Hola Marco and Alma! 

Konnichiwa from Japón, where I’ve been doing a couple month long research trip, following an itinerant 17th century artist monk through the mountains. It’s been a fascinating journey and new friendship with this wonderful artist. I’ve also been visiting the seasonal art and cultural festivals, and learning about the collections and institutions in the cities. I’m working on a book about my experience here… as usual with many images, essays, poetry, diaries and so on. I’ll make a companion film. 

I have a client in California, a friend, who is a commercial photographer in his seventies now and living between Columbia and California. I’ve been working with him remotely on his archive and developing a show about Neoliberal Realism. He started a stock photo agency and made incredible work, hundreds of thousands of slides that he was about to throw away that illustrate the so-called end of history period of rapid neoliberal expansion. The photos are a fascinating combination of capitalist sublime, Lynchian American unconscious, and surrealist stock agency b-roll, along with some early reportage and artistic experimentation. It’s compelling in its breadth and also provincializes and historicizes—maybe even de-naturalizes western neoliberalism and its peculiar visual culture. 

Speaking of de-naturalizing hegemonic cultures—and also the main reason I’m writing this morning, is that I have been in conversation with the Field Museum in Chicago (one of the big Natural History Museums in the world) for the last 6 months about a curatorial project looking at the history of natural history, and telling that story through their extensive archive. It’s a celebration of their museum staff artists, who are largely ignored by history, and also looks at themes of Christianity, Colonialism and Scientism as articulated in that mode of museography. I think the celebrating their staff part using their own archival holdings they like, and the other parts maybe less so. They’ve had me for a couple meetings and have been generally supportive if non-committal. I’ve been sending increasingly elaborate and frankly animistic proposals and they have been sending formal responses about their bureaucratic processes. They have an internal exhibitions staff of 60 people, rarely work with outside curators, don’t have any development funding, and have to submit my proposal to all sorts of protocols. The institutional politics are stunning and I can’t imagine this exhibition will be realized at a fraction of its scope. 

It occurred to me though, it might be fascinating to exhibit the proposal process, as well as the archival images and some of the correspondence that frames it. I’ve realized that so much of what constitutes art in the contemporary, is the invisibilized and highly aestheticized application process, the epistolary form, and what we could call a kind of relational aesthetics with institutional administrators. What people end up seeing is usually the bureaucratic Frankenstein that results. I like the idea of exhibiting the process and also reversing the usual hierarchies of power and narrative control. This is particularly fitting for a show deconstructing Nature and Natural History by using artists excluded from the historical record. 

And I thought to myself, what would be a better venue than Guadalajara 90210? I love your spirit and approach to exhibition-making, and it feels in line with the objectives of the project. 

Maybe we could talk about some more? I’ll share the proposal and a few related things, including a contemporary art series and public program. I included Chavis Mármol in the proposal along with a symposium on Automobillism. I want to put his Olmec Tesla piece in the middle of their great hall. Here are the links for the proposals and an example of some of the correspondence between me and them. I like the idea of using correspondence as wall texts for the work. And as you’ll see in the main proposal for Constructing Nature, the images are totally incredible and tell a lot of the story on their own. 

Ah, this may be the most important detail… The whole project came about because, I believe, a landscape painter who worked at the Field Museum a hundred years ago called Charles Corwin, contacted me from beyond his mortal life, speaking to me through cicadas who were having a very rare ‘superevent’ with the overlapping of several broods in their 17 year life cycles coinciding in a way that made them extremely prolific in Chicago during my time there. They were a very present and compelling force while I was there and led me unknowingly to Corwins grave and to the Field Museum.

Have you experienced cicadas before? They change the whole environment when they emerge from their 17-year brooding period and make this incredible droning sound. It actually reminds me of the rattles use​d in Mexico when they do a ‘limpia.’ In ancient Chinese thought cicadas were very significant messengers and guides to the afterworld. I can share more about this. A similar thing is happening with this 17th century itinerant artist. It might sound a bit strange to post-enlightenment ears, but it's actually quite consistent with many animistic cosmologies.  

Big Abrazos, 

Perry

Here’s an abbreviated collection of some of my correspondence with the Field​, which I think tells an interesting story itself… and then I’ll include their last message at the end. What this does, I think, is frame the exhibition, exhibit a subject position, and show what usually gets omitted from the exhibition process. The show may or may not happen but this kind of enormous body of work rarely gets shown, even though it's full of interesting aesthetics. 

