The exhibit Object Lessons: Recollecting Museum Histories at Michigan runs until December 30, 2017, at the U-M Museum of Natural History.

Until December 30, visitors to the U-M Museum of Natural History have the chance to see a special exhibit—one that explores the Museum’s past as well as the world of the 19th-century collector. Object Lessons: Recollecting Museum Histories at Michigan draws from the 25 million objects in the university’s collections to explain to visitors how the Museum began.

Amanda Krugliak, art curator at the U-M Institute for the Humanities, calls the exhibit “a love letter to the Ruthven building.”

Object Lessons is the last exhibit for the UMMNH, which will close to the public for most of 2018 in order to move to a building nearby, the Biological Sciences Building.

Kerstin Barndt, associate professor of German and museum studies, curated the exhibit, which complements a book co-edited by Barndt and Carla Sinopoli, curator of Asian archaeology and ethnology in the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Object Lessons & the Formation of Knowledge, published this fall by the University of Michigan Press, explains the origins and the scope of the university’s vast collections.

At the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology is a second exhibit related to the book: Excavating Archaeology at U-M 1817-2017. Sinopoli and Kelsey director Terry Wilfong co-curated this exhibit, which runs through May 2018.

Read more and listen to a related podcast at Michigan Today and on the U-M arts and culture website.