From the Museum series by Alessandro Pagani

Illustrator Jason Polan is best known for his Every Piece Of Art in The Museum Of Modern Art Book. These drawings are from the collections of The American Museum of Natural History and they are for sale at 20x200. 

These vintage photos of exhibits being prepared for the American Museum of Natural History have convinced me that this must be the coolest job ever.

Images from the exhibit American Museum of Natural History’s exhibit Picturing Science: Museum Science and Imaging Technologies.

About the exhibition:

Whether Museum scientists are studying parasites, people, or planets in other solarsystems, cutting-edge imaging technologies such as infrared photography, scanning electron microscopes, and CT scanners now make it possible to examine details that were previously unobservable. This exhibition, curated by Mark Siddall, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, features more than 20 sets of large-format images that showcase the wide range of research being conducted at the Museum as well as how various optical tools are used in scientific studies.

Bones Books and Bell Jars is a book of photographs by Andrea Baldeck of the Mütter Museum Collection.

About the book:

Bones Books & Bell Jars offers a contemporary fusion of art and medicine, recalling an era when artists and physicians collaborated to educate aspiring medical students and share information with other medical practitioners. Andrea Baldeck was given free rein to mine Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum’s vast collection of pathological specimens, anatomical models, surgical instruments, illustrated textbooks and other 19th century artifacts, to create her “cabinet of wonders” inspired still life photographs.

Art from Helen Gregory’s exhibit Unrequited Death which features work she has created during her time as the artist-in-residence at the Canadian Museum of Nature. It will run through September 3, but if you can’t see the work in person you can always download her app.

About the exhibit:

In her unique creations, Newfoundland artist Helen Gregory juxtaposes biological specimens with fanciful, even romantic, backgrounds reminiscent of the Victorian era.

Unrequited Death presents both the macabre and magical, revealing a fascination with dead things and evoking an age-old obsession with collection.

Domestication of Pyramids by Magdalena Jetelova was installed in multiple locations between 1992 and 1994. Jetelova’s work comments the Western mentality of taking important parts of our history and placing them inside museums.

Peggy Macnamara’s beautiful illustration work comes from her experience as Artist-In-Residence and Research Associate in Zoology at The Field Museum Chicago.

About:

For three decades, Peggy Macnamara has served as the Field Museum’s artist-in residence, spending her time entrenched among the museum’s vast collection of bones, stuffed specimens, and figurines to render them on canvas in watercolor.

Macnamara, who also teaches Scientific Illustration at the School of the Art Institute, originally began drawing and painting in the Field Museum as a hobby. For years, she spent hour after hour at the museum, intricately detailing its displays for nothing more than personal pleasure. Then, in 1983, she was named the museum’s only artist-in-residence, after an employee took interest in her work. Thirty years later, her colorful, life-like paintings of nature scenes have begun to catch the eyes of local gallery curators.

Click here to read more and to see a video about her.

Images from the new book A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science by Robert McCracken Peck and Patricia Tyson Stroud with photographs by Rosamond Purcell. 

About the book:

Founded in 1812, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia stands today as the oldest natural history museum in the Western hemisphere. Early expeditions organized at the Academy were of central importance to the exploration of America’s western wilderness, and the plant and animal specimens that were brought back formed the foundation of a collection that today contains some eighteen million items. What began as a small gathering of devoted amateurs has grown into a vibrant international center for scientific education and research.

A Glorious Enterprise, the first complete history of the Academy, tells the story of the brilliant and passionate men and women who endeavored to acquire and disseminate knowledge of the natural world. Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon, Robert Peary, Ernest Hemingway, and James Bond are just a few of the colorful Academy associates profiled in this lively narrative. Naturalist and historian Robert McCracken Peck and historical biographer Patricia Tyson Stroud take readers behind the scenes of the Academy, recounting the signal moments and achievements that shaped its first two hundred years—from its landmark discoveries in North America and around the world, through the construction of its famed dioramas in the 1930s, to the pioneering work of Academy scientists in water pollution and conservation long before these were topics of popular concern. The book is richly illustrated throughout with hundreds of archival images and stunningly original works by acclaimed photographer Rosamond Purcell that cast specimens from the Academy’s collections in a new light.

Unfortunately, this Yahoo News slideshow is as close as I’m going to get to the Brains exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, England. 

About the exhibit:

The exhibit makes up part of the Wellcome Collection’s major new exhibition, ‘Brains’ which includes slices of Einstein’s brain, 3000 year old trepanned skulls, ancient Egyptian mummified brains and brains in jars, and opens to the public from March 29 June 17, 2012. 

The Hyrtl Simulacrum Installation is a fantastically imaginative museum display designed by Jeanne Kelly 

Kelly on her display:

The Hyrtl Simulacrum is a multimedia, interactive augmentation to the museum experience. It makes curiosity contagious and infects others with a sense of wonder. The project uses museum artifacts as the foundation for creative historical fictions. These fictions are discovered through digital forensic facial reconstructions and analog interaction with story machines.

The stories begin with 8 of the 138 human skulls that combine to make up the Hyrtl collection, found in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Durning the late 1800′s Dr. Joseph Hyrtl wrote what he knew about each person directly onto their skulls.  The Hyrtl Simulacrum grew from these short stories written directly on bone. A famous Viennese prostitute, a tight-rope walker who died of a broken neck, a child murderer and a Tai bandit are only a few of the very real people chosen from the collection to become characters in this new narrative.

Combining my love of artistic anatomy, conceptual visual narrative, history, science and good story telling, the project has grown to include high-resolution CT scans of the original skulls, vintage photography, a variety of forensic reconstruction techniques, digital painting and image editing, large wooden interactive curiosity cabinets with miniature handmade dioramas inside and much more.

Read more…

Hell’s Kitchen might get a whole lot cooler. This is the new building being proposed to house the recently retired space shuttle Enterprise in the once shady New York neighborhood by the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. 

Selections from Connoisseurs, a project by Karen Knorr that explores the “received ideas of beauty and taste in British high culture”.

About the project:

Travel in the 18th century practiced by the privileged few was ameans to an end which often took the form of a collection of object (souvenirs) which found their way to the great  houses and museums of Britain. Rooms in private galleries ( the Dulwich Picture Gallery ) museums ( the Elgin Room in the British Museum) were built specifically to house and commemorate a search for authenticity and beauty. This cultural capital consolidated and celebrated the status of the owner be it the aristocracy, gentry or merchant classes. The existence of individuals endowed with taste is not peculiar to the 18th century. The remnants of these views may still be voiced in the value judhgements of the contemporary critic and collector. Today’s connoisseur is yesterday’s man of taste.