virtual exhibitions

Exquisite Things {from the Haffenreffer Museum}

connection collections | collecting connections

This is an exhibition of things, the way we connect to them and the way we create meaning by making connections between things.

The objects in this exhibition were chosen using a variation of the game exquisite corpse. Nine people (the museum's curator and eight students) each selected one thing – in sequence, one after another. Rather than following a specific theme, each person chose their object based only on how they thought it connected to the object that someone chose immediately before them. The result is not just an exhibition of objects from the museum, but also an exhibition of the relational spaces between things: how connections are perceived and how we make meaning through those connections.

We welcome you to encounter these things for yourself, wonder why they were chosen and tell us what you think the connections are. You can add your connections to our growing collection by playing the game here.

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Exquisite corpse was invented by the Surrealists in the 1920s. In its original form, it was a game played by multiple individuals who, by building on each other's work in turn, created a new collective work that no one individual would have imagined on their own. Traditionally played with words (and later adapted to images), players would write a text, conceal the majority of it, and pass it to the next player who would continue to write from where the previous player left off. In this exhibition, we have adapted the game exquisite corpse and applied it to the selection of objects from the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology's collection. The exhibition was created by the students in the course ARCH2100: Things: The Material Worlds of Humanity, taught by Dr. Ian Russell, postdoctoral fellow in public art and cultural heritage at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

Brown’s Egypt: Photographs From a 1923 Tour

Upon graduating from Harvard in 1922, John Nicholas Brown embarked on an extensive “grand tour” of Europe and the Mediterranean. In early 1923, Brown and his party traveled down the Nile visiting famous archaeological sites and excavations in progress. This virtual wiki exhibition displays some of the photographs from John Nicholas Brown’s travel album and seeks the addition of commentary pertaining to these artifacts. Curated by Tracy Gierada ’08 A.M. in public humanities.

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