.

Student Alison Gerber confronts a crocodile for the Weisman’s “Cabinet of Curiosity” exhibition.

Other items Tretter discovered for the installation include a rare lysurus mushroom from the University herbarium, sections of 28,000-year-old mastodon tusks from the paleontology collection, and a hand-scripted medieval choir book, circa 1325, from the rare books collection.

Lisa Arnold, a Ph.D. student in theater with minors in museum studies and art, uncovered perhaps the most chilling item destined for the display: a photo album depicting activities at a Nazi training camp, drawn from the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Collection. “The album does show people in military exercises but also in living quarters and just socializing. To me, it’s a reminder of how easy it is to fall into stereotypes, to see them as evil monsters. But there they are, doing the mundane things that all of us do,” says Arnold.

Among other items Arnold chose was a book of poetry by Phyllis Wheatley from 1773, the first published work by an African-American, from the Givens collection.

Displaying the bounty Each student was assigned one of nine display cabinets and proposed how to arrange the curiosities inside. Two-dimensional objects that didn’t fit neatly on the shelves of the nine-foot-tall-by-four-foot-wide cabinets were hung on a salon wall: a Diego Rivera drawing of Mexican farmworkers from the immigration history archives, field notes from Jane Goodall’s research in Africa from the Goodall primate studies center, and Hubert Humphrey’s University diploma from the Humphrey collection, among others.

Dion has high praise for his University collaborators. “The project required a lot of cooperation among museum staff, curators, and students,” he says. “This is an incredible group of people— well-read and educated, really committed to what they’re doing, and willing to look at new ways of doing things… And the students themselves really delivered. They helped shape the direction of the piece. This has been a true partnership.”

The students repay the compliment. “Mark’s been very generous in respecting our artistic sensibilities, our research, and our ways of looking at things,” says Arnold.

Dion returned to the University in February to direct the exhibition installation and to work with the students on refining display design.

What does Dion want the museum goer to draw from the experience? “The exhibit is like a puzzle,” he says. “There will be a vast range of objects— some quirky, some familiar, some humorous, some unsettling. I think it will be fantastic— both challenging and exciting. The encounter will mirror what the individual puts into it. The viewer must establish his or her own text.”

Sheehy echoes this notion: “This will be quite a different experience. We’re not used to seeing these types of objects together. There are a lot of different ways of viewing things, a lot of different levels of meaning.”

“Cabinet of Curiosities” represents a microcosm of the University’s vast repository of knowledge, a treasure trove of wonders collected over the 150 years of the school’s existence. Museum goers can expect to see a cavalcade of objects, arranged in fresh and unexpected ways, that will linger and resonate in memory for many weeks to come.

The exhibit opened at the Weisman on February 23 and runs through May 27.

by Barbara Silberg


Get more info For a complete collection listing with locations: www.umn.edu/twincities/arts.html

Get more info For more on Mark Dion, see the book, Mark Dion by Lisa Corrin and others (Phaidon Press, 1997). Available at booksellers and the Weisman store. To find out about current exhibits at the Weisman, view samples from the permanent collection, and learn how the Frank Gehry-designed building was conceived and constructed, go to www.weisman.umn.edu. For general information call 612-625-9494.