POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Artist Mark Dion is renowned for his “cabinets of curiosities” that incorporate found objects from richly diverse sources. During a semester as an artist-in-residence at Vassar College, Dion co-taught a course and worked with students to create such a cabinet with objects curated from various collections at Vassar. The result is the site-specific installation Universal Collection: A Mark Dion Project.

Universal Collection will be on view in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center through December 11, 2016. The installation features a monumental (twenty-three feet tall) cabinet which houses hundreds of objects pulled from all corners of Vassar’s campus and history. The objects come from the collections of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the A. Scott Warthin Museum of Geology & Natural History, Special Collections, Athletics, the Music Department, Drama Department, Biology Department, and the Vassar College Artifacts Project. Some highlights include: nineteenth-century scientific instruments, paintings, botanical specimens, athletic equipment, taxidermy, sculpture, geological specimens, and Vassar memorabilia such as student handbooks and class rings.

“Dion spent countless hours digging through the campus’s disparate collections and archives, even exploring basements, to select objects for inclusion, “ says Mary-Kay Lombino, the Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator and Assistant Director for Strategic Planning at the Art Center. “The resulting installation offers an arresting visual array that will at once seduce and challenge viewers. His work challenges our assumptions of how things are meant to be selected, categorized, and displayed in a museum setting.”

For example, a well-worn field hockey stick hangs beside a Picasso still-life, a former dance student’s old ballet shoes hang near a fossil of a fish and an Indian oil painting on glass, and a Wedgwood vase is seen together with a contemporary ceramic pot made on a Native American reservation. These types of juxtapositions and many more begin to address the politics of display and upend traditional museum classification as well as visitor expectations.