The Museum of Everything #7

Last chance to see The Museum of Everything’s sell-out installation at Mona

There are only a few weeks left to see one of the most talked about shows this season—The Museum of Everything’s monumental and critically acclaimed installation at Australia’s Mona (Museum of Old and New Art) before it closes on 2 April 2018. 

The exhibition is Mona’s most successful independent show to date featuring over 100 authors and 1,500 objects, assembled over 25 bespoke spaces.

Large-scale works include Calvin and Ruby Black’s Possum Trot theatre, the ethereal diagrams of Chinese qi gong practitioner Guo Fengyi and the re-united pre-pubescent dolls, carved, painted and photographed by Morton Bartlett—and collected by the likes of Cindy Sherman, Ydessa Hendeles, Grayson Perry and Maurizio Cattelan. 

Leading names include Chicago author Henry Darger, whose panoramic illustrations have been re-assembled by The Museum of Everything. The coded allegory reveals the legacy of the artist’s childhood abuse and is unique in 20th century visual culture.

Other makers on display challenge accepted ideas of urban conformity, such as Isek Bodys Kingelez, the Congolese citizen architect, whose miniature cityscapes will be featured in a retrospective at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) later this year. 

The pioneering proto-abstract drawings of the 19th century spiritualists, Georgiana Houghton and Hilma af Klint, occupy dedicated spaces. Material championed by the surrealists includes canvases by performative medium, Augustine Lesage and chicken-feather paintings by Hector Hyppolite, the Haitian priest exhibited by André Breton. 

Other makers of African descent include William Edmonson, the first African-American to exhibit at MoMA, whose historic masterwork Adam and Eve is exhibited beside a desk of carved Masonic imagery by William Howard and the silhouettes of Bill Traylor. 

The timing is certainly apt. The Museum of Everything is a supporter of and lender to Lynne Cooke’s Outliers and the American Vanguard—the monumental exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington DC, which challenges established histories and looks at the impact of outliers on the artistic evolution of the American canon. 

The Museum of Everything functions both as an exhibitor and as a platform, allowing the most significant and influential private makers of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries to be seen for the first time by a wide international audience. 

The Museum of Everything invites attendees to this year’s Sydney Biennale to visit this one-off monumental show and receive a free soft catalogue. A hardback book of the exhibition will be published by the museum and can be pre-ordered from me [​at​] musevery.com. 

The Museum of Everything is a non-profit organisation and a registered UK charity. For more information please contact the press department on pr [​at​] musevery.com.