Lost in the Museum: Buried Treasures and the Stories They Tell

Amazon.com Price: $29.00 (as of 20/04/2019 07:43 PST- Details)

Description

Few beyond the insider realize that museums own millions of objects the general public never sees. In Lost within the Museum, Nancy Moses takes the reader at the back of the Oemployees onlyO doors to uncover the stories buried―together with the objects―within the crypts of museums, historical societies, and archives. Moses discovers the real birds shot, stuffed, and painted by John James Audubon, AmericaOs most beloved bird artist; a spear that abolitionist John Brown carried in his quixotic quest to free the slaves; and the skull of a prehistoric Peruvian child who died with scurvy. She takes the reader to Ker-Feal, the name of the game farmhouse that Albert Barnes of the Barnes Foundation full of fabulous American antiques and that was once then left untouched for more than fifty years. Weaving the stories of the item, its original owner, and the ceaselessly idiosyncratic institution where the item resides, the book reveals the darkest secret of the cultural world: the precarious balance of art, culture, and politics that keep items, for decades, lost within the museum.

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