Graduate Students Resurrect Brown University Museum
(Originally for U.S. News University Directory)
Humanities graduate students at Brown University have found a way to connect art, science and history while honoring one of the school's most devoted former professors. These students, along with a faculty adviser and a handful of artists, recreated the office of John Whipple Potter Jenks and part of the museum collection that he helped to establish, according to The New York Times.
Professor's Legacy
Jenks attended Brown University before becoming its professor of zoology and founding the Jenks Museum in 1871, The Brown Daily Herald reported. The museum that he started collected animal remains, anthropological artifacts and other oddities that Jenks and his students found on their travels. In 1915, 23 years after its curator died, the museum shut down, and 30 years after that most of the collection was discarded.
Collection Resurrected
A project that started in 2013 has come to fruition this year, with a re-creation of Jenks' office and some of the museum's specimens inhabiting Rhode Island Hall, where the original collection was once displayed. The project began when Steve Lubar, Brown's public humanities graduate program director, mentioned the abandoned collection to some of his students. Lubar's pupils, now calling themselves "The Jenks Society for Lost Museums," according to the project's website, researched historical documents to get an idea of what the office and museum must have looked like when Jenks was at the school.
They were able to round up some of the collection's original artifacts for the exhibit. When most of the exhibits were thrown out in 1945, some remained on campus or went to other museums. Brown's current museum housed some of the specimens, while others were found in various offices throughout the school's campus.
Remaking History
Hundreds of objects from Jenks' original collection were discovered, but others had to be recreated. For that, the group recruited Mark Dion, an artist who specializes in installation work that involves scientific methods or subject matter. With Dion's help, the students found artists to make facsimiles of 88 objects in the Jenks Museum's old collection. The replicas are as accurate as artists could make them based on the descriptions they had, with the exception that everything was painted a ghostly white.
Committed to the Cause
While the new exhibit was built on collaboration, Jenks' original collection grew mostly out of his own efforts. Jenks had to persuade the school to provide display cases by convincing administrators he would be able procure a museum's worth of specimens to fill them, according to The Brown Daily Herald.
Even after bringing the museum into existence nearly single-handedly, Jenks continued working to fill out its shelves, reportedly adding more than 4,000 pieces on his own just to its collection of bird skins. Throughout his life, Jenks would maintain his devotion to the museum, donating time, money and additional artifacts, until the day he died on the building's front steps.
The re-creation is a tribute both to the museum's curator and to the collection that outlived him, according to the project's website. Combining real artifacts with imagined replicas, it highlights the need for both technical accuracy and emotional resonance in science and art education.
Humanities graduate students at Brown University have found a way to connect art, science and history while honoring one of the school's most devoted former professors. These students, along with a faculty adviser and a handful of artists, recreated the office of John Whipple Potter Jenks and part of the museum collection that he helped to establish, according to The New York Times.
Professor's Legacy
Jenks attended Brown University before becoming its professor of zoology and founding the Jenks Museum in 1871, The Brown Daily Herald reported. The museum that he started collected animal remains, anthropological artifacts and other oddities that Jenks and his students found on their travels. In 1915, 23 years after its curator died, the museum shut down, and 30 years after that most of the collection was discarded.
Collection Resurrected
A project that started in 2013 has come to fruition this year, with a re-creation of Jenks' office and some of the museum's specimens inhabiting Rhode Island Hall, where the original collection was once displayed. The project began when Steve Lubar, Brown's public humanities graduate program director, mentioned the abandoned collection to some of his students. Lubar's pupils, now calling themselves "The Jenks Society for Lost Museums," according to the project's website, researched historical documents to get an idea of what the office and museum must have looked like when Jenks was at the school.
They were able to round up some of the collection's original artifacts for the exhibit. When most of the exhibits were thrown out in 1945, some remained on campus or went to other museums. Brown's current museum housed some of the specimens, while others were found in various offices throughout the school's campus.
Remaking History
Hundreds of objects from Jenks' original collection were discovered, but others had to be recreated. For that, the group recruited Mark Dion, an artist who specializes in installation work that involves scientific methods or subject matter. With Dion's help, the students found artists to make facsimiles of 88 objects in the Jenks Museum's old collection. The replicas are as accurate as artists could make them based on the descriptions they had, with the exception that everything was painted a ghostly white.
Committed to the Cause
While the new exhibit was built on collaboration, Jenks' original collection grew mostly out of his own efforts. Jenks had to persuade the school to provide display cases by convincing administrators he would be able procure a museum's worth of specimens to fill them, according to The Brown Daily Herald.
Even after bringing the museum into existence nearly single-handedly, Jenks continued working to fill out its shelves, reportedly adding more than 4,000 pieces on his own just to its collection of bird skins. Throughout his life, Jenks would maintain his devotion to the museum, donating time, money and additional artifacts, until the day he died on the building's front steps.
The re-creation is a tribute both to the museum's curator and to the collection that outlived him, according to the project's website. Combining real artifacts with imagined replicas, it highlights the need for both technical accuracy and emotional resonance in science and art education.
