“Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art”
Lecture by Kathryn A. Hoffmann, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Date & Time: Tuesday, March 24th at 7:30 PM (Doors open at 7:00)
Venue: Observatory
Location: 543 Union St. at Nevins / Brooklyn, NY 11215 (Gowanus)
Price: Free!

This illustrated talk will follow the paths of sleeping beauties: lovely young women who lie on silk sheeted beds in glass cases in anatomical museums and fairground shows, who recline on sofas in Belgian train stations, and sometimes in the middle of streets. Often the women were nude. Sometimes they were adorned with a piece of jewelry or a bow, and sometimes they wore white dresses. One breathed gently in a glass case on a fairground verandah for nearly a century. Others lay quietly in caskets under flowers. Some were wax, some were real, some were dead, and some merely pretended to be dead. Sometimes, in the imagination of artists like the surrealist Paul Delvaux, they got up and walked about; pretty somnambulists wandering through natural history museums, arcades and streets, through modern cities and ancient Alexandria, Ephesus, and Rhodes.

Using photographs, posters, advertisements, and paintings, the talk will follow models known as “Anatomical Venuses” through one of the great wax anatomical museums of the world (La Specola in Florence) and an extraordinarily long-lived popular museum that traveled the fairground routes of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Pierre Spitzner’s Great Anatomical and Ethnological Museum). It will take side trips into some of the visual worlds the Venuses drew from or helped inspire, including fairground sleeping beauty acts, morgue shows, mortuary photography, reliquary displays, and art. In the paths of the sleeping beauties, it is clear that death and slumber, pedagogy and entertainment, science and reverie long shared strange borders.

Kathryn A. Hoffmann is the author of books and numerous articles on the body, including “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground.” She is Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses on anomalous bodies and the histories of medicine and the fairground. She has received awards for her writing, and lectures frequently for associations, libraries, and museums in the fields of the history of medicine, literature, and art.

Entry via Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room; go through back door of gallery, then take a left to find event. Directions here or call 718.243.1572. Feel free to email me at morbidanatomy@gmail.com with any questions. Note: I have seen Hoffman speak on this topic, and I can assure you–this is a lecture not to be missed!

Image: from “Anatomical Theatre;” click here to see full online exhibition. Image details: “La Specola” (Museo di Storia Naturale) : Florence, Italy; “Anatomical Venus” Wax wodel with human hair and pearls in rosewood and Venetian glass case; Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790)

For more information, see original post here: http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/2009/03/introducing-observatory-and-upcoming.html