Dear S, 

This is such an exciting project, and it feels in some ways like it chose me. It's also a fitting culmination of my graduate work with the inaugural Art & Ecology program at Goldsmiths, University of London. 

I’m taken with Corwin as a brilliant and overlooked artist. He was such a preeminent practitioner of a truly enchanting and collaborative form of world-building. His practice—and the practice of diorama-making more generally—I find extremely generative for entering into the Anthropocene discourse, as well as Western conceptions of Nature.

I’m captivated by the visual archive (at least that which has already been digitized and made accessible) that exists at the Field in relation to Corwin’s work. I find the photographic documentation—particularly the processual documentation—potently allegorizes the constructedness of Nature, and at the same time its fleetingness, openness, and contingency. It gives a sense that it can be made otherwise, which seems to be of existential importance in an era of ecocide. 

I’ve reached out to the University of Minnesota to see about visiting their Corwin collection, as well as the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, where I’ll be the first week of September. I've been collecting these wonderful details about his life and also putting together a reading list, in addition to my foundational ecology and science studies texts. I was at the Flaxman Library yesterday researching Corwin and there really seems to be a poverty of scholarship on him, though I did find some interesting texts on the history of dioramas, panoramas, etc. 

Can I come back and visit you and talk more about this project together? Maybe this coming week? I would also like to visit Gretchen at the library, and anyone else you might think of who's been there a long time and has the good stories.

I have so many ideas for how this could be realized, and I feel like I'm just getting started. I made a quick visual exploration / proposal since we met on wednesday just to get down a few interests. It's rough, but I wanted to give a sense of some of the directions I'd like to develop, hopefully in close conversation with you.

To the best of my knowledge there hasn’t been a book on Corwin and I'd like to amend this significant omission—both in the history of American art and its surrounding ecological discourse.  I could very much imagine a book developing out of this exhibition project, which I could also imagine travelling and finding audiences beyond the Field.

I think this project could work at a range of scales, and I hope we can explore the possibilities together. The Brooker Gallery truly is a jewel box and I imagine it could serve as the ‘brain’ of an exhibition that moves through the collection and building, reanimating it in an unusual way. 

Thank you again for your kindness and encouragement. It was really something amazing the way we met.

Wishing you a beautiful and restful weekend.

Warmly, 

Perry

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Hi S,

Here is a link for an updated exploration document:

It's a little over 25mb, so I added it to my google drive and you can download it from there.

I’ve become so animated with this project and the possibilities. Since we spoke I’ve been working on it every day. I think the big development of thought for me is that in looking at Corwin and his fascinating relationship to a very situated conception of Nature, one immediately wonders about other cosmological representations of humans' place in the world. I’ve been grouping this exploration under the banner of cosmopoetics—a combination of cosmology and poetics. I think this is a useful way to invite a greater contextual engagement with art, and in some ways also a response to a recent influential text called Cosmotechnics by the philosopher Yuk Hui. 

It's been a pleasure to consider works that share similar impulses to Corwin's. It's quite a range of cultures and expanse of time that humans have been exploring and aestheticizing these recurring themes. It occurred to me that moving through the Nature Walk and the Messages from Nature halls at the Field Museum is not that dissimilar in spirit from walking through the Lascaux caves.

It also strikes me that the Field Museum is one of a few institutions in the world which operates at such an expansive scale; a deep time repository of different cultures and knowledge, and as such, a fitting venue for this kind of comparative cosmological composition, which of course is already happening in many ways. 

I imagine this exhibition experimenting with a variety of different formats. Perhaps the cosmopoetics section could simply be a one-channel video installation offering these art historical correlates for consideration. This would be an easy way to collect a broad range of visual artifacts and it travels easily. I imagine there is a lot to work with in the FM collection and archives, and I’m interested in drawing connections between the conventional bracketing of histories and cultures. I’m also interested in sharing this kind of archival work and research. Perhaps this could look like reproducing the feeling and materials of working in the archive and library. I’d like to see some of the artful documentation of Corwin’s work printed at a larger scale, maybe on wall vinyls, aluminum prints, and so on. A performance program and a symposium is interesting to me as well, and I included some possibilities to consider in the updated document. 

