At The Institute Library, A Collection Of Collections

A copper “specimen box” encases an old whiffle ball bat. The plastic of the tip of the bat is torn, revealing a hollow interior. At the lip of the gash, dirt, like dried blood, coats the yellow plastic skin.

Surrounding it are nearly 20 other copper specimen boxes, each holding a natural or man-made object, such as a fishing lure, a lightbulb, or an animal skull. The frame of the box shows a specimen number, the name of the object, and the location where it was found.

"Specimen Number 35," a cattail, has a poem rather than a name: “Somewhere, below and to my left, an unseen and bent or broken cattail rubs against the side of my canoe. It is a squeak, a mild soft squeal. Not fingernails on a chalkboard, but more the sound of a badly played note on a violin, although no bad violin player can play so softly. Today, that bowing of the cattail on the side of my canoe flushes a snipe, so swift, it darts into the air, never more than six inches above the cattails.”

Specimen Boxes by the artist Scott Schuldt is part of Precious: Gathering What We Love. Curiosities, Cabinets, Connoisseurship & Collecting, an exhibition at the Institute Library’s Gallery Upstairs running through Sept. 6. Curated by Martha Lewis, Maxim Schmidt, Scott Schuldt, and Kristen Kassidy, Precious functions as a sort of collection of collections, exploring concepts such as consumerism, play and memory.

“I thought sharing what our community is carefully and happily saving might be a good conversation starter and a way to look at what beauty and abundance and surprises we have all around us,” said Lewis in an introductory text for the show.

As she notes in the same text, the Institute Library is also a sort of collection, with books on collecting woven in throughout the show. “This exhibit is … a visual reflection on local collections housed within a local collection with the aim of reframing that collection,” Lewis writes.

Tal Berkowitz Photos.

Precious highlights collecting both as a hobby and as an art form. By including collections like Robert Zott’s Stone Poems, it seeks to expand people's collective notion of what a collection can be.

Stone Poems is formatted as a book, not as a collection of objects on display. In its creation, Zott traveled to cemeteries across the northeastern United States and photographed gravestones. He then compiled the photos into poems using the last name of the deceased, each cemetery getting its own poem. 

In the collective consciousness, the idea of a collection is one of some number of physical objects all sharing some selected characteristic held and stored together under the ownership of the collector. Stone Poems seeks to expand this notion by presenting itself as a collection despite the fact that the collected objects (here, gravestone poems) do not exist in the physical world at all, much less under the ownership of Zott.

In addition to being creatively inspired, the visuals of Stone Poems are also poignant. Each photo centers a gravestone between a foreground of grass and the graveyard sky.

Precious also comments on the corporatized and consumerist nature of some methods of collecting. “Fashion and disposables both in terms of manufacturing and ‘landfill’ are destroying our planet,” Lewis notes in a curatorial statement. “Even collecting natural objects has its consequences.”

Some collections included in Precious, such as Beanie Babies by Joy Bush, explicitly engage in this consumerism. Others, like Specimen Boxes, avoid it. Sweet Treats and Miniatures by Adrian Huq, however, decides instead to subvert the consumerist nature of some collections.

Housed in a dollhouse, Sweet Treats and Miniatures features authentic plastic Barbies working a candy shop full of branded boxes labeled “Funfetti” or “Nerds.” There are cake-shaped erasers, gingerbread man stickers, cupcake keychains, and bottle caps.

In being an amalgamation of branded collectibles, Sweet Treats defies the corporate idea of how their collectibles will be consumed. It shows no allegiance to any brand or type of collectible, choosing instead to allow the collector agency in which, if any, collectible is used for a specific purpose.

In Vintage Playing Cards, by Eileen Mydosh, Precious expands on this idea of consumption by relating it to concepts of play, interactivity, and art.

Vintage Playing Cards is exactly what the title announces it to be. “Little Orphan Annie” backed cards and “Adultitis Fighter” cards featuring surreal and psychedelic-seeming images are scattered across the inside compartment of a table, shielded from the audience by a sheet of glass.

This collection draws a viewer's attention to one of the ironies of both collecting and art exhibitions—the seemingly static landscape they create.

Playing cards are not created primarily as a collector’s item, nor are they created to be put on display. When playing cards are used to play a card game, they are 52 separate objects for the user to interact with. The user physically touches and manipulates them, and what they represent changes in response to the user’s actions. 

Under a glass panel, though, the interaction between people and the cards is limited to viewing. This placing of an otherwise interactable object in the situation of an art exhibit, where it cannot be interacted with, forces the viewer to contemplate the interactivity of other objects placed in art exhibits.

Given the context of an exhibit about collections, Vintage Playing Cards specifically forces viewers to consider interactivity between the artist and the art. Collections are perpetually incomplete. Does that mean something like a painting, too, can be considered an incomplete work even after it has been displayed? Does the significance or value of a painting on exhibition change when the artist’s attitudes or thoughts toward it change?

In her curatorial statement, Lewis reflects on three goals for the exhibition: To create dialogue surrounding collecting and consumerism, to expand the popular notion of a collection, and to inspire the audience to make their own collections.

The presentation of bleeding-edge artistic statements such as Stone Poems or Specimen Boxes alongside less aggressively innovative collections such as Beanie Babies allows the viewer to recognize the inherent artistic value of any sort of collection. Recognizing this value helps to assure the viewer that whatever idea for a collection Precious has inspired in them has the potential to be artistically fruitful and fun.

This article comes from the 2025 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). YAJI is a program in which New Haven, Hamden and West Haven Public Schools high school students pitch, write, edit and publish articles through the Arts Paper. This year, YAJI advisors include Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman and reporter and YAJI alum Abiba Biao. Tal Berkowitz is a rising junior at Wilbur Cross High School.

The Gallery Upstairs is located on the third floor of the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St. in New Haven.