The front gallery of Artspace, right on the corner of Orange and Crown, has been made into a living room of sorts. While the pieces are displayed on pedestals, as they might be in a museum, the warm tone of the walls beckons people in from the street. The carpet on the floor looks soft and inviting — even if it is made of shells. The pieces look old and worn, as if well-loved by users before being preserved. We can’t touch any of it, but we can be in the same space, with comfort and ease.
Just around the corner are three actual artifacts encased in clear boxes. We can get close without feeling like we’re putting the objects in jeopardy. The artifacts are from the collection of the Peabody, currently closed for major renovations that aren’t slated to end until 2024. In the meantime, a partnership with Artspace has led to “Everywhere and Here,” a collaborative project curated by Lisa Dent, Artspace’s executive director, in which five artists — Anina Major, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Martha Friedman, Brittany Nelson, and Cauleen Smith — “were invited to search the Peabody database and work closely with collection managers to learn more about the objects in the collection.” With the museum’s doors closed for a time, the exhibit “provides an opportunity for visitors to see the one-of-a-kind selections, hailing from the Pacific Isles, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Mars.” It’s also a chance for the artists to interrogate the meaning of the objects, and the reasons that they’re in the Peabody in the first place, delving into the thorny questions that the Peabody and museums like it have had to start addressing.
Three of the artists used cultural artifacts for inspiration. Together, their projects highlight the double-edged sword of such museum work. On one hand, it’s a privilege to have pieces from all over the world carefully displayed, preserved, and studied at an institution like the Peabody. At the same time, it’s fair to ask why they’re at the Peabody instead of in their home countries (a question that, in fact, led the Peabody to return some artifacts in recent years, before the museum closed), and to ask why it is that the artifacts of some cultures are in natural history museums (the Peabody isn’t unusual in this regard) next to apes, dinosaurs, and meteorites, while similar artifacts from other cultures are in art museums.
Anina Major, whose work is in the front gallery, leans into the pleasure of being able to access the pieces. The artist “carefully selected objects” to “illuminate cultural connections across the African diaspora, specifically from the Bahamas,” an accompanying note states. “A gourd container adorned with raffia and cowrie shells, a truncated triangular flat-woven basket, and clay shards heavily tempered with shells provide the material framework for her installation. Inspired by the seemingly distinct archeological records of the objects, Major creates a sculptural narrative reminiscent of the spiritual and ecological landscape.” Major has put the pieces in a different context, connecting them to each other and to the present, bringing them back to life.
In another part of the gallery, meanwhile, another artist takes aim at the problematic nature of having cultural artifacts in museums at all. Do masks belong on a wall, or on people’s faces? “Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s videography project doubly challenges modern European thought: its historically upheld subject-object dualism as well as its present-day capitalist repercussions,” the accompanying text states. “Utilizing animistic masks found in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and elsewhere, and studying the history of makeshift masking in protest movements then and now, Nguyen’s mask videos trespass the boundaries between conscious subjectivity and unconscious objectification, essentialism and non-essentialism, the self and nature.” The irony isn’t lost that masks like those in the Peabody’s collection may well have used in defiance of elite institutions like Yale. But in imbuing the project with a little menace, Nguyen gets at how the masks have a power that can’t be fully contained — and because the masks are here, in the museum’s collection, we have an opportunity to appreciate that, and be thoughtful about what we take away from it.
A third artist headed into the museum’s antiquities (the Peabody famous has an actual mummy as part of its collection). “Martha Friedman’s recent material experiments led to her interest in the historical process of mummification,” the accompanying note explains. “The Peabody Museum’s Egyptian collection managers provided her with the access and information to recreate the detailed folding and overlapping of linen cloth over the facial area. The technique, combined with her use of glass and gold leaf, embody the delicate and valuable nature of the burial process.” Thanks in part to a few too many fantastical movies, we perhaps think of mummies as being in disrepair, as they are after thousands of years. Friedman’s project reminds us that how meticulous the mummification process was, and that the results could be rather beautiful. In our culture, do we treat our dead with the same respect today?
The final two artists in the show turn to the museum’s collection of space objects. “Brittany Nelson’s series of photographs take inspiration from archives on Earth and beyond,” the accompanying note explains. “Images of meteorite dust clouds on Mars, taken by the Curiosity Mars Rover, are aligned with letters exchanged between science fiction writers James Tiptree Jr. (really Alice B. Sheldon) and Ursula Le Guin. Nelson uses histories of the future to imagine queer futurisms, explore ecofeminist possibilities, and understand the links between space, gender and sexuality.” The emphasis in Nelson’s work is on space. The words from the letters exists in a vast void; it’s unclear from the piece if the recipient even hears the salutation, let alone responds to it. It’s tempting to read into it a sense of loneliness and isolation — but also a sense of uncharted territory. In that way, Nelson’s piece is an homage to two writers who, in their work, ventured fearlessly into explorations of gender and sexual fluidity at a time when it wasn’t nearly as common to do so as it is now.
Artist Cauleen Smith takes an even longer view. “Landing in Mexico in 1969, the Allende meteorite, considered the most studied meteorite in history with large calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions that are among the oldest forms in the Solar System, takes center stage in Cauleen Smith’s installation,” the accompanying note reads. For Smith, the meteorite is an Easter egg, a chance to dive into crystallography (a means of studying meteorites) and the history of science. Smith focuses on two crystallographers, Helen Megaw and the Nobel prizewinner Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who were friends as well as colleagues. Smith incorporates one of Megaw’s crystallographic patterns into her piece. We may have developed ways to analyze meteorites, but Smith points out that, really, “meteorites belong to no terrestrial nation, and to no Earth people.”
“When one thinks about the journey charted by the Allende meteorite, one must consider both time and space; distance and duration,” Smith writes. “The Allende meteorite is a visitor from our cosmic past and perhaps holds keys within its molecular structure to possible futures.” There’s a moment of extreme humility in contemplating the act of poring over a rock from space in hopes of learning something about where it came from, and where it and we are going. “The scale of our human ignorance, like the scale of the Universe, is staggering,” Smith writes.
“Everywhere and Here” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through Nov. 20. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
