An Evening with the Jenks Society for Lost Museums

Date: Saturday, November 22
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ( Tickets Here )
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY

* Copies of the catalog will be available for sale and signing.

Natural history museums preserve specimens from their inevitable decay, but what happens when museums themselves die? Spend an evening with the Jenks Society for Lost Museums to hear stories of specimens collected, lost, and collected again.

The objects in question once belonged to the Jenks Museum of Natural History, a collection assembled at Brown University in the late nineteenth century by naturalist John Whipple Potter Jenks. In 1894 J.W.P. Jenks fell dead on the steps of the museum that he had founded and obsessively curated since 1871. His tombstone proclaimed: “This Museum, the fruit of his labor, will be his Abiding Monument.” Yet over the coming decades, his museum would slowly dissipate: some specimens destroyed by fire, others packed away by biologists who favored laboratory equipment over stuffed birds and horse skeletons. In 1945 the university transferred ninety-two truckloads of Jenks specimens and artifacts to its dump on the bank of the Seekonk River.

The Jenks Society is an association of artists, scholars, and public humanists united by an interest in Lost Museums. Based in Providence, R.I., the group of graduate students from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design has resurrected Brown’s former Jenks Museum of Natural History. Entitled The Lost Museum, this installation intertwines art, history, and science to express the tragic story of one New England naturalist and the relentless decay that consumes all things.