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Feb 27, 2023 · Singular and distinctive in some respects—especially in their responsibility to preserve, restore and display fragile, treasured objects—museums resemble college campuses in other ways, including their diversity of stakeholders, their cultural visibility and financial challenges and the omni-presence of activists, protestors, provocateurs ...
Questions of cultural values and biological identity are acute in the projects of understanding specific animal bodies in specific contexts: a new specimen of bird in a museum drawer, a captive animal in a zoo or presented on a blog, an infamous animal display in a natural history collection. At the same time, these animals become iconically ...
The role of museums in society is changing. Museums keep reinventing themselves in their quest for becoming more interactive, audience focused, community oriented, flexible, adaptable and mobile. They have become cultural hubs functioning as platforms where creativity […]
- Where Are All The Small Animals?
- Where Are All The females?
- Where Is All The Gross stuff?
- Colonial Skews
Museums are overwhelmingly biased towards big beasts. It’s not difficult to see why; who can fail to be awed by the sight of a 25 meter-long blue whale? Dinosaurs, elephants, tigers and walruses are spectacular. They ooze presence. It is easy for museums to instill a sense of wonder with animals like this. They are the definition of impressive. And...
If we think about the sex ratio of animal specimens in museum galleries, the males are thoroughly over-represented. Curator of Natural Science at Leeds Museum Discovery Centre, Rebecca Machin, published a case studyin 2008 of a typical natural history gallery and found that only 29 percent of the mammals, and 34 percent of the birds were female. To...
When it comes to animal groups that people consider cute (i.e. mammals), why is it that specimens preserved in jars are displayed less regularly than taxidermy? I suspect that one reason is that fluid preservation, unlike taxidermy, cannot hide the fact that the animal is obviously dead. It is likely that museums shy away from displaying mammals in...
There is real unevenness in which parts of the world the animals in our museums come from. The logistics of visiting exotic locations means that some places were easier to arrange transport to than others, and there may also have been some political motivation to increase knowledge of a particular region. Knowledge of a country’s natural history eq...
Over the course of the semester, the students divided into groups to research elephants, giraffes, penguins, primates, and rhinos. As a class, they've visited the zoo twice to familiarize themselves with how the zoo communicates information about animals.
- Bret Mccabe
Jul 1, 2019 · However, since at least the 1950s, natural history collections have been perceived as a burden on museums and academic institutions, of little use other than exhibition in dusty cabinets, occupying space that could be used for more spectacular means of attracting the public.
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Jan 24, 2019 · They have become cultural hubs functioning as platforms where creativity combines with knowledge and where visitors can also co-create, share and interact. For this reason, the theme chosen for International Museum Day 2019 is “Museums as Cultural Hubs: The future of tradition”.
