Past Exhibitions, 2001–2010

For this first exhibition in the Kelsey Contemporaries series, Libyan-American artist and U-M School of Art & Design graduate Reem Gibriel fashioned amphorae out of fabric and clay that were designed to slowly disintegrate over time. The amphorae, whose shapes evoke the human figure, were each given an individual name and are intended as metaphors for victims of displacement, war, and genocide around the world. The collapse of the amphorae during the run of the exhibition evokes the passage of time and the fragility of human existence.

This special exhibition, the first in the Upjohn Exhibit Wing, featured some of the dramatic aerial photographs that Mary Meader took over Egypt in 1937, before modern development had encroached on the pyramids and other ancient monuments.

From January 13 to February 24, 2006, at the Duderstadt center on the University of Michigan north campus, the Kelsey Museum mounted an exhibition on the Roman site of Antioch of Pisidia in Asia Minor (Turkey)—a Hellenistic city refounded by Augustus in 25 BC as a Roman colony.

This Fertile Land presents seals and painted pottery from ancient Iran and Iraq at a period when signs and symbols were deployed in complex programs of meaning. Often the meanings are redolent with associations of nature, landscape, agrarian fertility, and human sexuality. Often they present symbols that slightly later become codified signifiers of divinities and mythologized aspects of the human condition in its larger context: snakes, phallic symbols, shamans, ibexes, suns, and fruits of the earth. 

What was life like for a man and his family living almost two thousand years ago? Archaeologists have often focused on what life was generally like in the ancient world, but few have examined this from the perspective of a single household. The exhibition Digging Up a Story: The House of Claudius Tiberianus uses papyri and archaeology to draw the visitor into the life of one family in Roman Egypt.

What was childhood like in the ancient world? Everyone was a child once, but experiences of childhood differ widely across time and culture. The exhibition Archaeologies of Childhood: The First Years of Life in Roman Egypt looks at material from Egypt under Roman rule and tries to show what childhood was like in that particular place and time.

This exhibition combined items from the Egyptian collection at the Kelsey Museum with a small number of loan objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, integrating the information they convey with new data from ongoing Michigan excavations at Abydos in southern Egypt. Recent work in the late Old Kingdom cemetery at the site allows us to consider how Egyptian individuals inscribed notions of identity, power, family, and society onto long-lived mortuary landscapes. Looking at their graves over time reveals how individuals could manipulate the representation of identity, as well as how the memory of certain individuals was desecrated or revered throughout Egyptian history.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933), the eminent Greek Alexandrian poet, often drew inspiration from the ancient world, particularly the classical and late antique spheres that are so well represented by the Kelsey collections. Cavafy's presence at the Kelsey invites the visitor to contemplate a dialogue between modern poetry and archaeology. 

The enduring importance of fabric in our everyday lives—for clothing, furnishings, symbolic communication, and commerce—is underscored by the study of historic cloth.

Love them, hate them, use them, abuse them: animals are everywhere in our lives. The argument could be made, however, that they were more important to the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome. U-M undergraduates considered this and many other issues as they designed and helped to organize an exhibition.