I also don’t mean to get carried away! This is all really provisional—kind of thinking out loud… and I actually feel a bit vulnerable in sharing it at this stage. In some ways I feel like I’m following intuitions and then trying to make sense of what’s developing. This experience so far has become a container for some of the most meaningful artists and artifacts to me, and also a rich learning opportunity. I'm so curious to be in dialogue with you and J, and learn your insights and ideas, and I would be so happy to work together collaboratively on any aspect of this, to whatever extent is desirable. 

Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday.

Kind regards, 

Perry

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Good morning S! 

I hope you had a restful long weekend. Since our meeting last Thursday I’ve been continuing this work on Charles and the theme of constructing nature. I was at the Newberry looking through a visual collection on world expositions that I think are a big part of the story, particularly the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. I  had some lovely conversations with the staff and researchers—all of whom, invariably, were thrilled about this project and excited to share resources and ideas.

One librarian recommended a lecture she saw at the Peabody that's very illuminating and relates to the project: https://peabody.harvard.edu/video-all-world-here-anthropology-display-1893-chicago-world%E2%80%99s-fair She also shared this wonderful anecdote about a friend who worked at the FM and mentioned that some of taxidermied animals are actually in state of microbially-encouraged decomposition—so much so she claimed you could hear this slow metabolization in certain dioramas(!) like the polar bears apparently. 

The following day I was at an event at Chicago Filmmakers watching beautifully restored and scored home movies from the Filipino Chicagoan diaspora made in between the wars and I met a colleague of yours from the Field who shared some delightful stories about ‘easter eggs’ in the dioramas, like hidden creatures and portraits of the artists clandestinely worked into the rock faces(!). These details are so good... And I’m really curious to learn more about Corwin and company’s proto bohemian lifestyles that J alluded to. It's such a terrific project and the subject opens up into so many fascinating related themes and conversations, as well as exciting possibilities for how to share them. I’m thrilled to do interviews with FM staff and get deeper into the archive. I think it's also such a cool way to examine and celebrate local history and reflect back on what really is likely the end of the age of real animal dioramas. And as suggested, I can see it producing a lot of positive sentiment and support for the museum, and specifically for fundraising to upkeep the dioramas.  

I think this time together working on the exhibition would also be a good way to bring me on board for a defined period and project, but also give me the opportunity to learn the collection towards the other projects, like the ones I began outlining in the document I shared. I think there is great potential to integrate more contemporary artists working at the intersection of science and ecology, which is my field of expertise and a lot of preliminary ideas are included in that last version of the document. I imagine more contemporary art could work its way into the program through the conventional avenues, but we could also move more quickly and lightly, integrating works into the collection galleries and liminal spaces, complexifying narratives, and responding timely to significant events.

I'm really in awe by the way this has been coming together and I keep feeling all of this encouragement as we go further down this path.

Wishing you a beautiful week and looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Perry

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Good morning S, 

Apologies for my hasty email yesterday, I was travelling back to California for a short trip to visit my daughter. Do you have someone in mind from collections that you think would be a good match for me and our project? I'm also happy to approach people on my own. B stood out to me, in part because I see this curatorial approach to be in a similar spirit to his research on pollinators; moving through different disciplines and departments to instigate a flourishing of new knowledge, connections, and beauty. I would also like to arrange a meeting with archives for next friday and wondered if you would like to join or meet up at some point while I'm at the museum. I was planning to frame my request as follows:

I'm working with S on an exhibition about Charles Abel Corwin, a diorama painter at the Field Museum in the early 20th century. Through the work of this unsung artist the exhibition will explore themes of how Nature is constructed in Western thought and museography. The show will also explore the vibrant and social milieu of creatives at the Field Museum, their collaborative work, and sometimes eccentric personalities. I would like to visit the archives and have some informational conversations with the archivists. Would Friday September 13th work for a visit? If not perhaps sometime early the following week.

Kind thanks, 

Perry

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Thank you so much, S. I think anthro makes the most sense. It’s kind of a sociology of science thing. I’ll spend some more time on the site too and keep in touch. Wishing you a peaceful weekend. 

