Welcome to the public website for the program Museum or Mausoleum: The Framing of Art, Culture, and Neuroplasticity.
A full program description from the 2011-12 Academic Catalogue can be accessed here.
Students and Faculty may access the Fall and Winter quarter Moodle page from the links in the home page.
Santiago Ramon y Cajal, 1914
Do museums transform living, changing cultural objects into fixed, preserved, inviolate collections? What stories do museums tell? What stories do objects embody? And what stories do we, visitors, tell ourselves? How do objects housed in museums affect our sense of self-identity? What does it take to become aware of how stories we tell both frame and are framed by objects? Is it possible to heal culture and the self through the interactions of narratives and objects? What happens to historical ideas about human consciousness when we explore the mausoleum-like exhibitions of what this consciousness has exhibited as other? What happens to consciousness when it is framed by neuroscience or to the self when it encounters thinking as an evolutionary internalization of movement.
In this program, we’ll explore the power of narrative objects in a variety of exhibition spaces: museums, galleries, shopping malls, book/web pages. We’ll identify curiosities about the relationship between art objects and self-representation, particularly shifts in cultural influences and identities as they relate to shifts between the museological and mausoleum-like aspects of exhibition spaces.
Faculty: Lara Evans art history, visual arts, Sarah Williams feminist theory, consciousness studies