Wed Jan 25 2017
Mütter Museum is asking public to follow along and participate online in the show’s creation.
Flu pandemic topic of 2019 exhibition
By Stephan Salisbury CULTURE WRITER
The museum seeks to convey what a pandemic feels like. National Museum of Health & Medicine
Just in time for what could be a virulent flu
season, the Mütter Museum has invited interested viewers to jump into
the potentially infectious waters of exhibition creation.
At 2:30 Tuesday, the museum hosted a Facebook Live
event to announce a major exhibition — tentatively titled “Spit Spreads
Death” and scheduled to open in 2019 — that will explore the influenza
pandemic of 1918-19 in Philadelphia and seek to convey what it feels
like when deadly disease strikes half a million people in a city of
nearly two million.
In coming weeks and months, the museum will invite
the public to follow along in blog posts as the exhibition begins to
come together. In May, another online gathering will be held to give an
update of where planning for the show has taken its creators. The show
is scheduled to open in mid-2019.
The museum has commissioned the British art
collective Blast Theory, known for its use of interactive media and the
integration of performance, visual art, and digital broadcasting, to
create a work of art to serve as a centerpiece of the exhibit, curators
announced on Face-book.
Matt Adams, one of three members of Blast Theory,
known for his work in theater and with interactive media, said the
exhibition process had just begun and the result remained a mystery. He
called the prospect of the exhibit exciting.
In addition to Adams, two guest curators have been
brought in to work on the project: Jane E. Boyd, an independent curator
based in Philadelphia, and Trevor Smith, contemporary-art curator at
the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The project is funded by the
Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
Mütter Museum officials said they were seeking to
engage audiences in new ways, not just through the museum collection.
They are also keen on showing how an exhibition is created — and
interpreted by a contemporary artist.
Speaking from the Mütter’s library on South 22d
Street, beneath the portrait of late 19th-century surgeon Samuel Gross,
curators and artist said they’d work collaboratively to shape both
artwork and exhibition and to ensure that all is “fused.”
“What we don’t want is, here is the history
exhibition and over here is the piece of art,” said Robert Hicks,
director of the Mütter library and leader of the collaborative group. ssalisbury@phillynews.com
215-854-5594
@spsalisbury
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