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Conversations Los Angeles Leiden: Nature and the City is an exhibition that offers visitors a new perspective
on objects and specimens that may be familiar to them through other, more traditional display contexts. The
exhibit highlights the collections of Naturalis, the national natural history museum of The Netherlands, located
in the city of Leiden. Created in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County,
Conversations Los Angeles Leiden opened in Leiden on April 20, 2006 and is on view for approximately five months. It comprises five
installations created by four Los Angeles-based visual artists (Paul McCarthy with Raivo Pussemp, Michael C. McMillen, Ed Moses, and
John Outterbridge) and one composer (Jon Hassell), who teamed up with Naturalis curators to present personal works
assembled from items in the Museum's collection. They address a theme of topical importance: "nature and the city."
The installations are featured together in two of the Naturalis' galleries. In conjunction with the unique art
installations, an original piece of music, commissioned from Jon Hassell, is presented as a sound installation.
Conversations has its roots in an earlier exhibit of the same name, conceived by the Natural History Museum of Los
Angeles County and presented in the spring of 2005. An unprecedented effort to engage visual artists in
"conversation" with scientists in the interpretation of natural history museum collections, this exhibition drew
widespread interest from many different constituents in Los Angeles–and beyond–for its innovative approach to
cross-disciplinary collaboration, as well as for its museological interpretation and display.
The reincarnation of Conversations in Leiden incorporates the experience gained from this sort of flagship
production, now utilizing new visual and sound artists–and, of course, Dutch curators–in the creation of a
project tailored to Naturalis' collections and gallery space. The project represents the first undertaking
in a larger, ongoing collaboration to foster the cross–fertilization of ideas and resources between the two
museums. The experience gained in Conversations Los Angeles Leiden: Nature and the City is part of a joint initiative to explore a new language for
exhibitry, which will be utilized in the renovations of the permanent galleries of both museums.
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