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.
Permanent
Temporary
Past
Mind/Matter
The Neuroscience of Perception, Attention, and Memory
Starting December 7, 2024
“Mind/Matter: The Neuroscience of Perception, Attention, and Memory” explores the wonders of human cognition by taking visitors on a journey through the historical and modern science of the brain.
The exhibit was created in partnership with faculty from the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University.
The exhibit includes historical scientific drawings that have never been shown to the public before, magical illusions that challenge our perceptions of reality, 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. Through a series of interactive exhibits, the curators bend our perception to reveal how our brain constructs our reality.
A Great Migration
By Katharen Wiese
Starting August 27, 2024
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.
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
Starting December 2024
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.
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.