TAXIDERMY CULTURE: THE HUMAN LIFE OF ANIMALS
Join Robert Marbury, author of Taxidermy Art: A Rogue's Guide, for a six-week immersion into the polysemous world of preserved animals, beginning November 3. Rather than a technique class, this class will use taxidermy as a pressure gauge for who holds cultural authority over the natural world at any given moment.
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Over the course of six weeks, we will move through time and space, from the Wunderkammer to the Rogue Taxidermy movement, asking not just what taxidermy means, but who has the power to decide that meaning. This includes an honest look at the asymmetry baked into natural history itself: whose labor filled the cases, whose knowledge got credited, and whose got erased. Together, we'll trace six eras where the same preserved animal shifts identity depending on who's holding the mount. By the end of the course, students will leave with a working framework for reading any preserved animal, in a museum, a gallery, or a meme, as an argument about power as much as a specimen of nature.