James Clifton, is the Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and Curator, Renaissance and Baroque Painting, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Blaffer Foundation manages a significant collection of early modern European art, primarily paintings, and since 2008 has expanded to include a curiosity cabinet. Clifton will be speaking about his research, which, in part, investigates how curiosity cabinets connected to developing culture of early scientific inquiry until knowledge of geography, science, and ethnography progressed enough and collections became less dependent on spectacle and the exotic.

This talk is part of “Entering the Wunderkammer,” a series of events and activities that brings together students, artists and curators to engage with the wide range of topics raised by "cabinets of curiosity." These precursors to modern museums, first popularized in Renaissance Europe, will be the pivot point for lectures and workshops that will interrogate curation as art, art as research, and display as cultural language.