St Bart's Pathology Museum - Field Trip with Joanna Ebenstein & Carla Connolly .
Lecture “Anatomical Venuses, The Slashed Beauty, and Fetuses Dancing a Jig,” plus tour of the ground floor level of the Museum.

Wednesday 19th September 2012
Doors at 6.30 pm, Show commences at 7 pm

A very special off-site visit to the newly rejuvenated St Bartholomew's Hospital Pathology Museum, lovingly restored by Pathology Technician Carla Connolly.

Since 2005, artist, independent scholar and Morbid Anatomist Joanna Ebenstein has travelled the world seeking out–and photographing whenever possible–the most fascinating, curious, and overlooked medical collections and wunderkammern, backstage and front, private and public. In the process, she has amassed not only an astounding collection of images but also a great deal of knowledge about the history and cultural context of these fascinating and uncanny artifacts.
In her lecture “Anatomical Venuses, The Slashed Beauty, and Fetuses Dancing a Jig,” Ebenstein will lead you on a highly-illustrated tour of medical museums and introduce you to many of their most curious and enigmatic denizens, including the Anatomical Venus, the Slashed Beauty, the allegorical fetal skeleton tableau (as seen above), the flayed horseman of the apocalypse, and three fetuses dancing a jig. Ebenstein will contextualize these artifacts via a discussion of the history of medical museums and modeling, a survey of great artists of the genre, and an examination of other death-related arts and amusements which made up the cultural landscape at the time that these objects were originally created, collected, and exhibited.

Joanna Ebenstein is a multi-disciplinary artist with an academic background in intellectual history. She runs the Morbid Anatomy blog and related open-to-the-public Brooklyn-based Morbid Anatomy Library. She is also the founding member of Observatory, a Brooklyn based arts and events space devoted to the revival of the 18th century notions of the dilettante and rational amusements. Her recent work—which includes photography, curation, installation, blogging, museum consulting, lecturing and writing—centers on anatomical museums and their artifacts, collectors and collecting, curiosities and marvels, 18th and 19th Century natural history and, as the subtitle of her blog states, “surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture.” She has lectured at a variety of popular and academic venues, and her work has been shown and published internationally; she is the current Coney Island Musuem artist in resident, and recent solo exhibitions include The Secret Museum and Anatomical Theatre. You can find out more at her at her website astropop.com and her blog Morbid Anatomy; you can view much of her photography work by clicking here. She can be reached at morbidanatomy [at] gmail.com.

St Bartholomews Pathology Museum,
3rd Floor,
Robin Brook Centre,
West Smithfield,
London
EC1A 7BE

The Last Tuesday Society is honoured to house this exhibition and lecture series cultivated in collaboration with Joanna Ebenstein of the rightfully venerated 'Morbid Anatomy' Library, Museum & Blog.

Talks at 11 Mare Street - please click here to buy tickets