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Morbid Anatomy Museum Essay

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The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins. -Edgar Allan Poe. And for your own glimpse into the “shadowy and vague”, there is no better place than at Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum. This private museum opened its doors just over a year ago by Tracy Hurely and creative director Joanne Eberstein. The museum offers the kind of unique-quirky exhibits that don’t fit easily into most large museum’s programs making this charming Brooklyn outlier the sole Big Apple purveyor of exhibits which exploring the dark and offbeat aspects of society. Joanne Eberstein, the Morbid Anatomy Museum’s driving force, says her passion for all things strange, obscure and …show more content…

A few steps more and you can enjoy coffee drinks and various baked goods while you acclimatize to the environment. I met up with Joanne in the coffee shop and we headed up to the first floor library area to start our tour. The Morbid Anatomy Museum’s mission is to make a home for the community with which they share their interest and to give wider public access to what are usually inaccessible collections. And it is in the library that this mission is manifest. On view are books and objects covering a wide range of topics; High and low culture, death and beauty. Various academic disciplines are represented; medicine, magic, natural history, the occult. It is in the overlap of these various pieces of literature that one can begin to see the roots of ideas that have eventually found physical expression, and a place in the museum’s displays. What I find fascinating about the Museums collections is that while the objects you encounter are unfamiliar and/or bizarre, they are all mementoes of larger ideas and cultural anthropologies that have at one time found expression in societies around the world. So at their roots are quite practical questions. And those involved in these explorations have relied on objects and visual media to explore their ideas. In looking at these objects and learning about their backgrounds one gains a better understanding of the ever forward moving

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