Dialogue with the Director Archives Dialogue with the Director

Cabinets of Curiosity: Musing About Collections, on view through Sept. 24 in the South Balcony, chronicles the historical aspects of collecting as they developed in 16th-century Europe, and as they can be gleaned from the current holdings of several University of Kansas repositories. The exhibition brings together a diverse array of wondrous objects from the Spencer Museum of Art, the Spencer Research Library, the Anthropological Research & Cultural Collections, and the Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center. European collections of curiosities served as catalysts for the emergence of the modern museum, and with that in mind, Director Saralyn Reece Hardy asked colleagues in all the participating institutions to respond to the question: As you think about the works in your collections, what object seems emblematic of your "cabinet of curiosity?" Why? Their answers follow throughout this Cabinets-inspired publication.

Leonard Krishtalka
Director
Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center

"Cabinet of curiosity" harkens to a time, more than 400 years ago, when people did not understand the nature of life on earth, either the fantastic array of living animals and plants, or the fossils found eroding from the ground. European explorers returned from distant lands with stories and specimens of exotic bestiaries and botanicals - apes, armadillos, tapirs, fish that lived on land-amusing oddities consigned to cabinets of curiosities. Fossils were "sports of nature" that magically grew out of the ground or were planted there by the devil. People thought that each piece of life on earth - and earth itself - was as it always had been: unchanging, unconnected and created a few thousand years ago.

The specimens in the cabinets suddenly shattered the calm, shocking our simple, static sense of place and purpose in the universe. No longer curiosities, they shone the light of the Enlightenment. Fossils, people realized, were the life of the past, a million missing links, the intrigues left by a vanished world imperfectly preserved. The plants and beasts from distant lands connected the continents to one another and linked the life of the present to the life of the past. The curiosities in the cabinets revealed our origins. They became the roots, trunk, branches and twigs of a tree of life, some four billion years in the making.

The coelacanth, perhaps, best embodies this sense of time and place. Thought from fossils to have become extinct 65 million years ago, a living coelancanth, massive and monstrous, was brought up from the deep sea off the east coast of South Africa in December 1938 by a fishing trawler. Some 200 more have been recovered since, among them the museum's specimen in 1988 off Grand Comore Island. It looks extinct. Its anatomy is antique. Its head, scales, skeleton, muscles, organs and lobed fins tell us how life went from water to land 400 million years ago. The coelacanth is an ancient knot unfurled on the tree of life. And it hurtles us through time like no other machine of science or art.

Steve Goddard
Curator of Prints & Drawings
Spencer Museum of Art

Our collections include things made by people for other people to see. So, our collections revolve around humanity and its concerns. I would have to offer one of my favorite pieces in the collection: H.C. Westermann's lovingly crafted box, carved as a gesture of thanks to his friend Richard Hollander. The lid of the box doubles as a printing block, which is also carved by Westermann. The image that is printed from the block (in an edition of one) shows Westermann's signature image of a "death ship" and the text "For Richard from Cliff." One of the many things that this work asks us to think about is the role of art as a gift.

Richard W. Clement
Head of Special Collections
Kenneth Spencer Research Library

While any book as an artifact can elicit considerable curiosity, the books from the Department of Special Collections on display in this exhibition offer a contemporary record of the growth and development of cabinets, indeed whole rooms, of curious objects, nascent museums, as we understand them today. The most emblematic image is found in the frontispiece to Ferrante Imperato's Historia naturale in which we see the great 17th-century collector in the midst of his wondrous acquisitions.

Mary Adair
Interim Director/Associate Curator
Anthropological Research & Cultural Collections

Humans have been making objects from various raw materials for millions of years, but we continue to be fascinated when we see prehistoric objects made from stone, bone, or shell. When was it made?   Who made it?   How is it used? Why is it shaped that way?   These artifacts excite our imagination about the past and encourage us to learn more about the people who made them.

Stone tools, and especially formally shaped tools, draw particular attention and curiosity.

These well-made, enigmatic pieces of stone remind us that humans around the world made tools for basic survival purposes.   However, the various styles are a guide to how the tool was used and when it was made, while the selected raw material may reveal patterns of trade or migration.   Like modern materials that seem to constantly change, the sizes and shapes of prehistoric stone tools changed as people altered their lifeways, hunting patterns, and technologies.   Styles often stayed in use for a period of time, thus allowing modern researchers the ability to track the migrations and culture of their makers through time and across the landscape