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Mediations Art in the Natural History Museum
Book chapter

Mediations Art in the Natural History Museum

Linda Kim
Race Experts, pp 73-126
01 Jan 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv233kxz.8

Abstract

Art Arts & Humanities Life Sciences & Biomedicine Science & Technology Anthropology Ethnic Studies Social Sciences
I have presented the reasons for science’s enlistment of art for an exhibit on race—the special urgency of The Races of Mankind in the 1930s. This chapter looks more closely at the natural history museum, its exhibits, and how Hoffman was able to insert her sculptures and unique artistic expertise into its matrix of display technologies and discourses, both popular and expert, on race. Additionally, while chapter 1 set out to explain the stakes of The Races of Mankind for science, specifically race science, this chapter presents the critical intervention art made to science’s articulation of race inside the natural history museum. Specifically Hoffman’s art brought to the project a new relationship to the “real” of race and the assertion of beauty and aesthetics as priorities in the museum’s objects and displays. The Field Museum accommodated her artistic expertise at numerous points in the commission, from the insertion of her own brand of “realist” representation to the selection and presentation of racial types she deemed “beautiful” and the importation of modernist display techniques in the Hall of the Races of Mankind. All of these reconceptualizations of race that Hoffman brought to the project were not only tolerated but embraced by a museum that recognized that it was the artist’s mediation that would coax a recalcitrant public to its anthropology exhibit. [1st paragraph]

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Web of Science research areas
Anthropology
Art
Ethnic Studies
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