Cabinets of Curiosity: Classrooms and Collections Research at Ohio State University
Opening reception: Monday, December 1 at 12:30 p.m.
December 1- March 13
Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery, The Ohio State University-Marion 1465 Mount Vernon Avenue, Marion, Ohio 43302
Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Free and Open to the Public
Take a journey back in time to the origin of museums and explore the curious collections of Ohio State University. Cabinets of Curiosity: Classrooms and Collections Research at Ohio State University invites you to walk through the wonders of early modern collecting and examine the connections between the Renaissance wunderkammer, or “room of wonders,” and the modern research collections at Ohio State. Blending elements of the exotic, the beautiful, and the strange, historic cabinets of curiosity became the eclectic taproot of modern museums. Highlighting the collections of Ohio State University within the rich history of scholarly collecting, Cabinets of Curiosity displays artifacts, specimens, and oddities from University collections in the style of a Renaissance wunderkammer. Experience the wonder at the Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery at Ohio State University at Marion from December 1 - March 13. Admission is free and open to the public.
Curated by: The Students of History 3678: Applied Public History- Museum Pasts, Practices, and Challenges & Amanda Respess, Assistant Professor of Premodern World History, The Ohio State University at Marion
For questions or more information contact Leslie Beyer-Hermsen (beyer-hermsen.1@osu.edu).
Kate Shannon, the 2025 Artist Laureate for The Ohio State University presented a curated exhibition of cyanotypes, Grasses in Sun and Shadow, in the Wayne and Geraldine Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery. The community and the campus were invited to attend a free opening reception on Tuesday, October 21, 12:30 p.m. in the Kuhn Gallery.
The cyanotype process is one of the earliest photographic methods, using light-sensitive chemicals, sunlight, and water to produce vivid blue photographs. It was popularized in the mid-1800s by botanist Anna Atkins, who used the process to create camera-less impressions of plants and, in doing so, highlighted the dual nature of the new photographic medium as both art and science. During the reception, Shannon will provide a description and detail on how this unique art form comes to life.
Grasses in Sun and Shadow features artworks by members of the Ohio State Marion community who, like Anna Atkins nearly two centuries ago, used the cyanotype process to create camera-less imprints of natural elements at the Larry R. Yoder Prairie Learning Laboratory. Shannon says, “In an era increasingly defined by virtual experiences, it was refreshing to work with these individuals beneath the sun, tracing the fleeting shadows of the prairie’s grasses, flowers, and leaves. I invite you to revisit the gallery throughout the month, as the seasons change beyond each carefully crafted impression, forever preserved in blue and white.”
Kate Shannon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University and Ohio State’s 2025–26 Artist Laureate. Her work explores photography’s relationship with memory, materiality, and the digital age. Her artwork has been exhibited widely, and she has received Ohio State Mansfield’s Campus Awards for both Excellence in Scholarship and Excellence in Teaching. In 2024, she presented research on Ohio State’s Floyd and Marion Rinhart Collection of 19th-century American photographs at The Daguerreian Society’s Symposium in Houston, Texas, and is currently developing a creative project that reexamines these historical images using contemporary tools. Shannon earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Kentucky and her Master of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University.
Minding & Mending Our Ways: Moving Towards an Intentional Future is the second iteration of the Ohio State Marion Sustainability Stories exhibition. This year’s theme focuses on the various ways our campus and local community can reflect on the natural world and become more deliberate about our place and actions in it. Consciously interacting with nature results in tangible benefits, including better mental health and an enhanced sense of connectedness with nature. Research tells us that once we become mindful of the impact we have on our natural surroundings—the space we take up, the resources we use, and the waste we produce—we can ultimately make changes to our past behaviors that leads to better, more sustainable choices in the future.
Minding and Mending Our Ways features local student research, class projects, and campus and community programs that explore issues of sustainability in Marion and beyond. From designing wellness walks to eradicating invasive species to conducting research into adopting greener consumer practices and manufacturing processes, you’ll see examples of innovative research and experiential learning projects about our natural resources from courses in various disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, geography, and engineering. Also featured are programs that involve sharing houseplants or lending and mending clothing items, citizen agriculture projects that grow fruits and vegetables to share with the community, a successful local farm-to-table business, and volunteers helping to restore the native honeybee population.
