The Peabody Museum is always evolving. We are committed to building a greater understanding of science, culture, and community, giving space to a wider range of collaborators and experts, and listening to our visitors. Each time you come back to the Peabody, expect to see something a little different - and be a part of that change yourself.
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A Great Migration
By Katharen Wiese
August 2024–June 2025
A Great Migration, a new multimedia installation by Kat Wiese, uses the common language describing both the movement of African Americans between 1910 and 1970 and the northern migration of Sandhill cranes to explore the ideas of assimilation, possibility, and collective actions shared across cultures.
About the Artist
Katharen Wiese (b. 1995) is an multidisciplinary artist from Lincoln, NE, currently residing in New Haven, Connecticut. She holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (2018) and an MFA from Yale University (2024). Before entering graduate school, Wiese was a community arts organizer in the Everett and Near South Neighborhoods of Lincoln, Nebraska where she coordinated murals, events, and public projects. Wiese’s own artistic background spans, figurative painting, printmaking, murals, and collage. Her current work engages the actualities of commodity culture and its relationship to racial and environmental harm by use of reclaimed materials. Situated within her experience of dualities as a biracial black Nebraskan, the patchwork is a primary form holding a simultaneity of subject positions. Through interventions in painting, quilting, and bricolage, her work evokes the animate histories of disposable objects, aiming for a negotiation between image and surface which refuses to be hastily consumed. Her work has been featured in both national and international exhibitions. She is currently a teaching fellow at the University of New Haven.
Dreaming Animals
Meredith Miller, photographer, and MJ Millington, poet
December 2024–June 2025
Dreaming Animals explores humanity's complex relationship with endangered animals through art and poetry.
Using playful scenes and archival images from the collections of the Yale Peabody Museum and the Beinecke Library, photographer Meredith Miller highlights species at risk. MJ Millington’s poems rework common animal-related expressions to underscore the disconnect between our familiar notions of animals and the ecological realities that threaten wildlife.
About the Artists
MJ Millington is a poet, artist, and creator of the podcast Rime: Stories About Poetry. Her publications include My Secret Inky Vice, 17th Century Gentlemen Talk About Flowers, and others. She was the recipient of a 2021 Yale University Environmental Humanities Grant, as well as a winner of the Vermont Studio Center Broadside Competition 2020. She was the 2018 Edwin Way Teale Artist-in-Residence at Trail Wood; and in 2022 was nominated for Connecticut State Poet Laureate.
As a poet she translates the world of the senses, including the visual, into the written word. As a multimedia artist working in textiles, photography, paper and more, she plays with the structures and forms of poetry to create works of visual art. She has exhibited nationally, and her work is in the collections of Yale University, as well as private collections in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, California and New York.
Meredith Miller received her undergraduate degree in Latin American Studies and Visual Art from the University of Chicago in 1998 before earning an MFA in Photography in 2003 from Yale School of Art, where she also won the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize. She received an Artist’s Resource Trust Award from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation in 2014 and Artist Fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism in 2006, 2012, and 2020. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions throughout New England as well as in New York and in California. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Danforth Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. She has attended artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Artist’s Enclave at I-Park, Wilson College, Weir Farm Art Center, the Ocean House, and Monson Arts. She works as a Senior Photographer at Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and teaches at Southern Connecticut State University.
Resonance of Things Unseen
Indigenous Sovereignty, Institutional Accession, and Private Correspondence
By Emily Velez Nelms
April–December 2024
Artist Emily Velez Nelms’ exhibition Resonance of Things Unseen: Indigenous Sovereignty, Institutional Accession, and Private Correspondence, which ran from April 2024 through December 2024, transforms the papers of former Peabody curator William Sturtevant into artist prints. His research focused on the physical, medicinal, and cultural knowledge of the Seminole and Miccosukee people, whose tribal homelands are in southern Florida. He deeply depended on his relationship with elder Josie Bille, the sole Miccosukee Seminole who would engage with him.
Etched in yellow flypaper and dotted with mosquitos from the Florida wetlands, Sturtevant’s letters are displayed alongside an architectural blueprint from “The Jungle Queen,” the oldest running tourist attraction in Florida and a site where he acquired objects. This installation considers the often-hidden figure of the anthropologist/curator, and how institutions have historically used Indigenous knowledge as content for academic research and exhibitions.
Through the presentation of primary sources, a microcosm of relations between Floridian First Nations, the University, and the economy of tourism and development, Nelms’ exhibition serves as a singular case study for the larger pervasive and historical violation of institutional extraction and display.
About the Artist
Emily Velez Nelms is known for works that acknowledge the gaze of the viewer. Her practice is often rooted in histories of southern Florida, incorporating installation, film, sound, and architectural processes. Through her practice, Velez Nelms examines how social structures shape spatial realities, scenes of domesticity, and infrastructure, while intentionally resisting disciplinary boundaries.
During her Masters of Environmental Design at the Yale School of Architecture, she developed ‘Domestic Exotic’, a critical examination of the of impact cultural tourism on the urban development of her home region, southern Florida. Using Florida as a case study, she details a history of racial performance and its connections to more contemporary attractions such as the Hard Rock Casino chain and Disney’s Epcot.
Velez Nelms has been a Studio Fellow at Whitney Independent Study Program (2024), and an Artist-in-Residence at Skowhegan (2018), MASS MoCA (2023), and the International Sculpture Center (2016). She recently served as the coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America and has been nominated as a 2025 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Velez Nelms holds an MFA from UCLA (2019).
The Cyrus Cylinder
March–June 2024
This inscribed clay cylinder, on loan from the British Museum, is sometimes called “the first charter of human rights,” and was on display at the Yale Peabody Museum during its 2024 reopening.
The piece, named after King Cyrus I, founder of the Persian Empire, was excavated in 1879 by Mosul-born archaeologist and diplomat Hormuzd Rassam, who sent it to the British Museum in London. Another small piece, donated to Yale University in 1922 by James B. Nies, was later reunited with the London fragment once researchers realized that the two were related. The pieces are usually on display together at the British Museum.