The opening of Lucy Mitchell’s new work was marked with a panel, Nature Morte: Explorations in Un-Natural Philosophy from 4:10-6:00pm on Friday, March 23, 2018. Aimée Bessire, James Delbourgo, and Mark Dion joined a discussion of the contemporary curiosity cabinet in conversation with Lucy Mitchell, and chaired by Zoe Crossland.
Participants:
Lucy Mitchell is an artist who lives and works on Martha’s Vineyard. After high school she went to Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England, subsequently spending several years living and working in Italy, France and England. She started exhibiting in the 1970s in New England and at Gotham Book Mart in New York, showing at Graham Galley in New York in the 1990s. More recently she has continued to exhibit in New England, Maine and Martha’s Vineyard, with a focus on installations within public spaces.
Aimée Bessire teaches at Bates College, including courses on African art and culture, the African Diaspora, American culture, cultural and critical theory, gender studies, popular culture, and the history of photography. Her research focuses on the art and heritage of Tanzania, with a particular focus on the ephemeral. This emerges from her work with Sukuma healers, and engagement with empowered healing substances and practices and the tension between power and decay. Her publications include “Utamaduni: Sukuma Art, Culture and Heritage in Northwestern Tanzania,” in Shangaa: Art of Tanzania (2013); “The Power of Ephemera: Permanence and Decay in Protective Power Objects,” (African Arts Autumn 2009)
Artist Mark Dion is a mentor in the MFA program at Columbia. His work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archaeological, field ecology and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ‘subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences. The artist’s spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkammen of the 16th and 17th Century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens.
James Delbourgo is Professor of History at Rutgers University. His research combines the history of science with imperial and global history and the history of collecting and museum studies. His recent book, Collecting the World (2017), explores global natural history collecting and the career of Hans Sloane, which culminated in the foundation of the British Museum in 1753. The book examines Sloane’s career from his background in Ulster and voyage to the slave society of Jamaica to his creation of a network of collectors who gathered curiosities throughout the world, making possible the establishment of the British Museum.
Zoe Crossland is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia. Her research draws on semeiotic theory to explore how human lives are lived through and within particular material conditions. She is especially interested in the tension between the archaeological ability to bring the past into view on the one hand and the work of inference and practical activity through which archaeology conjures and evaluates competing claims about the past on the other.
The 9th Floor Case 