Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine
Dean's Letter
CU museum's collections inspire MFA exhibit
Original art work that is part of the MFA exhibition that is the result of a collaboration between the CU Museum of Natural History and MFA students. The exhibition is titled (Re)Collecting: Translating Archive and Excavating Memory . Photo courtesy of the CU Museum of Natural History.
For the past several months second-year MFA candidates in the CU-Boulder Art & Art History program have spent time visiting the collections and meeting with curators and collections managers at the university's Museum of Natural History in the areas of anthropology, botany, entomology, paleontology and zoology.
Seven students, John DeFeo, Corrina Expinosa, Ariana Kolins, Ben McQuillan, Roberta Restaino, Carissa Samaniego and Adam Sekular have produced new artwork in response to the process of collecting, storing and sharing a rich and diverse cultural archive.
The resulting exhibition, (Re)Collecting: Translating Archive and Excavating Memory, is on display through March in the University of Colorado Boulder Museum of Natural History's BioLounge. Admission is free and open to the public.
"With this exhibition we enter these visual documents into the archive of our social moment– when we were conscious of the operations that constructed our understanding of the past."
The exhibition explores the human relationship with memory, both an individual's own and the memory of others, and how that memory is often supplemented by the use of an archive.
The artists' statement describes the archive and the MFA exhibition this way:
This archive can be physical, like the collection of a museum, or digital like the ever-increasing records carefully curated online. This archive can be formal—processed carefully, recorded meticulously, stored in jars, vitrines, and in acid- and lignin-free files to preserve against the impact of time.
Archives can also be informal, of an individual's personal design—a shoebox full of family photos from past generations, a list of favorite movies or songs, letters in the drawer of a bedside table from the loved ones.
Collections become reflections of our world; our taxonomy of values, our construction of history.
(Re)Collecting is a response to the permanent collections of CU Museum of Natural History. This collection is an archive of immense diversity, including ancient tools, native species of plants and animals, and remnants of past worlds in many forms.
"Looking at this archive as well as our own vernacular history as living, active, documents to be reflected upon and translated, the works included in this exhibition range from external observations of the natural world to deeply personal retrospectives of childhood memories. With this exhibition we enter these visual documents into the archive of our social moment– when we were conscious of the operations that constructed our understanding of the past."
For more information on the CU Museum of Natural History, click here.
Filmmaker alums tackle nuclear weapons buildup
The nuclear weapons buildup and the protests against it were for many simply the news of the day, but for two filmmakers from the University of Colorado Boulder it may turn out to be a provocative theme for a historical documentary and multimedia oral-history archive. Read more
Cancer in canine companions may suggest human cancer, depending on where you are
Recent advances in veterinary research have suggested that if your dog has cancer, it's possible you might, too, thanks to toxins in your shared environment. But that research might not tell the whole story, according to new findings. Read more
Alum's startup, already hailed as innovative, is acquired by POLITICO Europe
Keaton Brown, who graduated from CU Boulder in May of 2018, majored in Economics and Political Science while developing the startup. Read more
Subscribe Request Info Give
275 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309
Email the magazine
College of Arts & Sciences main website