On Tuesday, November 11, SCE Associate Dean Robert Kirkbride will present, “That Dark Cabinet: Building the Morbid Anatomy Museum,” at the museum, located in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. Kirkbride will discuss his design for the new museum, which he and collaborator Anthony Cohn transformed from a nightclub into a museum for anatomical curiosities – a building-as-cabinet where knowledge that typically “slips through the cracks” is produced and exhibited. Dr. Kirkbride will discuss the museum’s position in a legacy of memory theaters, reliquaries, studioli, and cabinets-of-curiosities. Commenced on January 16, 2014, the museum was designed and completed in five months. It includes a library for the permanent collection, an exhibition gallery, café and retail, lecture space and workshop. Since ribbon-cutting on June 28, 2014, the museum has received generous press:

“A sense of brooding…creeps through the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, a magnet to curiosity seekers since the opening last summer… Its home, in a former nightclub in Gowanus, a location remote to many New Yorkers, has drawn sizable audiences nonetheless.”
Ruth La Ferla, “Flirting With the Dark Side,” Fashion and Style Section, The New York Times, October 17, 2014

Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum: A new and resplendent temple of weirdness has opened in New York, Visual Arts section, Ariella Budick, The Financial Times, August 22, 2014

The Dark Side Gets Its Due: The Morbid Anatomy Museum Opens in Brooklyn, The New York Times, June 26, 2014

Exploring the Culture of Mourning: Death and Grief Influence New York Exhibitions, The New York Times, October 17, 2014

The Headless Horseman Variety Show, The New Yorker, October 16, 2014

New York City’s Most Morbid Museum, BBC, August 19, 2014

Brooklyn’s Museum of Death: Inside Morbid Anatomy’s House of Intriguing Horrors, The Daily Beast, July 10, 2014

 

“That Dark Cabinet: Building the Morbid Anatomy Museum”
Morbid Anatomy Museum
424-A 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215
8:00 pm
Tickets can be purchased here.