The Micro Museum: A World of Wonders

By Wendy Watson, Mount Holyoke College
Art Museum curator

While the real art museum is closed for expansion, the Williston Library courtyard will become home to the Micro Museum, a modern “cabinet of curiosities.” Every few months, a new micro exhibition will appear there, featuring rare, curious, even mysterious objects from the collections of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Skinner Museum.

The diverse objects featured in the Micro Museum will range from unusual works of art and material culture to scientific instruments, industrial artifacts, and natural oddities, reflecting a tradition that originated in sixteenth-century Europe with the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. It was this Renaissance concept that served as the basis for the modern museum as we know it.

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum was founded in 1876, only a few years after New York's Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Among our museum's earliest acquisitions were historical objects, specimens sent back to the College by its early missionary graduates, and other rarities, in addition to paintings, sculptures, and plaster casts. These objects have all been preserved in the permanent collection, providing a unique opportunity to study the history of nineteenth-century taste and collecting on campus.

The Skinner Museum, just up the street from South Hadley's town common, is a fascinating anachronism, a modern Wunderkammer containing more than 5,000 items assembled by industrialist Joseph Skinner around the turn of the century. Like his Renaissance predecessors, he was obsessed with the notion of gathering together a wide variety of natural specimens and man-made artifacts he acquired during trips abroad and explorations closer to home. Following in their footsteps (and in those of artist Charles Willson Peale, who in 1784 established a similar museum in Philadelphia), Skinner had as his goal the creation of a microcosm of the expanding world—with an emphasis on American material culture and industry—designed to advance public knowledge through an enjoyable process of learning—or, as Peale called it, “rational amusement.”

In keeping with this tradition, the Micro Museum will present displays designed to enlighten, provoke, and even astonish. The first micro exhibition, which opened September 5 and is on view through November 5, is a selection of unusual Native American artifacts from the Skinner Museum, unresearched until Katherine Williams '00 undertook a project to study them last spring. Her findings are presented in the form of text labels that discuss the origins, authenticity, use, and history of these historical items.

Future exhibitions will focus on a remarkable collection of Chinese embroidered silk shoes made for women with bound feet, a ritual necklace from the South Pacific, and a mysterious iron object from South Carolina that viewers will be invited to identify.

A firm believer in “distance education,” she helped reduce the gap between Europe, Africa, and America with the use of satellite technology and the Web. “I like the idea of serving as a cross-cultural link transcending time and space,” she says. “It is a wonderful way for both students and professors to learn about themselves and the world.”