CCA Events
The Marvelous Museum
A Project by Mark Dion
September 10–11, 2010, 5 pm
Oakland Museum of California
Curated by OMCA Senior Curator of Art René de Guzman (CCA Faculty).
The exhibition continues through March 6, 2011.
Admission is $12 general; $9 seniors and students with valid ID, $6 youth ages 9-17, and free for children 8 and under, and members.
OMCA is at the corner of 10th Street and Oak Street. The accessibility ramp is located at the new 1000 Oak Street main entrance.
OMCA offers onsite underground parking and is conveniently located one block from the Lake Merritt BART station.
For more information, visit www.museumca.org.
For his latest project, conceptual artist Mark Dion has embarked on an unprecedented expedition through the Oakland Museum of California's art, history, and natural science collections to create multiple site-specific installations and interventions throughout its art galleries, drawing upon the overlooked orphans, curiosities, and treasures from the collections.
The Marvelous Museum includes objects that date back to OMCA's predecessor institutions and, while they often lie outside of OMCA's California focus, still tell a rich and interesting story of how museum collections are assembled over time and how curators and museum visitors engage in an often invisible and silent dialog about the nature of art, history and science.
The interventions explore the nature of museums and public presentation, the history and purposes of collections and exhibitions and are intended to create an internal dialog in visitors as they contemplate thematic juxtapositions of art, history, and science. Examples include surprising and intriguing placements such as a large stone coin from the Island of Yap in the Art of the Gold Rush Gallery amid 19th century landscape paintings and daguerreotypes; a taxidermy baby giraffe in the California People Gallery surrounded by figures and portraits by Viola Frey, Dorothea Lange, David Park, Carrie Mae Weems and others; a drawer of police batons and Republican campaign materials in the Counter Culture Gallery, and more.
Mark Dion is known for making art out of fieldwork, incorporating elements of biology, archaeology, ethnography, and the history of science, and applying to his artwork methodologies generally used for pure science. Traveling the world and collaborating with a wide range of scientists, artists, and museums, Dion has excavated ancient and modern artifacts from the banks of the Thames in London, established a marine life laboratory using specimens from New York's Chinatown, and created a contemporary cabinet of curiosities exploring natural and philosophical hierarchies. Dion has a longstanding interest in exploring how ideas about cultural and natural history are visualized and how they circulate in society, in particular through museums.
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