Student researchers from Brown University and RISD posing with the recreated artifacts . (image courtesy of the Jenks Society)

In 1945, workers at Brown University’s biology department were clearing out storage space when they stumbled on a giant trove of natural and ethnographic specimens and artifacts. The collection had belonged to the Jenks Museum of Natural History and Anthropology, founded at the school in 1871 and dismantled in 1915 to make way for new classrooms. Inexplicably, the workers drove 92 truckloads worth of the carefully curated objects to the banks of the Seekonk River, where they unloaded them into a common dump.

Now, the collection has been resurrected from that mire by “The Jenks Society for Lost Museums” — a group of students and professors from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design — with the help of artist Mark Dion. Like previous attempts to reimagine destroyed museums, their three collaborative installations, on view at Rhode Island Hall, recreates parts of the museum while challenging assumptions about permanence in museum work.

Dion seems a natural fit for the project, having made his name as an artist/archeologist/historian/detective (of sorts). In 1999, he combed the muddy banks of the Thames River in front of Tate Modern, turning up a vast miscellany of clay pipes, plastic toys and even a human shinbone that he later displayed in aWunderkammern, or curiosity cabinet. Last year, he recreated the office of a half-fictitious curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, spinning a tale about anticommunist paranoia in 1950s America. The Lost Museum also centers on a strange character: John Whipple Potter Jenks —  the museum’s founder and namesake, a man whose tombstone unfortunately reads, “This museum, the fruit of his labor, will be his abiding monument.”...Continue Reading

> via Hyperallergic