Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media explores how the media spectacle in which we live had origins in World War I and the burgeoning mediascape of posters, photography, cinema, illustrated newspapers, and ephemera that made it the first global media war. How did the media and artists imagine a war encompassing the entire world? Combatants included forces from Australia, Canada, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, as well as racially and ethnically diverse American and Indigenous peoples including Māori, First Peoples, and Choctaw “code talkers.”
The Dutch Collector’s Cabinet and the Politics of Possession
World Made Wondrous recreates a fictive 17th-century Dutch collector’s cabinet in order to examine the political and colonial histories of European collecting practices in the 17th century. As Europeans assembled their cabinets, they ordered the world in deliberate ways, asserting judgments and hierarchies on the value of natural materials, forms of labor, forms of craftsmanship, as well as human worth, often with dire and deadly consequences. The exhibition interrogates the underlying agendas and structures that were fundamental to these collections—which are precursors to today’s European and American museums, including LACMA.
