Darwin's Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the "Origin of Species"
Through February 2010.
Rare Book Room. Open 9:00 - 4:30 Monday - Friday.
2009 has seen events and celebrations throughout the world marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his landmark book, On the Origin of Species. The Bryn Mawr College Library will join the festivities with its new exhibition Darwin’s Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES, opening Thursday, October 22nd in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room in Canaday Library. The exhibition will run through February 2010.
Darwin’s Ancestors will examine the development of natural history from the mid-16th century, when the field was transformed by the appearance of strange new plants and animals brought to Europe from Asia, Africa and the Americas. Over the following three hundred years, amateur and professional scientists enthusiastically collected, described and classified the natural world both at home and abroad, and looked for ways of understanding the relationships among species. This exhibition will feature the work of many of the key collectors, classifiers, and theorists, from Leonhart Fuchs and Conrad Gesner in the early period, through John Ray and Linnaeus in the late 17th and 18th centuries, to Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Lyell, and Darwin himself in the 19th century.
The curators of the Bryn Mawr exhibition are Angelique Wille, a graduate student in the History of Art; Marybeth Matlack, a senior Medieval Studies major, and Eric Pumroy, Director of Library Collections.
Lecture by artist Rosamond Purcell:
Vegetable Lambs and Elephant Birds: Classifying the In-Between
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
4:30 pm
Carpenter Library 21
Rosamond Purcell’s extraordinary photographs and installations of natural history specimens have been featured in numerous books and exhibitions that explore the interaction of art and science. Her work includes three books done in collaboration with the late Stephen Jay Gould, and an exhibition, Two Rooms, which featured a reconstruction of a 17th century cabinet of curiosities. Her most recent book is Egg and Nest (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Some reoccurring themes in Purcell’s work include the drive to collect and classify, the decay of objects and beings, and the fluid boundaries between art and science. Her work has ranged from examining natural history collections, photographing disintegrating game dice in Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck with Ricky Jay (Quantuck Lane, 2002), exploring a junkyard belonging to an eccentric antiquse dealer for Owls Head (Quantuck Lane, 2003), and recreating the cabinet of curiosities of the 17th century Danish scholar Ole Worm. Running throughout these works is the artist’s interest in personal and scientific collections, and the choices of display and categorization which are manifested in them.
The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has written, “Rosamond Purcell is one of the great photographers. She has captured the history of objects by photographing them in romantic decline – books scourged by worms, petrified food-stuffs, biological specimens gone wrong, the inexorable entropic winding down of everything.”
Following the lecture there will be a reception and viewing of the exhibition in the Rare Book Room.
Darwin's Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the "Origin of Species" is sponsored by the Friends of the Library. The show is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., in the Rare Book Room in Canaday Library, through February.
For additional information, please contact the Library’s Special Collections Department: 610-526-6576 or SpecColl@brynmawr.edu.
Bryn Mawr College Lanterns
Floor
2, main staircase landing
Open regular library hours
Bryn
Mawr College Handbooks
Floor 3, main staircase landing
Open regular
library hours
The
Dr. A. V. Heyl Mineral Collection
Foyer. Open regular library hours
Allen Heyl grew up in Allentown, majored in geology at Penn State, then went on to Princeton for graduate work and a Ph.D. He had a long and illustrious career with the US Geological Survey, which required that specialists in mineralogy be able to work in all related branches of geology, including geochemistry and geophysics. Among his numerous publications (over 200) is a valuable work on the chrome mines of southeastern Pennsylvania. This year Dr. Heyl has generously presented the Geology Department with his Pennsylvania Collection of minerals. Many of the sites where the minerals were collected are no longer available or open to the public. Anyone interested in viewing more of the collection may contact Associate Curator, Juliet Reed by e-mail.
Intimate Devotion: The Book of Hours in Medieval Religious Practice
January - May 2008
Pointing Fingers: Women Sin, Crime and Guilt
September - December 2006
Luxuriant
Nature Smiling Round
January - May 2006
Building
Muscles While Building Minds: Athletics and the Early Years of Women's Education
September - December 2005
Mapping
New Worlds: The Cartography of European Exploration and Colonization, 1450–1750
January - May 2005
The
Invention of Antiquity
September
- December 2004
Bryn
Mawr Plays: Dramatic Productions at Bryn Mawr College 1889-1920
2002-2003
Jeannette
Jehanne Jeanne Joan: Shepherdess Soldier Savior Saint
January
- June 2003
Dedicated
to the Cause: Bryn Mawr Women and the Right to Vote
September
26 - December 20, 2002
The Very Best Woman's College There Is: M. Carey Thomas and the Making of the Bryn Mawr Campus September 21 - December 20, 2001
The
Sargent Portrait: M. Carey Thomas and John Singer Sargent
September
21 - December 20, 2001
Books,
Printers, and the Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe: 1450-1600
February 22 - June 1, 2001
It's
the Ticket: Nineteenth-Century Bookbinding in the British Isles and the United
States
September 23 December, 1998
Leading
Bryn Mawr: An Exhibition in Honor of Nancy J. Vickers
1997