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.
A Great Migration
By Katharen Wiese
Starting August 27
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.