Perry 

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C, it was so nice to hear your voice last night. Thank you so much for your warmth and kindness and offer to help though this moment of transition. I feel a strange connection to Chicago and I feel like there is something important for me here to learn or do. I arrived in the middle of this massive cicada event, and they have been such a striking feature. I learned in ancient China they would bury the dead with carved jade cicadas in their mouths. A kind of reincarnation spirit or guide. I’ve come to love them quickly, I feel a sense of calm and almost affirmation in their overwhelming sounds. It also helps that they like beautiful green places like myself. I saw a beautiful show at the Depaul museum from an artist called Selva Aparicio who wove together hundreds of found cicada wings into a mourning veil with hair from three generations of women in her family.

Thank you for your invitation to share what I’m working on. It's good to put it down somewhere.

The main thing perhaps I’ve been working on, and in a much more focused way after grad school in London (art & ecology at Goldsmiths), is a documentary film about plantation agriculture. Looking at the social and spatial relationships that were developed on the sugar plantations in the early European colonial period in the Americas and how much they determine the way labor and land gets organized through the industrial age to the present. I’ve been interviewing scholars, filming and doing archival work around the world. Orlando Patterson at Harvard, James Walvin at York, Robert Proctor at Stanford, Jason Moore, Silvia Federici, and many others. There’s an excerpt I made for a post production grant, it’s not color corrected but gives an idea... The music is also a placeholder. I’ve done everything myself so far and put together a good team to finish it, all friends, a cinematographer called Dustin Lynn who went to Harvard and made films for Gabriel Orozco, Peter Beard, Marina Abromovic, Bromberg and Chanarin. He’s also a great musician and puts out his music with RVNG INTL. Another friend Sebastian Alvarez offered to produce it, he’s wonderful and his last film about Brasilia premiered at Visions du Réel in Switzerland. He actually went to and taught at SAIC. My friend Skooby Laposky (yes, really) offered to help with the music. He's done a lot of film work PBS, Arte, MoMA, NYT’s, and he did that Bill Cuningham doc, and also does this really interesting biodata sonification where he composes with plants and does cool events at MIT. And then I asked another friend, an anthropologist filmmaker and professor at Berkeley called Thor Anderson to help as well. I’m waiting to hear back from ITVS about our grant application, it's quite competitive apparently, I don't think I can finish it on my own. I thought I'd maybe do a podcast version at least and plan to make an open-access online research portal as well.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kkq2dvzTz8ybTCBiYufFq5K0W6yyfw9w/view  

The project I proposed to the Field Museum is about an unsung diorama painter, his collaborative ecology, and the construction of Nature in Western thought and museology. I met with the two main directors of exhibitions and they seemed interested and encouraged me to continue developing the idea for a possible show in 2026. I got really carried away with the proposal and included a public program, symposium, publication and so on. I suppose that looking at how particular a becoming-secular dualist conception of enduringly-Christian Nature is also begs the question of how other cosmologies render their lifeworlds. This opened up into a comparative cosmopoetics as I’ve called it and likely has a good foundation for a book. It occurred to me during this process too that the FM is almost willfully disengaged from the very active contemporary art milieu that’s taken science and natural history as its primary material or departure point. I suggested that some large scale thematic shows of contemporary artists could be introduced into their slower programming and more responsive interventions could be lightly and timely integrated into their collection galleries. Here’s the proposal:

I also have an exhibition I’m developing about post-Pasteurian diasporic microbiopoetics, in which I’d like to look at the syncretic fermentation practices that emerge in diverse and diasporic settings. I thought it might be nice for the watershed art & ecology space in Pilsen. I also applied with it recently for a curator position at a new arts organization in Los Angeles called Active Cultures. I imagine it would be a beautiful way to look at different food cultures and socialities, and I would like to accompany it with a public program, maybe an end of the season pickling party :) And I imagine a book with recipes, immigrant stories and lots of beautiful pictures. 

I also have a number of writing projects I would like to finish. I’ve kept online writing and image sharing practice going for over a decade now and it’s really starting to pile up. I would like to collect some of these writings and images for publication. In part because I’m scared of digital entropy and also because I think it's a particularly contemporary form of art that is undervalued. A recent example is ritualsintime.space ,a kind of blog (I don’t love this term) with many, many images, essay films and kinds of writing; journals, criticism, poetry, parataxis, autofiction, theory, commentary and so on. I was thinking I’d like to start making postcard versions of some of the images and bits of text that relate, as a way to make them feel more real and tactile. 

