Online Talk: Exploring Cabinets of Curiosity: Art, Science, Colonialism, and Cataloguing the Natural World with Artist Kate Samworth

Artist and illustrator Kate Samworth leads an online talk exploring the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities — the frenzied, often obsessive collecting of natural and man-made objects that became a defining occupation of 16th-century nobility, merchants, apothecaries, and natural philosophers.

Gallstones, narwhal tusks, and conjoined sheep alongside saint's teeth, sextants, and ceremonial cups: these agglomerations — precursors to modern museums — grew from cabinets into entire rooms and wings, extending into botanical gardens and menageries across Europe. The talk examines how the spice trade, the Greco-Arabic translation movement, and the printing press shaped Renaissance science and art, and how the era's images reveal the scientific, artistic, colonial, and religious motives behind the collecting impulse.

Samworth is an artist and educator whose work has appeared at RISD, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her illustrated book Aviary Wonders Inc. won the Kirkus Prize.

Online via Zoom. $8. Recording sent to ticket holders after the event.