A recreation of the contents of a museum case from a dissipated University Museum, based on a found document.

During a four-month residency at Alfred University, New York I became interested in the story of the Steinheim Museum, an eclectic cabinet of curiosities founded on campus in the 1870's and the first museum in Western New York. It housed a collection of hundreds of thousands of objects including birds, fossils, plants, pottery, oil paintings, statuary, shoes, stuffed animals, basketry, costumes, historical implements, relics, rocks and other curiosities including the skeleton of the first woman prosecuted in the county for murder.

After the death of its founder the museum fell into disrepair. In the 1950's it became a meeting place for lovers. Successive generations of students dared each other to break into the museum and bring back an artefact as proof. The dilapidation of the building threatened the collection and uncoordinated rescue efforts left artefacts strewn around various departments of the university and other undocumented safekeeping places in the village. Between 1953 when the museum was finally closed to the public and the time the building was renovated in 1996 into a career development centre, virtually all of the collection had vanished.

I found an anonymous, undated document in the University Archives. It lists categories of artefacts in one case from the museum at a time when the collection was mostly intact but starting to disappear. Now that the artefacts have gone, the categories; CHINESE, WOOD FRAGMENT, COLONIAL AND GENERAL, ITEMS IN BAD SHAPE, EVERYTHING CHEWED BY MICE, are absurdly broad and give only the slightest hint of what may had once been on the shelf. I used this document as a set of instructions to recreate the six shelves of the case using objects I found, bought, borrowed or made from around the village.

Please see www.alfreddiary.blogspot.com for a diary of the residency.

Original diagram courtesy of Alfred University Archives