By Steven Scarpa, Associate Director of Marketing and Communications
The Yale Peabody Museum announces the opening of a new gallery exhibition using the collection to explore the ideas of possibility and collective action shared across cultures.
A Great Migration, a new multimedia gallery by Katharen Wiese, opened to the public on August 27 on the first floor of the museum. Admission to the Peabody Museum is always free.
Wiese’s work uses the common language describing both the movement of African Americans between 1910 and 1970 and the northern migration of Sandhill cranes to explore the ideas of assimilation, possibility, and collective actions shared across cultures.
“I am excited by how A Great Migration synthesizes a space between engagement with scientific research, craft traditions, and African American history. Both in science and the arts, the labor of women is often underrepresented and undervalued, especially women of color,” Wiese said, who joined the museum as a Summer Art Fellow. This fellowship is co-sponsored by the Yale Peabody Museum and the Yale School of Art.
Wiese was inspired by the cranes’ act of “painting.” Sandhill cranes will dip their beaks in iron rich mud, and they'll paint their wings. She said that biologists believe this could be a way that they're trying to camouflage themselves, or a way to look youthful. It made her think about how African Americans and people of color adapt in different environments, she explained.
“I have been considering ideas of assimilation, adaptation, and belonging implied by painting, and the particular significance of these ideas in relation to black Nebraskans’ making space for themselves in predominantly white environments. How do we adapt to monocultural environments and how do we determine the meaning of our own adaptation?” Wiese said.
The presence of a working artist reacting in real time to their scientific inquiry has added a new and welcome dimension to the Peabody’s work. Going back to the creation of the iconic mural The Age of Reptiles, in the 1940s, art and science have been an important part of the Peabody’s ethos. Wiese’s gallery continues that long and robust tradition.
“Kat Wiese’s project explores the natural world, African American history, the concept of legacy, and the power of communal actions. A Great Migration offers incisive connecting threads that feel at home at the Peabody in an exciting new way. Throughout this fellowship period, Wiese's insights—often shared in meandering conversations at the ends of long days—have changed how I view the potential of the renovated museum and my own work,” said Kailen Rogers, the Peabody’s Associate Director of Exhibitions.
“The fellowship program is in its second year and has been a fantastic way to collaborate with Yale MFA students. Kat and her work have provided a beautiful way to invite visitors to participate in the art-making process. I feel we are lucky to have had her in this role this summer, and it’s a privilege to be able to host her collaborative work in the gallery for visitors to engage with,” said Nicole Palffy-Muhoray, associate director of student programs.
ABOUT KATHAREN WIESE
Katharen Wiese (b. 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist from Lincoln, NE, currently residing in New Haven, Connecticut. She holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (2018) and an MFA from Yale University (2024). Before entering graduate school, Wiese was a community arts organizer in the Everett and Near South Neighborhoods of Lincoln, Nebraska where she coordinated murals, events, and public projects. Wiese’s own artistic background spans, figurative painting, printmaking, murals, and collage. Her current work engages the actualities of commodity culture and its relationship to racial and environmental harm by use of reclaimed materials. Situated within her experience of dualities as a biracial black Nebraskan, the patchwork is a primary form holding a simultaneity of subject positions. Through interventions in painting, quilting, and bricolage, her work evokes the animate histories of disposable objects, aiming for a negotiation between image and surface which refuses to be hastily consumed. Her work has been featured in both national and international exhibitions. She is currently a teaching fellow at the University of New Haven.