At an intersection, a traveler has a choice of where to go—it is a place of possibility and potential. With a collection spanning 5,000 years of global history, the Spencer Museum of Art exists at a crossroads where art, ideas, and experience intersect to create new directions for discovery. A work of art also carries the stories of its own journey, which multiply and take on new meanings as it intersects with other people, traveling across geography and generations.

Four galleries on this floor feature long-term exhibitions that highlight the range and depth of the Spencer Museum’s collection. They explore distinct yet intertwined themes and spark conversations among works of art created in different historical, geographic, and cultural contexts. Two balcony galleries feature short-term exhibitions, and the Ingrid and J.K. Lee Study Center is a hybrid space for classes, research visits, and temporary installations. We invite you to chart your own path, follow your curiosity, and make new connections.

This exhibition centers you in the Spencer Museum’s collection galleries and introduces an intersectional approach to engaging with questions about the human experience. The art on display invites you to consider: How have people used objects to create community? How has the global circulation of people and objects driven human creativity? How do the legacies of colonialism, enslavement, commodification, and consumption reverberate in museums today?

Throughout Intersections, you will encounter a variety of viewpoints from students , scholars, artists, and Museum staff through texts, QR codes, and monitors. We hope you use this information to navigate big ideas, explore how they intersect with your experiences, and discover the many ways we continually co-create knowledge about our world.

Discover ways that artists craft a sense of community and sustain social rituals through clay. These ceramics span the Museum's global collection, from ancient pottery to contemporary forms that represent shared human experiences, distinct traditions, and ways that cultures influence one another. Intimate in scale, many of these works were meant to be touched, held, and passed from person to person.

What does one cup hold? The stories of its material, design, and contents? The memories of those who used it? This gathering of containers evokes social engagement and spiritual ritual, from objects associated with the spread of Buddhism to the underground activity that took place during prohibition in the United States. Objects like these facilitate shared social experiences and connect us to trade and labor networks. What does your favorite cup hold for you?

To quench your thirst for a game, try drinking from a puzzle jug. These vexing vessels were a popular form of entertainment in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. Holes in the jug’s neck make it difficult to drink without making a mess. The solution is hidden within an interior channel running around the rim and down the handle. The drinker must cover the right combination of holes to create a vacuum and draw out the contents.

This loop-handled jug was removed from a cemetery at Bab Edh-Dhra’ in the present-day nation of Jordan. As the oldest known burial ground in the region, the site marks a moment of great societal change as semi-nomadic people began settling into communities during the early Bronze Age. Containers for funeral feasts and burial rites were entombed alongside the deceased. What does this gesture suggest about the way these people cared for their community members? How does it compare to practices today?

Richard Notkin serves anti-war messages from his teapots, explaining “I use the teapot metaphorically…I’m more interested in conveying ideas than tea.” Notkin grew up in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust and was a student at the Kansas City Art Institute during the Vietnam War. Steeped in those events, he creates teapots with haunting symbols that warn of the horrors of war: a mushroom cloud, skull, and teetering stacks of dice.

Illustrations like this Narcissus Pseudonarcissus L. (wild daffodil) on the large dinner plate reflect European intellectual thought of the 1700s, which emphasized learning through observation of nature. The illustrations are based on the Flora Danica, or “flowers of Denmark,” an encyclopedia of native wildflowers of the kingdom of Denmark. Claiming each as “native,” however, reflects the research of the time and the agenda of its creators who sought to bolster national pride, spread botanical knowledge, and exploit the benefits of plants.

This original form of “text messaging” goes back 4,000 years. Cuneiform is the earliest known system of writing, recorded as combinations of wedge-shaped marks on wet clay tablets using a sharpened reed of stiff grass. Even emojis have ancient counterparts in the form of logograms and pictographs, which developed alongside systems of writing. Cuneiform tablets first captured records related to land and agriculture, but evolved to document maps, literature, religious teachings, and more.

The style of this ancient Etruscan drinking cup is known as Bucchero, a distinctive black, burnished pottery made to resemble metal. An indigenous society of the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans’ economic and social power was based on their production and export of metal, particularly iron. With few surviving records, what we know about the Etruscans comes from objects found in tombs. From the realm of the deceased, we gain clues about their ways of life.

On a treasure map, “X” marks the spot, but if you could experience a bird’s-eye view of historic Marvin Grove, you would discover that it is a heart-shaped area marking the treasured green space at the heart of KU. Nestled behind the Spencer Museum of Art and stretching from Memorial Drive to Memorial Stadium, this wooded hollow takes on a nest-like quality on a campus-wide scale. It is a place of respite for all Jayhawks and migratory visitors alike, and as the Museum’s backyard, it is a site of celebration for the interplay of nature, culture, and the character of our community for our 5th Annual Backyard Bash.

