Every Abandoned Place is a photographic series created during a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History, where the artists witnessed the dismantling of the historic Fossil Hall. Their photographs show fossils packed away, murals peeled back, and hidden supports exposed— revealing the museum as a layered structure of time, matter, and narrative. As cabinets emptied and walls stripped, sedimented histories surfaced: scientific knowledge, institutional choices, and the ideologies shaping public displays.

 

For the artists, the drama of the fossil hall’s dismantling contains a poignant metaphor for translation of scientific data into narratives for the public and an exploration of ideologies necessarily embedded in those narratives The images act as ready-made strata, showing what is preserved, what erodes, and what reconfigures when an iconic space is unsettled. In this unmaking, the museum becomes a living cross-section of what is remembered or forgotten, revealing how scientific truth evolves through shifting evidence, interpretation, and cultural (and political) framing. Every Abandoned Place will be published by Gnomic in fall of 2026..