The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents “The Map and the Territory: 100 Years of Collecting at UCLA,” a collaborative exhibition organized in partnership with the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Library, featuring works gathered from 13 collections across campus. The show, which was delayed by 15 months because of the COVID-19 pandemic, opened Jul. 1 and will close Oct. 24
UCLA’s museums, libraries and archives are home to an array of more than 21 million objects. This exhibition highlights the role of the campus’s collections in the pursuit of knowledge. The juxtaposition of items — from rare books and manuscripts to historic and contemporary artworks, and from musical instruments to meteorites — offers visitors opportunities to reflect on meanings and connections the objects create when they are brought together. Curators and custodians of UCLA’s diverse collections worked together to identify common themes for the exhibitions, which represents various geographic regions, eras and modes of reckoning with human experiences.
Featuring approximately 200 objects, the Fowler exhibition strives to represent the richness of UCLA’s holdings in ways that are evocative and enlightening, while also acknowledging their inevitable incompleteness.