Temporary Exhibitions

May–November 2026

The Yale Peabody Museum’s newest temporary exhibition goes back 4,000 years to explore the origins of writing. Yale researchers are studying a set of tiny document fragments, forgotten since their arrival at the Brooklyn Museum in 1947, to learn more about this crucial moment for human communication – when understanding moved beyond the palace of the pharaoh to the daily lives of regular people. 

Starting July 2026

What kinds of objects or encounters quietly leave traces on us? How do culture and identity continuously shape the body?

Inherited knowledge, language, memory, and ancestry are often intangible. Inspired by Taíno body stamps, the artist thought about how temporary identifiers can represent the ways our immaterial cultures are always part of us.

Soft Traces proposes that cultural identity persists through embodied experience, repeated gestures, and everyday acts. The artwork fully exists only whea person touches it to create an impression on their skin.

Starting October 2025

Spineless means having no spine or backbone; invertebrate, or weak and purposeless. These two definitions, respectively literal and metaphorical, give context to the general connotations surrounding invertebrates and invertebrate research. But invertebrates have allowed humans to make tremendous scientific strides, spanning environmental technologies and revolutions in medical research. Utilizing specimens from the Peabody’s collections, this exhibition highlights applications of invertebrate research and its role in the advancement of biological science and human health.

Starting September 2025

What is the difference between a record and a life?

Sculptor Cameron Patricia Downey’s latest work brings together an array of found objects to question how we define who—or what—is a witness. Do these materials’ rich histories, touched by the actions of people or the Earth, imbue them with a kind of life? Inspired by the museum’s collections, Downey created this installation as the Yale Peabody Museum’s 2025 Summer Art Fellow, co-sponsored by the Yale School of Art.

Starting April 2025

Here the artist explores the natural landscape and local history of Horse Island through photography and personal reflections. Her black and white images have an ethereal quality, and at first glance the contexts are hard to place.

Located in Branford, Connecticut, Horse Island is an environmentally protected area maintained by the Peabody Museum. Voulgaris spent a week there in a residency co-sponsored by the Peabody and the Yale School of Art. This residency is self-directed for an artist who is interested in living and creating while camping in rugged terrain.

Presented in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute
December 2025–June 2026

This bilingual exhibition brought to life the story of a people whom traditional scholarship once labeled as “extinct,” disproving the narrative through examining the history of resistance and survival in the Caribbean, and the current Taíno movement in the United States. Here, visitors learned about the Caribbean Indigenous survival journey through stories, crafts, musical instruments, and objects.

Taíno culture has roots in Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, and other ancestral homes throughout the Caribbean.

March–May 2026

The Peabody Museum (est. 1876) was originally located in downtown New Haven. The current building opened 100 years ago with a public embrace of evolutionary biology, and during an era much different from ours today.

Developed around themes of our public embrace of evolutionary biology and our long-standing role in the production of scientific knowledge, it featured four objects and specimens that were either collected or acquired by YPM in 1925, the year the building was dedicated. It also featured a 3-minute projected montage of still and moving images from the 1920s and 1930s.

September 2024–April 2025

When we think about “nature,” we tend to imagine distant, untouched places. A rainforest, a coral reef, a remote mountain range. But in doing so, we place ourselves outside of nature, as if human-made environments exist apart from ecological life. In reality, we live alongside other species every day. The spaces we build, inhabit, and discard are constantly being reshaped by other species in ways we rarely notice.​

Habitat Shared is an art project that documents the quiet, overlooked ways in which our lives intersect with those of other species.

In partnership with the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University
December 2024–October 2025

Mind/Matter explored the wonders of human cognition by taking visitors on a journey through the historical and modern science of the brain.

This mind-bending experience featured never-before-seen historical scientific drawings, magical illusions that challenge our perceptions of reality, and interactive stations that make visitors reflect on memories old and new and displays to explore how recent advances in artificial intelligence challenge our sense of what it means to be human.

February–October 2025

What is natural? Who belongs here? In their desire to preserve, museums displace objects in time and space, recontextualizing them in an institutional setting. The creative works in this exhibition reveal a sense of strangeness evoked by this ‘de-naturing’.

This exhibition was developed by Yale undergraduates in the course “Picturing at the Peabody”, in partnership with the Yale School of Art. Students investigated themes, subjects, or collections related to the Peabody, and learned the history of photography and how the collections are studied, organized, and exhibited.

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.

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:

The inaugural installation of the Student Exhibition Gallery grew out of a final project in the spring 2023 seminar class “Nature and the Modern Museum.” That year, three students and two postbaccalaureate scholars worked with Museum staff on every aspect of exhibition production from narrative development and research to design and installation. 

The final exhibition looked at the notion of what’s real and what’s not in a museum like the Peabody by juxtaposing museum-made reproductions—models, casts, and taxidermy—with objects the Peabody Museum has labeled “fake,” exploring their devaluation.

March–June 2024

This inscribed clay cylinder, on loan from (and usually on display at) the British Museum, is sometimes called “the first charter of human rights,” and was on display at the 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.