A Lebanese painter and poet, Etel Adnan lived in exile in Paris before moving to Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco, where she lived for many years. When she started her abstract painting work, Mount Tamalpais became an endless source of inspiration from 1955.
At the crossroads of individual and collective memory, the works of Christian Boltanski, imbued with questioning about history, time and erasure, childhood, and death, exude a very strong emotional power. "I work to stir emotions in the audience."
On the border between investigation and the quest of finding one's self, Sophie Calle's work interlaces reality and fiction. In an investigative mode, she reveals intimacy and some of her private life through the distance of narrative and of reflection on documents.
This work of history is made up of 50 digital photographs combined into a single image, creating a cinematic effect. Using fiction, Stan Douglas meticulously re-enacts scenes of police violence during a peaceful demonstration in Vancouver.
This moving shadow play takes us back to childhood, where enchantment meets the greatest fears. The accumulation of toys, books, tape, and bottles of water on the trays suggest that the artist, who is the master of the game, has just left.
The Date Paintings are a series of paintings created since 1966, each consisting of a monochrome painting with a date painted in white, which happens to be the day it was made. The painting is accompanied by a diary kept by On Kawara, which contextualizes the place of execution.
Joseph Kosuth is a major artist of the conceptual art movement. The work, a triptych composed of a hammer, its full-scale photograph and its definition in an English/French dictionary, is intended as a philosophical game around the notion of representation.
Annette Messager is a collection artist and creator of chimeras. In this installation, she brings together characters and objects cut out of black rubber sheets and stages them in a disturbing, strange, and yet fascinating theater.
Starting from the observation that "painting has always painted only itself," Gerhard Richter's complex and multifaceted work analyzes and explores the many forms painting can assume, from monochrome to abstract and photorealistic paintings.
Villeglé is an advertising poster, motivated by "surprise and love at first sight." He invented a pictorial and poetic work by collecting and highlighting "advertising materials accidentally subverted by bad weather or by an anonymous and angry gesture".
The museum is housed in a 17th-century building—a former Jesuit college with the entrance tucked away off a small courtyard.
In 1871, a group of thinkers formed the Society for the Study of Natural Sciences of Nîmes and the Gard (SESNNG: Société d'étude de Sciences Naturelles de Nîmes et du Gard). This group of naturalists and explorers, specializing in botany, zoology, geology, and paleontology, came together with the aim to educate others and study. They also build their collections.
Stanislas Clément served as the museum's first curator from 1883 through to 1902. He worked to bring the various collections together and organized the museum's first exhibitions. His successor was Galien Mingaud, who held the post from 1902 through to 1912.
The SESNNG was required to relocate, so the city decided to found a museum in a former Jesuit college. The Society's collections were moved there, and the members set up their offices. On the second floor, they designed a zoology gallery dedicated to displaying mammals. The moose is still exposed.
The third floor contained further zoology exhibits, this time featuring fish, shells, various reptiles (both with scales and feathers), and amphibians. The entirety of the room was used to house exhibits—there were even snakes wrapped around the columns!
On the top floor, there was a display of insects, along with collections of items from botany, geology, and prehistory.
Emilien Dumas was a geologist who developed a geological map of the Gard area. After his death, all of his material, the samples he had collected, and the map itself were given to the museum. The entire collection is housed in this room, alongside very old scientific literature. This holding is of great significance.
Today, the museum's exhibits are based around four key themes: the geology of the Gard, prehistory, ethnology from the 1930s, and zoology. The various rooms have been renovated and some of the older galleries are now used as archives.
The museum also has its own planetarium, located in Mont-Duplan, just 15 minutes from the main museum building.
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