There's a good chance you've heard about Brown's impressive collections on the admissions tour - the fabled human skin-bound books and the extensive toy soldier collection at the John Hay Library have long been selling points for Brown tour guides. But have you seen any of it since arriving on campus?
Likely not. The majority of Brown's collections are not generally on display and enjoy carefully protected lives in one of a number of departments or institutes. But an exhibit at the Annmary Brown Memorial, "From A.A. to Zouave: Collections at Brown," seeks to display a cross-section of the broad range of artifacts and documents the University has amassed over the course of its history.
The exhibit is curated by students in AMCV 1550: "Methods in Public Humanities," with Professor of American Civilization Steven Lubar, and taps into the individual interests of the exhibit's many curators. Each student picked one collection at Brown and worked with the librarian responsible for its preservation to tell a story with three to five items from the collection. The collections range from dance costumes to Alcoholics Anonymous memorabilia to work by street photographer Gary Winogrand. The objects can be exhibited as long as they are an appropriate size and durable enough to withstand damage from transport to the display cases and several months of light exposure.
"One of the purposes of this exhibit was to show off the wonderful things at Brown," Lubar said. "Probably nothing in the exhibit has ever been on display before. My hope is that people start to realize what great collections there are at Brown."
Jonathan Olly GS, the teaching assistant for the class, followed his long-standing interest in the history of whaling as a contributor to the exhibit. He made selections from the Carleton D. Morse Whaling Collection at the John Hay Library, which comprises hundreds of books, prints, logbooks, letters and photographs of whales and their hunters.
Donated to the university in 1957, the Morse Collection offers research material on the whaling industry from three continents and dozens of cultures. Morse's hometown of New Bedford, Mass. once boasted a vibrant whaling industry, but the trade had dwindled by the time Morse entered Brown. Upon graduation, he simultaneously launched a business career and a diverse collection of whaling artifacts inspired by his childhood in the world's former whaling capital.
Olly's selections include prints of whales from the 18th century. He said, though, that while the Morse collection is important, it is not one of the University's top priorities.
"Not all collections at Brown are created equal," he said. "Some collections are liked more by the libraries. There's a stamp collection that has a $50,000 endowment. Other collections are so large they can't be cared for, so the library can't afford to accept them."
Kai Morrell '11 studied an entirely different type of collection. Working with Fred Jackson, director of the Plant Environmental Center, Morrell studied the plant specimens in both Brown's Greenhouse and the Brown Herbarium in Arnold Laboratory.
Until she came to Brown, Morell said, the subject "wasn't something I realized I had an interest in."
"I'm from Hawaii, and I didn't recognize a lot (of) plants here," she said. "Then I went into (the) greenhouse and saw plants from home."
Founded in 1877, the Herbarium was part of a 19th century movement to catalog and preserve plants and other natural history artifacts. The Herbarium houses thousands of pages of dried, mounted plants - some of which predate the Civil War - in the basement of Arnold Lab. Living plant specimens have been kept around Brown's campus since 1912, when a small greenhouse was erected on George Street, the first of four greenhouses the University built over the next century.
While most collections at Brown can expect to be protected and sheltered for decades to come, the future of the greenhouse is unclear. Construction plans for The Walk, the greensward that will connect Pembroke Campus with Lincoln Field, will demolish the current greenhouse without making provisions for a new home for Brown's living specimens.
"Now is the time to invest in these collections," Morrell wrote in an abstract for her portion of the exhibit, "to provide them with the support they need to fulfill their unique potential as cultural and research assets to the University community."
Morrell selected a number of live plant specimens for "From A.A. to Zouave," but could not display them due their fragile nature. Instead, she is trying to to raise awareness about the greenhouse's fate - with a modern twist to traditional museum curation. She has created a cell phone tour, where anyone can call a number to hear an audio tour of the living collection.
"Collections are the basis of research," Olly said. "They capture either a moment or a place or the understanding of people at a point in time. You can't get it through secondary sources. This is the raw data of history."
