Exhibits

ALL THINGS CONNECTED, CURIOUSER, SPECTACULAR SATURN AND SPACE WEATHER HAVE CLOSED.

The Museum of Natural History is Rhode Island's only natural history museum and is home to the state's only public planetarium. For more than a century the Museum has served as a unique educational, scientific and cultural resource by offering exciting exhibitions, workshops and presentations that provide ways for children and families to learn about our world and its people.

The Museum houses collections containing over one quarter million objects pertaining to natural and cultural history assembled from sites around the world. The natural history collections include fossils, mollusks, minerals, rocks, mounted flora and fauna. The cultural collections contains over 25,000 archaeological and ethnographic specimens primarily of African, Native American and Pacific origin.

Africa: Many Places, Many Faces

This exhibit focuses on four ethnic groups and the eco-zones that they inhabit. By drawing connections between people and their environments, this exhibit explores the link between culture and nature, and expose the vast diversity of the African continent. The exhibit consists of African material cultural objects, supplemented by natural history specimens, photography, sound, and text panels which examine the individual cultures and the influences of African cultures on our own society. In doing so, the exhibit will highlight the connections between anthropology, art history, world history, and ecology, and will examine African material culture through these various lenses.

Exhibit was made possible through major funding support from Dr. Dwight B. and Anna Cooper Heath and the Rhode Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Circle of the Sea: Re-Visited and Re-Imagined
CURRENTLY CLOSED

The Circle of the Sea exhibit, showcasing the Museum's diverse holdings from Oceania - with an astonishingly extreme make-over. The exhibit has array of objects such as those used in daily life for cooking, clothing, fishing, and seafaring- most of which have never been publicly viewed. It also features the major addition of natural history from the region: ornately feathered Birds-of-Paradise, gigantic seabirds and mollusk shells, colorful corals and volcanic geology so pivotal to the Pacific. A visit to Circle of the Sea: Revisited and Re-imagined promises to be a virtual South Seas tropical adventure without even leaving home.

Special thanks to Kirsten Vacca, Guest Curator, for her contributions and expertise. Exhibit was made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Lasse Antonsen: Wind-up Butterflies, Dead Leaf Insects, and Other Metaphors
Closing soon!
In this exhibition the artist, has created an imaginative display of a wide variety of natural history and art objects. Antonsen incorporates insects in his own artwork in order to create metaphorical and ethical reflections on culture and time. Antonsen is fascinated by the symbolic and metaphorical use of insects by poets, comic book artists and film makers, and the exhibition will spotlight the role butterflies and other insects play in contemporary literature and art.

Lasse Antonsen is an artist, art historian, and curator, who was born in Denmark and studied art and art history in Denmark as well as the US. He has an MA in art history from Tufts University.

Natural Selections:
Treasures from the Museum's Collections
Exhibit is closing Tuesday, September 3, as we work on our new, updated Natural Selections exhibit. The updated exhibit will re-open on Saturday, November 9. Support provided by the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

At the turn of the century, natural history collecting became an international movement. This Victorian styled exhibit showcases treasures donated by private collectors which inspired the founding of the Museum of Natural History in 1896.

Dynamic Galaxies: Our Place in the Universe
New Exhibit opening Saturday, February 16, 2013

Looking beyond our cosmic neighborhood reveals that the distant Universe is filled with galaxies. Galaxies are vast collections of stars, gas, dust and dark matter held together by the gravity exerted by all these objects on each other. Galaxies come in a spectacular variety of sizes, shapes and patterns, from small assemblages of fewer than 1000 stars and no gas to giant systems with more than 10 trillion stars and even more dark matter.

The beauty of galaxies' appearance is due to their dynamic nature. The cycle of star birth and death frames their spiral arms, and the galaxy centers harbor giant black holes that can send jets of high energy radiation into space.

In this new exhibit we will explore just some of the properties of galaxies, and what we've learned about the Universe from studying them.

Sponsored by the Brown/NASA Northeast Planetary Data Center & The Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium

Trekking Across Mars with Curiosity
Closing Monday, September 30, 2013

Mars is a cold desert world. It is half the diameter of Earth and has the same amount of dry land. The Curiosity Rover, a robotic rover about the size of a small SUV, began its journey across the Martian landscape in August 2012. It is searching the Red Planet to see if it ever was -- or is still today -- an environment suitable for life. This exhibit features past missions to Mars, describes the wide range of surface features and processes that have been discovered, and tracks the Rover as it explores the Red Planet.

Exhibit prepared by the Northeast Planetary Data Center at Brown University and the Museum of Natural History with support from the NASA RI Space Grant Consortium.

The Museum is open every day from 10:00am until 4:00pm, with last admission at 3:30pm. Museum admission is $2 (Free for children under 4 years old.) Some special programs have a separate admission. Planetarium Admission is $3 (No one under age 4 is permitted in the planetarium.) This includes entrance to the Museum and galleries.