Wunderkammers and Contested Sacrality in the Walters Art Museum

By Brynn Mattsen

Pull quotes:

“The rhetoric and visual vocabulary present in the Chamber of Wonders lend itself to evidence that the museum prioritizes imperialist narratives as more sacred than the narratives of the cultures of origin exhibited in the room–and they urge the observer towards this prioritization as well.”

“Because the museum is meant to represent a pillar of American Civil religion as an educational institution that trains civilians, the sacrality that should be associated with this status fails when the education the Walters provides is manipulative and incomplete.”

“Offering the mummy up for display in the way she is, with inappropriate historical context and within a room modeled after designs by imperialist and colonialist figures, implies a heavy meaning to the unsuspecting visitor who assumes legitimacy in the museum space.”

Author Introduction: This paper is based on my brief experience as a volunteer at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It is based on a particular standing exhibit there called the Chamber of Wonders styled after the wunderkammers (‘wonder rooms’) of wealthy Europeans of the Age of Exploration, which feature cultural and natural artifacts obtained from outside of Europe and are rife with racism and exoticism. Tucked away in a corner of the Chamber of Wonders are the remains of an ancient Egyptian child. Research in Goucher College’s Special Collections and Archives connects the college’s founder to the mummy, and the resulting paper dissects the narratives presented by the Walters in the Chamber of Wonders exhibit, how they create a fundamentally contested history and space, and how that contestation influences the museum’s status of cultural and spiritual sacrality according to certain frameworks.

No faculty intro — student submitted entry.

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