Menil Society Benefactors, Friends, and Fellows are invited to join Paul R. Davis, Curator of Collections, to explore the newly reopened exhibition, A Surrealist Wunderkammer. Over the summer, the Menil Collection took on the substantial renovation of the gallery and its display with an eye toward future projects related to the exhibition’s twenty-five-year history of exploring Surrealism.
A Surrealist Wunderkammer is a single-gallery exhibition devoted to seeing the world from the perspective of Surrealism, an international art and literary movement started by André Breton, Paul Éluard, and others in France during the 1920s. The gallery presents ethnographic and found “surreal” objects, obsolete photographic and moving image technologies, and other works that informed the thinking of artists affiliated with Surrealism.
The original exhibition, which opened in 1999 with the title Witnesses–A Surrealist Wunderkammer, grew out of conversations between Dominique de Menil and her son-in-law, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, about the exceptional collection of Surrealism and Indigenous arts from the Pacific Islands and Pacific Northwest assembled by the de Menil family.