I’ve been collecting anonymous twentieth century vernacular photographs from around the world and I have enough for a museum by now. I think they are so beautiful and mysterious. They make the canon look so overly-affected by comparison. And they can take on such amazing patinas and marks of time. I would like to expand the repertoire of museology and the ways art spaces are conceived and used. I have a few models, Toledo’s Institute of Graphic Arts in Oaxaca, a gorgeous art reference library beside a bougainvillea-covered courtyard, galleries and an atelier for making art books. I love idiosyncratic house museums like the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, and Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. I did my graduate school thesis on -ennials (biennials, quinquennials, etc) as promising sites of knowledge production and cultural exchange commensurate with planetarity and interdependence. My final project was an art library in an old church called the Sianne Ngai Becoming-ergon of the Parergonal Discourse of Evaluation Library and Tea Room somewhat tongue in cheek. It’s a reference to a great scholar at University of Chicago, Sianne Ngai, who has written several fascinating texts, the most recent of which Theory of Gimmick I found particularly useful for drawing the connections between post industrial financialization and contemporary art. 

You mentioned your parents are reading a lot of Badiou right now. That sounds right on, and I would like to read him more. I know we’re politically aligned though I’m likely less excited about math and universalism—though some degree of that is certainly necessary to correct for the excesses of post-structuralism, its embrace by the right, and an era of compounding post-truth relativism and AI hallucinations. I wonder if they’ve heard of Kohei Saito, his Slow Down text, a kind of ecosocial primer, and a wonderful surprise bestseller in Japan during the pandemic. It really neatly consolidates a somewhat fractured left into a very coherent degrowth position. 

I’ve been totally obsessed with a Korean-German philosopher called Byung-Chul Han who prolifically puts out these incredibly lucid texts on everything that seems to be of the utmost significance in our troubling times. He became well known with two texts called The Burnout Society and The Transparency Society that look at the neoliberal achievement subject with its attendant psychological maladies and the silicon valley doctrine of transparency respectively. He’s written beautiful texts on the disappearance of rituals, the crisis of narration, the virtualization of objects (non-things), and a string of texts filtering western thought through far eastern buddhism, culminating in a text called Absence that I really love. There’s also a wonderful early text called Shanzhai that looks at how that term came to be used pejoratively about Chinese counterfeit goods and what kind of underlying assumptions presuppose that. 

I’ve actually been reading quite a bit of sinological comparative aesthetics, notably Yuk Hui (cosmotechnics and his new work on post european thought) and Francois Julien. Also another Han text called Good Entertainment: Deconstructing the Western Passion Narrative. I’ve been enjoying a series of texts from Minnesota called Forerunners, I just finished one called No Fossils by Dominic Boyer I found very cogent. I also discovered James Elkin’s work, on the shelf at the Harold Washington Library, and have taken out a dozen of his texts from over the years. He’s amazingly fluent in western art historiography and has been doing some interesting collaborative, experimental scholarship, particularly around pedagogy, visual cultures and looking beyond eurocentric art histories. He has a winning disposition too, very good humored. Other things too, I rarely miss an opportunity to recommend David Graeber and David Wengrows The Dawn of Everything, such an important project and contribution to anthropology. 

Outside of that I would like to do a couple more films. One about automobilism/ public transportation / pedestrianized spaces and another about animal rights. I think that’s about as much time as I have left in life.  I’d like to teach as well. And I’m open to helping with other projects. I think the main thing for me right now is getting some degree of stability and support for any of these projects. Or finding other supported projects with common goals to participate in. I’ve been doing all this without any institutional support, just with modest and sporadic freelance work and student loans. I’m really feeling exhausted, under-resourced, tired of substandard living, perpetual precarity, deferred health maintenance, and so on.

I'm happy to see you and meet J, and catch up properly. I hope this is somewhat coherent for a late night catch-up email. It's nice for me to organize my thoughts, I'm missing things...

Here's last sunday with Agnes https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PPrDLUnQB1kqQe8j_t0ZBTBofV2rFM-k/view?usp=drive_link it moves so quick it hurts 

Abrazos, 

p

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Hi M! Hi S! 

I'm going through your writing on Akeley, M, and I just got to a passage on Haraway's Primate Visions. I decided to reply with a short note before I go deeper. 

Here's the early proposal I shared with Susan:

Since that version, and our meeting, I've been working on a more developed and focused proposal and have been sectioning out some of the contemporary and modern examples from the Cosmopoetics segment into discrete exhibition ideas for a series tentatively called interpostions. I think there's a great opportunity to bridge the worlds between contemporary art and the Field Museum. 