This year’s exhibition features Conversations with Trees, an interactive display featuring work created by students in Peter Chan’s Visual Communication Design course, as well as a virtual reality demonstration, that celebrates the historic trees that stand in and around the historic Ohio State Oval.
In each of these examples, we find people intervening to foster awareness of how incredible the world around them can be, and how we can collectively work to improve the ways in which we move through it with care and gratitude.
We obviously encourage you to enjoy the contents here within these gallery walls. We also invite you to take a walk to visit the various sites that extend the message of this year’s showcase beyond the physical space of Kuhn Gallery: The Plant Lending Library in the Marion Campus Library, the various projects in the Larry R. Yoder Prairie Learning Laboratory, The Marion Campus Garden, The Clothes Closet in the Alber Student Center, and even the locations of our community partners (scan the various QR codes in the gallery for directions to specific sites). So please, once you’re done exploring here, go outside, pay attention to world around you, and determine your place in it moving forward.
The Wayne & Geraldines Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery features to research of many of our best and brightest students in a unique display of research posters from the past 12-14 months. These posters are the culmination of hard work between our undergraduate students and a group of dedicated faculty research mentors. One of the advantages of attending Ohio State Marion is that you can work closely with professors on various research projects.
On Display November 15, 2024, through March 15, 2025
KDM4B Mutations in Human Cancers
Wesley Bush, Korey Bosart, Dr. Renee Bouley, Dr. Ruben Petreaca
ADARA1 Mutations in Human Cancers
Anna Valentine, Korey Bosart, Dr. Renee Bouley, Dr. Ruben Petreaca
Determining the PRMT5-RuvBL1 Hetermeric Complex and its Role in DNA repair
Majd Al-Marrawi, Dr. Ruben Petreaca, Dr. Renee Bouley
Computational Study of Potential Offsite Targets of Cannabinoids
Maria Ruano, Hannah Durbin, Dr. Ryan Yoder
Exploring an embodiment model of intuitive eating and attunement with exercise: The mediating role of intrinsic motivation
Molly Quinn;Faculty Mentor: Dr. Tracy Tylka
Multi-omics driven multi-task learning for cancer classification
Divyesh Bommana; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Golrokh Mirzaei
Adolescent Girls’ Reactions to a Body-Image-Centered Young Adult Novel
Hannah Fuller; Faculty Mentor Dr. Linda Parsons
Environmental Effects of Vehicles: Analyzing the Alternatives
Alex, Ali, Michael, Abigail; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
The Significance of Bicycle Lanes in Marion Ohio
Andrya Dunn, Jared Moody, Cade Rothlisberger, Chris Tompkins; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
Sustainable and Efficient Packaging: The Path to Saving the Planet
Jordan Hensley, Kaelin Schondel, Kayleigh Aiken, Alexis Stiverson, Makenzie Luttfring; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
Saving Our Waterways: A Call to Action Against Pollution
Aiden Morris, Haley Ingle, Mackenzie Tarbert and Mary Clare Cooper; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
The Overexposure of Products and Excessive Consumption in America
Loralei Smith, Nadia Hines, Kira Young, Boubacar Diallo and Savannah Bender; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
The Importance of Recycling/Reusing Your Clothes
Eyan Axline, Amber Earnest, Deborah Kwagala, Varun Mishra, Audrey Simon; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
Think Globally, Act Locally: Recycling
Alexandra Buyer, Makayla Roetiger, Emma Nichols, Logan Rensch; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
Fast Fashion
Asha Keerthipati, Nikki Martin, Laren Sargent, Anna Sterling; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
Endangerment of Indiana Bats
Garrett Fitzpatrick, Zakai Johnson, Annabelle Kozelka; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anna Willow
How Fungicides and gut parasites affect bumble bee health
Twy Gray, Emily Runnion and Frances Sivakoff
Burrowing Rodents Macroevolution: A Bayesian Approach to Estimating Diversity
Kylie Smith; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jonathan Calede
Morphospace occupation and skull morphology in geomyoid rodents: the impact of extinct species
Nikita Christian; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jonathan Calede
Funded by The Ohio State University Sustainability Institute
Sustainability Stories on display at the Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery, Apr. 11-May 31, 2024
About the exhibition
Here, you will experience a collection containing various artifacts, including art, poetry, research, and documentation of
community projects, all of which address sustainability.
