The Jenks Society for Lost Museums has given Brown’s nineteenth-century Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, a second life. Working with artist Mark Dion, the Society has re-collected scattered relics and remnants, transformed words into spaces, and fragments of curatorial description into spectral art. A three-part installation re-imagines the office of the museum’s founder, showcases the remaining fragments of the collection, and conjures the ghosts of artifacts once found in the museum back into existence – as reimagined by over 80 artists.
The exhibition tells the true, powerful, personal stories of Little Compton's people of Native American, African, and mixed-raced descent who were enslaved, forcibly indentured and newly free in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each story provides insight into the larger institution of slavery in Rhode Island and throughout New England.
Exhibit Hours: Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm
Opening Reception: Friday, April 14, 4-6pm
Gallery Night Providence: Thursdays / April 20 & May 18 / 5-9pm
"Intimacy and Isolation in Providence" is an oral history exhibit featuring the images and voices of 17 Providence artists and institution builders. The exhibition, curated by Brown students and designed by students from Rhode Island School of Design, was initially developed in the fall of 2004 at Brown in an American civilization course, "Theory and Methods of Oral History", taught by Paul Buhle, senior lecturer.
For rural Mexican families living in the Coachella Valley of inland Southern California, the 1970s is remembered as a difficult time, when a divisive “fight in the fields” between members of the United Farmworkers Union (UFW) and the Teamsters tore at the fabric of the local community. Although painful, these struggles inspired young Mexican Americans – many now identifying as “Chicano” – to question the treatment of Mexican people in all sectors of society, including education.
Cheap pulp fiction magazines of the early 1900s defied social taboos against violence, sex, and bad taste. Condemned by moralists and scorned by the elite, pulp stories flaunted violence, reveled in promiscuous sex, and stereotyped just about everyone. "Pulp Uncovered" is an interdisciplinary arts festival celebrating pulp fiction magazines from the 1920s–40s. The festival includes a museum exhibit at the John Nicholas Brown Center, a film pulp fiction festival, and community events such as walking tours, lectures, panel discussions, and art talks.
Annmary Brown Memorial 21 Brown Street Brown University
From A.A. to Zouave: Collections at Brown is an exhibition honoring the treasures of Brown University’s collections. From the coffee pot that launched a thousand Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to a hand-knit cap from a Civil War Zouave regiment, see what Brown’s libraries, museums, and galleries have to offer.
Too often, Native Americans are in museums as curious anthropological studies and relics. The goal of this exhibition is to bring examples to Brown of living, modern, vibrant Native perspectives and profiles. Through the exhibit, we hope to show variety – variety of perspectives, variety of medium, variety of talent, variety of age, and variety of Tribal Nation.
How have American teenagers learned about sex over the last 100 years? The exhibition Beyond the Birds and the Bees: Sexual Education in the 20th Century reveals the history of sex education. Discover changing American ideas about childhood, sex, and the family by exploring some of the places where people have learned about sex: in the military and schools, from parents and friends, and through popular culture.
Art+History was an exhibition and community programming series about the processes of interpreting history. The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage commissioned Carla Herrera-Prats and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman to make new artworks influenced by the physical and historical parameters of the Nightingale-Brown House.
Carriage House Gallery, Brown Center for Public Humanities 357 Benefit Street
Remember the Old Times: Cape Verdean Community in Fox Point, 1920 to 1945 was a student-curated and executed exhibition that told the story of the history and culture of the Cape Verdean community that lived in the Fox Point neighborhood. Cape Verdean Fox Point was a vibrant, close-knit community that was displaced by urban renewal, gentrification, and the expansion of Brown University.
Exhibition: Fribourg Family Atrium, Granoff Center
A Contemporary Art Exhibition by Dennis McNulty, on view April 27 - May 11, 2011, in the Fribourg Family Atrium at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Inspired by the anthropology museum, we asked ourselves, can we put a familiar culture in a case? What object defines your Brown experience? A Ratty tray? Your Sex, Power God costume? A photo of your friends singing along to Dave Binder on Spring Weekend? That copy of The Democratic Wish that you never cracked open?
John D. Rockefeller Library 10 Prospect Street, Providence, RI
Thomas and Antonia Bryson donated the Bryson Dance Collection of over two thousand books, programs, playbills, photos and documents to the Brown University Library system in 2010. The collection forms a record of the international development of theatrical dance, primarily ballet and modern in the 20th century.
Carriage House Gallery, 357 Benefit (rear entrance) Providence, RI
Performances:
Friday, December 7, 9am - 5pm
Friday December 14, 9am - 5pm
Feel free to bring a conundrum or an inspiration, on paper, to the performances. They will go into a box that Amy will draw from throughout the performances to influence her thinking.
What is the price of the past—from a museum perspective, and a commercial perspective? The museum field believes that a price tag detracts from an item’s historic importance. However, unknown to the average visitor, museums are constantly engaged in buying, selling, and trading pieces of history based on their economic value, illustrating a long-existing tension between cost and value in the process of determining worth.
>> OFF CAMPUS LOCATION: see description for details
Maya weaving tells stories. It is rooted in tradition, and alive today. The exhibit features historic garments from Guatemala, and garments being made today in New Bedford by Maya weavers using their traditional back-strap loom. Join in this celebration of a new chapter in New Bedford’s long tradition of textile manufacturing. Now through April admission to the Whaling Museum is free to those who live in New Bedford, made possible by a grant from BayCoast Bank.
Téjela: Weaving Stories, Weaving Lives: Exhibit opens Saturday, February 18th and closes April 7th, 2013 Maya weaving tells stories. It is rooted in tradition, and alive today. The exhibit features historic garments from Guatemala, and garments being made today in New Bedford by Maya weavers using their traditional back-strap loom. Join in this celebration of a new chapter in New Bedford’s long tradition of textile manufacturing. Now through April admission to the Whaling Museum is free to those who live in New Bedford, made possible by a grant from BayCoast Bank.
>> OFF CAMPUS LOCATION: see description for details
A hidden gem... a dumping ground... a source of life and inspiration... a spot to watch birds, chase frogs, and play baseball... a natural resource in need of remediation... a swimming hole... a place haunted by the remains of factories... part of a watershed... home.
