Coming Together: Campus Collections at the Fowler Museum
The Fowler Museum at UCLA was about to open the exhibition The Map and the Territory: 100 Years of Collecting at UCLA, which brings together selections from over a dozen of the campus’ remarkable collections in celebration of this year’s Centennial. In partnership with the Hammer Museum at UCLA and the UCLA Library, the Fowler gathered rare books and manuscripts, historic prints, contemporary paintings and drawings, abstract animations, ceramics, musical instruments, avian specimens, meteorites, and more. The COVID-19 epidemic postponed our opening scheduled for April 4th, but over the coming weeks we will share with you some of these wonderful and thought-provoking objects. We hope the wide range of materials will open new horizons for you at home and shorten the distances among us.
The idea for The Map and the Territory was the product of coming together and discovering common themes among UCLA’s collections, rather than the result of a preset organizational schema. The materials chosen speak to connections between people and places, and shed light on human resourcefulness in the face of hardship—something that resonates all the more powerfully with us today.
The exhibition’s title was inspired by a 1946 short story by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. It described an empire so obsessed with maps that it created one matching the actual size of its territory. This scale rendered the map impractical. The urge to reckon with and document the world in all its diversity and imperfection has occupied artists, novelists, scholars, economists, and many others over the centuries. This exhibition, too, grapples with how to represent UCLA’s holdings, yet make them manageable and coherent.
Over the next few weeks, the Fowler Museum invites you to virtually explore and think about The Map and the Territory through a sampling of objects that you will be able to see when the storm passes, the Fowler reopens, and we can all experience the exhibition in person. Until then, we hope that your curiosity and love of knowledge—which spurred the formation of UCLA’s collections and this exhibition—will be nurtured by glimpses of creativity and resilience that will inspire you, make you think, and connect you with the past and present in new and unexpected ways.
MAP OF NOWHERE, 2008 Color etching Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. Purchased with funds provided by the Helga K. and Walter Oppenheimer Acquisition Fund. |
My Relatives I Sing for You – Nehiinkem, Če’ee’axre, 2010 Archival pigment print Hammer Museum |
Ocean of Generosity, ca. 2000 Paper, paint Fowler Museum at UCLA, X2008.5.7; Museum purchase |
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