While each display in this gallery might come from a different perspective—anthropology, the biological sciences, fine art, poetry, the citizen agriculture movement—these are all, in their own way, stories. Stories of possible futures grounded in sustainable practices. Stories of quiet inspiration borne out of observing nature. Stories of exploration into the problems plaguing our biosphere. Stories of purposeful hands turning soil so that we might better feed the bodies and souls of ourselves and others.
Sustainability Stories is curated to reflect a series of loosely interconnected themes. As you continue clockwise along this side of the gallery, you will first encounter the section we call “Laying Down Roots,” a group of pieces reflecting the history of our interactions with the land and the impact those practices have on us today and in days to come. Turning the corner, you’ll next see the section we call “Spreading Seeds,” a notion we take as both metaphorical (the movement of people, idea, cars, and bicycles) and literal (as in the practice of making seed bombs), resulting in changes to our habits and our natural spaces. As you move towards the recessed corner, you’ll then encounter “New Growth,” a collection of pieces depicting the idea of rebirth and new beginnings. Next, you’ll find the section “Digging Our Own Future,” which showcases displays of how we have taken matters into our own hands, so to speak, to produce our own food while helping maintain healthy soil, water, and wildlife. Last, in “Watershed,” you’ll contemplate a critical point marking a change in course of our mindset and habits regarding our use of natural resources.
The stories shown here have clear beginnings, but their endings are yet to be written. We hope that, ultimately, this collection will inspire you to reflect on your own role in the mission of sustainability, how you might play a part in shaping a future that is greener, cleaner, and healthier for everyone. We invite you to add to our stories.
January 22nd through Friday, March 15th, 2024
About the exhibition
Examine the textiles that gave the Silk Road its name, and travel across the trade routes that connected the cultures of Afro-Eurasia for centuries. The Silk Road exhibit weaves together the brilliant colors and feather-light textures of silks from China, India, the Islamic world, and Europe, telling the story of silk and the history of movement across empires and time. Historic textiles, jades, and jewels from the 1400’s to the present illuminate the origins of commerce and connections in the Old World and provide design inspiration for today. Featuring luxurious gowns, religious banners, brocades, saris and the designer fashions of Oscar de la Renta and Dior.
The Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery at The Ohio State University at Marion was excited to share the Cornfield Review Exhibition, featuring student artwork and literacy from the past 45 years of this student publication.
Featured Spring 2022.
About the exhibition
Ben McCorkle and the other English faculty worked with the Wayne Rowe, Emily Creasap, Bryan Sickmiller and John Maharry to organize and stage an exhibition of student art from the Cornfield Review in the Kuhn Fine Arts Gallery on the 1st floor of Morrill Hall.
The space is designed to be a place where students can relax and study in addition to experiencing the works of art of their fellow students. There are posters of 20 Cornfield Review covers from 1976 to 2021 as well as a variety of poetry and photography published by Marion students. In addition, Ben put together a video of digital artwork and some beautiful drone footage of campus in a video you can watch in the gallery as well.
The Cornfield Review began publishing in 1976 under the direction of Professor David Citino with the help of a small group of Ohio State Marion students. Since its inception, the literary journal's mission has been to promote the literary and artistic talent of the Ohio State Marion community, as well as the Central Ohio region more broadly. The Cornfield Review has enjoyed a near‐continuous publication run since it began; in 2006, the editorial board launched a companion publication, Cornfield Review: Online, which showcases multimedia, born‐‐digital content.
https://cornfieldreview.osu.edu/
We would like to officially invite you to come and experience the gallery when you have a chance. Look for announcements about student poetry readings throughout the semester.