This year’s Backyard Bash is anchored by the monthlong installation Conference of the Birds, a series of 13 sculptural nests created by KU students, commissioned by the Museum, and situated throughout the Grove. The artists are graduate and undergraduate students representing architecture, physics, social welfare, and visual art.

Conference of the Birds borrows its name from a 12th century poem by Farid ud-Din Attar in which a gathering of the world’s birds embark on a quest for a leader and spiritual truth to overcome the challenges of their world—many of which we face today. Different nests in the installation investigate themes of adaptation, shelter, sustainability, community care, and the human impact on our ecosphere. These ideas are also explored in the Museum’s exhibition Audubon in the Anthropocene.

This is your guide to embark on a quest for nests throughout the Grove. As the leaves fall, look up to spy nests created by inhabitants of the Grove and use this map to seek out and engage with their artistic counterparts.

* Two outdoor receptacles—the Little Free Musem and a mailbox in Marvin Grove—contained the Map & Guide as well as self-guided activities and plein air paintings of the installations by KU Painting Club members that were offered to the public as “gifts from the grove.”

A series of gently curved “ribs” rise from the ground like the skeletal remains of an ancient bird’s ribcage forming a cavity that doubles as a nest and community reflection space. Paper cranes and other origami birds made from recycled seed paper and imprinted with quotes and prompts are scattered across campus and the Grove to direct people to Almloff’s nest. She explains, “People are welcome to take these and plant them, but they can also give back to the project by hanging up their responses…These act as a skin to cover the bare ribs of the nest.”

Is the essential quality of a nest its physical structure or the sense of togetherness created among a group? Phillips’s Momentary Flock suspends time and reminds us of different ways we can create community. Rising from the ground as if taking flight, winged windcatchers respond to the breeze with an improvisational choreography and invite us to imagine ourselves momentarily as one of the flock, sharing, as Phillips states, “a sense of freedom and weightlessness.”

Invoking Gaia, the Greek name for the personification of Mother Nature, Martin’s design references the engineering of a weaverbird’s nest at a human scale. Layers of woven material flow between a series of posts, creating a web punctuated with small openings that Martin explains, “offer niches for birds to take refuge” and “read like sheet music, representing notes of birdsong.”

Twin archways gracefully bound to one another create a threshold between two environments or frames of mind. Beneath the arches, one finds a liminal space, much like a fledgling’s last moments before leaving a nest mark a transitional moment. Rouse’s Tied Together takes its inspiration from the tiny tailor bird nest; curling a single leaf and stitching its edges together with spiderweb silk or plant fiber, it holds a cocoon of fine grass.

Evoking the teardrop shape of weaverbird nests and honoring the use of local materials and handmade construction techniques of traditional Indigenous architecture, Gore invites visitors into a comforting and nurturing space built from locally sourced and scavenged materials. Gore describes her design as “a statement on sustainability and how we as Americans import so much of our building materials.”

Driven by the question “What would a bird’s nest look like if the main resource a bird has is human trash?,” Lockwood crafted a nest entirely of her own trash, as well as litter she collected along nature walks. Lockwood challenges us to imagine a world where trash is easier to come by than a twig or a blade of grass. As urbanization increases, Lockwood fears “that humanscapes will be more common than landscapes.”

New Age Nature draws on notions of the Anthropocene, a term proposed by scholars for our current geological period that is characterized by the impact of humans on our ecosphere. Al-Ani describes New Age Nature as “a nest at the end of its use, falling apart, back into nature.” Scraps of building materials are fitted together to form a broken circle that comments on our crisis of human shelter.

Stonestreet’s papier-mâché albatross is a messenger from the seas, carrying with it a dire warning about plastic pollution and its impact on seabirds. Stonestreet explains, “As the weather erodes the papier-mâché of the bird, its wire frame will begin to show, revealing a stomach made out of recycled window screen filled with bits of plastic trash.” The albatross skims the ocean surface for food, picking up plastics it cannot digest. With 90% of the world’s seabirds consuming plastic today, little room is left for nutritious food, resulting in death from starvation on a massive scale.

Cascading down the slope of Marvin Grove, McCue’s shock of bright, shiny red fabric contrasts with its natural surroundings and weaves between the poles signifying how birds today have adapted to knitting together a dismaying mix of natural and human-made materials. It conjures, as McCue states, “the iconic image of a bird flying with a piece of red ribbon in its beak….while simultaneously symbolizing the ‘cut’ or wound that humans have made in their natural environment.”

Backyard Bash 2021: Understories celebrates the interplay of nature, culture, and the character of community in Marvin Grove, the historic green space behind the Spencer Museum of Art. But whose backyard is it? How do the stories of its Indigenous inhabitants intersect with those who live, work, and play here today? How do we come to understand our sense of place and how does it shape our understandings of ourselves, our environments, and one another? This year’s theme—understories—explores these questions and expands on ideas in the KU Common Book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and the Common Work of Art Native Hosts by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds.

