Today the Yale Peabody Museum reopened to the public after a large-scale renovation and reimagining, which included a four-year closure! Entry to the museum is now completely free – but make sure to book a timed ticket if you want to visit us in the weeks soon after reopening.
If you visited the museum in the past, you will still recognize the French Gothic exterior of the original 1920s building designed by Charles Klauder. Some of the objects on display will also be returning friends. However, the renovated interior of the building and its expansions both vertically and to the north, including the building of a second monumental tower, comprise a breathtaking new modern museum.
It promises the public and the Yale community many new ways to enjoy, learn from, and create with the Peabody’s artifacts and its ongoing research and other activities. Almost all of the displays are entirely new, there will be exciting new programming and multimedia content, and there are many new spaces to serve both students and the public.
You can now see hundreds of fascinating historical artifacts from our History of Science and Technology collection on display in the new Peabody as well! In the future, there will be related events and activities in the museum spaces. Students and staff are also working on accompanying virtual content for the Amuse app, which can be accessed from anywhere and not just while visiting the museum.
Currently about 70% of our objects which are on display are in the first-ever, dedicated exhibition gallery for the HST collection. (This means that the space is permanently dedicated to objects from our collection, but the specific objects and multimedia content that visitors will see can change over time, as we share more artifacts and themes and collaborate with different people.) The objects are mixed with engaging images, multimedia content, and texts – including contributions from people outside of the museum.
You can find this new HST gallery by coming through the original entrance to the museum at the corner of Whitney Avenue and Sachem Street. Past visitors will recall that a model of a giant squid used to hang in the lobby. Now a family of flying dinosaurs perch on the visitor’s desk and just outside of one of the arched windows inside our gallery!
After you enter the museum here, go up the grand stone staircase to the second floor, which leads straight to our gorgeous new displays. I will post proper photos of the gallery in the future, working with the museum press office. Elsewhere on the second floor, you will also find the desk of Yale scientist Josiah Willard Gibbs from our collection.
About 30% of our objects which are currently on display in the Peabody Museum are on the first floor, in new galleries dedicated to student- and instructor-designed displays. The Student Programs office and collections staff work with instructors and students who have taught or taken classes that use museum objects to create accompanying displays which will run for less than a year.
These galleries give museum visitors a taste of the ways in which Yale classes use artifacts, and they allow students in particular to gain experience with all of the different aspects of creating and installing exhibitions. I hope to bring you proper photos of these displays in the future as well!
Two of the current displays include large numbers of our objects – one on medical artifacts curated by Dr. Matthew Morrison, M.D. and one on photography curated by Lisa Kereszi. Dr. Morrison is a longtime collaborator of the HST collection, who invites me to share artifacts with the students in his medical literature courses every semester of every year. I’ve written blog posts in the past about some of these classes including here, here, and here.
There will be even more of our artifacts in museum spaces which will be opening in the coming weeks. Stay tuned to the exciting new Yale Peabody Museum – and welcome back!
History of Science & Technology at Peabody Museum 