Curio cabinet to university gallery: sites for memory, imagination, and knowledge

The Curiosity Cabinet began as small casework that held personal collections of antiquity, exotic specimens, and elements from nature. Eventually becoming the basis for museums, they also served a function in academia as teaching tools that would act as a microcosm of the world. What started as informal, personally guided research of the world around oneself has become an industry of heritage, education, and cultural record through methods of curation and authorship of the historical narrative. To examine how the formation of an archive shapes an individual, I have turned to analyzing my family tree to probe the roots of our stories and examine the bedrock of my personal heritage. Within our collection of heirlooms and local detritus, I seek to demonstrate how the accumulation of objects and passage of stories engage an individual's perception and imagination of their identity. Additionally, I will unpack how display in an institution plays a role with context and proximity, the way a physical collection preserves and forms connections, and how it cumulates as footholds for the audience’s and curator’s memories.