I should have a revised proposal for Corwin & Constructing Nature as well as some ideas for the interpositions series to you both in the next few days. 

Also, per our conversation, Sophie Calle is my artist friend who works a lot with taxidermy, here's a nice piece on her in t magazine a few years back:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/t-magazine/sophie-calle-artist-cat-pregnant.html 

Jonathan Crary is the scholar I recommended who has written a lot about visual culture. He also co-founded Zone press and his recent anti Silicon Valley polemic Scorched Earth is really excellent. 

Hiroshi Sugimoto is the photographer who worked extensively with dioramas, and there are others too, including some in the proposal I sent.  

Our meeting was so animating and exciting for me. Thank you both so much. I'm working to get it all down in a more focused way to share. 

I'm back in California now and planning to visit LA NHM to see their critical reflections on their history of diorama making https://nhm.org/pst-reframing-dioramas I just learned about this and it seems very relevant! 

More soon, 

Perry

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Hi S and M, 

Greetings from Los Angeles. I saw the Reframing Dioramas show yesterday at the NHMLA and met Tim Bovard and Matt Davis, the taxidermist and exhibition organizer. It was really well done with an excellent publication. I'm compiling some notes and images to share and making good progress on the Corwin proposal. Corwin did a few dioramas there—unfortunately mostly painted over, but Matt said he could help with some archival materials. Also really impressed with the scope of this edition of PST art and science collide. As well as the visual language for coordinating such an extensive city-wide production. I'll include some pictures in my review as well as highlights from the Lumen show at the Getty and color in pre columbian cosmology show at LACMA. More soon!

Perry

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Hi S and M! 

Greetings from Tokyo. I wanted to share an updated draft of Constructing Nature. There's so much I've left out and it's very provisional but it shows significant development of thought and structure, as well as the work I've been doing in the archive. Please excuse the rough edges. 

There are so many incredible images in here that I think stand up to some of the greatest canonical moments in twentieth century visual culture. 

I've also been working on a document about museographical practices of note and a series I'm calling interpositions, or contemporary art exhibitions and interventions for the Field. I will get these to you as soon as I can. 

Wishing you both a lovely weekend. 

Perry

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Dear S and M, 

Konnichiwa from Kyoto, where I've been staying in an artist residency doing research and generally marveling at this incredibly beautiful, kind and sophisticated country. 

I'm really pleased with the way the Constructing Nature and interpositions projects are coming along. Here is the proposal for the interpositions series. 

M, your thoughtful guidance towards the Blaschka glass found its way in. Wow, that work is so incredibly beautiful! 

I chose (and paired) most of the projects included here because I believe they would be feasible to realize, and I know some of the artists / galleries personally. I think the inclusion of contemporary art at the FM is a really exciting possibility. 

I would like to work on this initiative and imagine it could be done with the preexisting FM exhibitions community. This also opens up the Field museum to art world funding possibilities, which I have some ideas about as well. 

The Constructing Nature show that I put together—almost entirely from the Field Museums archives, I think is really, really strong. It would be a wonderful tribute to the legacy of the Field Museum as well as a significant contribution to the history of Natural History. It takes on some difficult legacies but in a way that's due and I think reckoning with them makes the museum stronger.  

My hope is that you can make a position for me to realize these projects over the coming years. My preference would be to work remotely for the most part, with periodic site visits as needed. 

As mentioned, I wanted to share a few images from PST: Art and Science Collide, particularly the diorama show at LHMLA, the Storm Cloud show at the Huntington, Lumen at the Getty, and the impressive graphic design throughout. I also included some images from the natural history museum in Tokyo—my goodness! and a show at 21_21 design site (Tadao Ando) about waste management. I truly could not have imagined a more elegant and spirited way to deal with this urgent subject matter.   

Ok, so to recap:

1. Constructing Nature here

2. interpostions here

3. Field Notes here

Looking forward to your news.

All my best, 

Perry

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Greetings S and M,

I’ve had some time to reflect on this exciting project. It's been quite a rush since that fateful encounter with Corwin that put me into a fugue, spending hundreds of hours developing this exhibition and learning about the Field's history. I feel a new sense of clarity around this project and what a significant contribution it is. To the grand narratives, the particular protagonists at the FM, and also as a precedent for the reevaluation of overlooked artists working in the modern period.