In woodlands, the understory is the space between the canopy and forest floor where flora provides food and shelter for wildlife and promotes nutrient recycling. Understories in Marvin Grove is a series of installations and activations that shine a light on stories untold and ideas about place through new creative work by students and activities facilitated by the Spencer Museum and partners. Part exhibition, part festival, Backyard Bash 2021: Understories is a platform for creative placemaking, place honoring, restoration, and “re-story-ation.”

* Two outdoor receptacles—the Little Free Musem and a flat file in Marvin Grove—contained the Map & Guide as well as self-guided activities, free art supplies, and plein air paintings of the installations by KU Painting Club members that were offered to the public as “gifts from the grove.”

A clutch of native grasses bound between two curved timbers evokes the plow and yoke, which Kirsten Taylor reminds us were “the tools used to bend so much of nature to human desire.” No longer vibrant, upright, and windswept as they once stood in North Hollow—the area plowed and replanted with saplings to become Marvin Grove—Taylor’s grasses are dry, delicate, and turned sideways as reminders of the threats to the “last remaining tallgrass prairies which exist behind fences, closed in by property lines.”

A back-to-school birthday party changed the course of American music. Naomi Madu’s installation is a monument to the birth of hip-hop in 1973 and what went down in the rec room—and in history—at 1520 Sedgwick Ave in the Bronx, where DJ Kool Herc played his first “breakbeat” turntable experiments at his sister’s birthday party. Nearly 50 years later, Madu’s street sign, microphone, and QR code–activated audio “restore agency to underrepresented communities to tell their own stories.” The combination of symbols and audio explore the intersections of hip-hop, Black liberation movements, Black storytelling, and issues of gentrification.

In 1878, KU Chancellor James Marvin led an effort to plant trees over this once rocky hollow punctuated with prairie grass resulting in the grove we explore today. This action destroyed indigenous ecosystems and obscured their stories. Morgan Siemers’s cabinet of echoes invites us to listen for the sounds of the prairie, restoring them to this space. Each compartment contains household materials and instructions for activation. Extending author Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ideas about plants as subjects not objects, Siemers invites you to transform common household objects into subjects of the prairie: “Listen intently to the sounds you are able to create and imagine yourself as part of the indigenous ecosystem.”

A fragment from the doorframe of a vernacular American home marks a threshold between two eras and frames of mind: Indigenous sovereignty and practices of reciprocity with the land and Euro-American settlers’ fixation on turning the Midwest into a forest to source wood and build houses. Like a parent recording the height of a growing child on the edge of a doorframe, Anne Rogers documents the height of “native prairie plants that would have been present on Mount Oread before white settlers drastically altered the landscape.” With new investigations into the traumatic and deadly experiences of Indigenous children forced into Native American boarding schools, these notations grow in meaning.

MacKenzie Greckel characterizes her multimedia spheres as “organically shaped and sustainably made disco balls” created from debris collected on KU’s campus and scavenged from thrift stores, and the remains of a broken mirror. Each sphere carries the cast-off experiences of others situated among reflective shards, bringing light and color into the Grove as both fade throughout the season. Greckel asks: Are these disco balls fallen monuments to late-stage capitalism and its distortions? Are they seeds encoded with lessons for the future?

Weaving together songs and stories before an immersive painted backdrop, Tweesna Rose Mills transmits the history of her ancestors and connections to the Lands and Waters, including the area now known as Lawrence, Kansas. “The songs and stories I plan to share were meant to live on and to be experienced. They integrate different Indigenous peoples histories, and walks of life, and how we are all connected.”

This is a live performance. Check the Museum’s website for dates and times.

Beneath our feet, a complex network of underground filaments known as mycelium are transmitting messages and redistributing nutrients among the trees for the greater health of the Grove. Above ground, the mysteries of these networks sometimes manifest in the form of mushrooms. Abbigail Dougherty invites us into this network through a series of “mushroom mailboxes that act as waypoints for thought.” Seek out each mushroom to discover a hidden message and writing materials to prompt reflection and action.

Flowers bring good fortune to those who tend them. Gwendolyn Joslin’s giant origami fortune teller dispenses wisdom from its “petals,” affirming plants’ capacity as teachers. Bring the Flower Teller to life using the syllable counts indicated to discover common, scientific, and Indigenous names of plants, and Native American knowledge and tradition drawn from the book Braiding Sweetgrass. Joslin taps into childhood wonder and whimsy, reminding us “as we grow older, we forget to play outside, have fun, and learn. Take some time today for enjoyment and reconnection.”

Student responding to the word ABSENT, aligned their ideas with a memorial to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women—James Aaron Cadotte’s Useless Abuse. Pieces of each letterform aggressively are ripped away, progressively revealing their blood-red interiors.

From their assigned word EXTEND, each letterform becomes a call to extend care: pollinator seed packets to tend the ecosystem, affirmations to tend the heart, treats to tend the palate, kindness challenges to tend to others, resources for tending community, and a surprise looking glass for keeping an eye on tending one’s self.