[Note #12] Brooks Hall, Anthropology and the Space Between Science and Art

Natural history museums and museum anthropology shared a parallel growth in the late 19th century. Both were concerned with objects and collections. Displays in anthropology museums often “demonstrated the relation of man to nature.”[1] But anthropology and natural history grew apart in the museum world. In the 1890s, the University of Pennsylvania envisioned an anthropology museum that would occupy (and unify) the ‘space between science and art.’[2]

In 1977, Anthropology moved into the former Brooks Museum. I suspect that the Department recognized a 19th-century museum as a familiar part of its discipline’s founding. Inside the new Brooks, the Commons has become a unique space. String bags from Papua New Guinea, studied by Lise Dobrin and her students in ANTH 3559 Curating Culture, will soon make creative new use of the exhibit space. Anthropology colloquia are open to the public. In the photo above, the UVa Chamber Music Ensemble performs alongside Himalayan tapestries and between the iron columns that once held up the museum’s second-floor balcony. In a modest way, we are finding that space in and between science and art.

From Professor Hantman

[1] Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method in Anthropology,” In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. by George W. Stocking, pp. 75-111. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p. 100. [2] Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 82-87.