CANCELED – Collecting Wonders

This lecture has been canceled. We apologize for any inconvenience.

With Claudia Swan, Inaugural Mark Steinberg Weil Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis

Beginning in the 16th century in Europe, collectors assembled Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosity—protomuseums engineered to evince wonder and awe. These collections housed weird and sometimes wild conjunctions of the natural and the man-made, the local and the exotic. What purpose did cabinets of curiosity serve? And how are these sorts of collections related to museums as we experience them today? This illustrated lecture will explore key features of early modern collecting practices—as seen in the newly reinstalled Lopata Gallery 124 at SLAM—and the aesthetics of wonder.

Tickets for this program may be reserved in person at the Museum’s Information Centers or through MetroTix at metrotix.com or 314.534.1111. All tickets reserved through MetroTix incur a service charge; the service charge is waived for tickets reserved at the Museum.

For information about the Museum’s safety protocols, visit slam.org/covid-19-response.