I see this show as primarily dealing with the history of Natural History, and I’m amazed at how well the Field tells this story. It has all the key ingredients, including its connection to the World’s Columbian Exposition which is important for understanding the development of Natural History museums broadly. Constructing Nature also beautifully addresses the aforementioned problematic of how art was apprehended and evaluated during that period (and very much continuing into our own). I think the images I’ve curated from the archives are truly of world historical caliber and can take their place not just among the history of natural history, but modern art as well. I think this show and publication can really be a major contribution.

I think the show can be realized modestly in the Brooker at a scale commensurate with the photographic documentation, done with a gallery treatment. This also invites people to view them intimately, and there's a special wonder in viewing overlooked beautiful things at this scale. I would like to make reproductions on exposed aluminum—framed or not, but without glass— and offer a curated library and archive with some seating. I think the show could also easily be extended into one of the larger special exhibition galleries with a bit more scope and room to breathe. I've shared a number of ideas for an accompanying public program. 

On my end, I would like a more clear sense of your commitment and my compensation. I would also like support in retrieving the archival materials for reproductions and a copy editor. It will be easier to design the show when we determine the space and I have very particular and informed ideas for how to approach this. 

There is also the possibility of integrating more contemporary art into the exhibition schedule which I'm really happy to keep exploring together.  Actually there are a number of new developments and ideas from this Japan trip. I'm currently in Gifu, following an itinerant 17th century artist monk through his wanderings, taking in the changing seasons and mountain festivals.  

Sending you both kind and warm regards 

and looking forward to your response, 

Perry

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Dear S and M, 

I saw an unbelievably beautiful performance from a very significant Japanese dancer, Min Tanaka, in a forest in Gifu over the weekend. He was dancing a piece (and the place) in honor of the same itinerant artist monk I’m studying, Enku. The timing of these events must be beyond coincidence, or so I’m convinced, and much like Corwin and the cicadas, I feel as though I’m collaborating with the unnamed. In Shinto thought, I’m learning, there are 8 million Kami, or spirits, to consider. I believe this is part of what makes aspects of Japanese culture so mindful, respectful and aware. I’ve been marveling at what it would mean to live in such an enchanted and complex world. 

The reason I’m sharing this, is that I learned Tanaka calls his practice unnamable dance, after a passage in Roger Caillois’ writing. Earlier this year I encountered a stunning collection of photographs of Caillois’ rocks and stones published by a small Italian press and now I’ve been studying Caillois’ earlier work on poetic petrology and ludology. As soon as I saw the book I was convinced this would be a perfect show for the Field, but felt as though it needed something else. A pairing perhaps, like in the other proposals I’ve offered... 

I know now, it should be Tanaka dancing the unnamable dance at the Field Museum along with the beautiful photos of Roger’s collection and some choice passages of his brilliant writings. I think this would be a perfect scale for the Brooker gallery and Tanaka could do a series of dances around the museum. 

I imagine this exhibition and event would be very exciting to the supporters of the Field Museum and could be realized with relatively modest means. 

I’ve attached a brief proposal for your review addended to the earlier interpositions document. 

Wishing you both all the best. 

Kindly, 

Perry

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Hi Perry--

I appreciate your enthusiasm for this research and the many discoveries and connections you're making. 

As indicated previously, the FIeld Museum is not ready to commit to the exhibition you're envisioning, and we do not have funds to work with outside scholars on such a project. If support is required, we should probably pause the conversation. Either way, going forward, please direct exhibition-specific communications to me; Exhibitions will consult M and other FM staff as feedback is needed.

We anticipate conducting some exhibition topic testing soon. The topic list has not been finalized, meaning it's possible we could include Constructing Nature in the mix. Should you wish to provide a very brief write-up (under 200 words), we can see how it might fit into the larger testing goals. The paragraph(s) needn't be perfect; we'll pare it down further to align with the testing instrument. Please note that testing should not be interpreted as commitment.

I regret this is not the news you're looking for, but hope you will recognize our limitations and decision-making process.

Best wishes–

S

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Hi S, 

A brief write up on constructing nature:

Constructing Nature celebrates the unsung artists of the Field Museum and their major contributions to modern art and science. The exhibition draws from the Field Museum’s extensive archive and illustrates the historical development of the Natural History Museum.