The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft hosts Dr. Karen A. Rader, Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University for an evening lecture entitled "Animals on Display: Reflections on the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History."

Human estrangement from animals is a cultural phenomenon with a strange and contested history. John Berger, critic and writer, famously said that “in the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared.” Those who share his view contend that animals have been removed from our daily lives and that we have been removed from the daily lives of animals. Yet this development has also been the impetus for a plethora of representational practices that, broadly conceived, work to fill in the gap between humans and animals. Ironically, these practices may ultimately intensify the very nostalgia, distance, and ignorance they were devised to remedy.

The lecture will present and reflect on a wide range of examples of these new representational practices, situated in various historical and sociocultural contexts, in order to speak to the ongoing importance of making animals visible for the arrangement and sustenance of human-animal relations.

There will be a pre-lecture reception at 6:00 p.m., and the lecture will begin at 6:30 p.m.