Current Exhibitions

July 2021 – July 2022

The enumerative, descriptive, and pneumonic properties of lists and notes enable us to articulate and record what is urgent, what must be remembered, what should be counted, what needs to be communicated – the very substance of life. Lists and notes have been a part of human civilization for centuries and they remain essential structures which organize and govern human life across cultures. In places where writing is not privileged, oral traditions are filled with lists that are chanted, sung, and recited, cataloging everything from complex genealogies to the names of stars in the sky. To our surprise, of all the calls for participation that this Museum has issued, the call for lists and notes received by far the most submissions. Many, many people collect old lists and notes. We corral them in special drawers, shoe boxes, and cedar chests, file them in folders, carefully hold onto certain special ones by tucking them into our wallets, pasting them into scrapbooks, or secreting them in the dark recesses of an underwear drawer.

Why do we hold onto lists and notes long after their creation and deployment? Why do so many of us collect lists and notes belonging to strangers that we find on the street, in library books, on the subway? This suggests that their meaningfulness transcends their simple utility. They are so brief, but seem to capture so much. Lists, as accumulations of things, suggest infinity. Notes, as condensed version of thoughts or ideas, are like tiny works of origami that unfold into entire stories. Each list or note can evoke a novel’s worth of narrative; each suggests a time, a place, a situation, a mood, a feeling, a circumstance. Many notes are stamped with compelling urgency – do this now! pay attention! don’t forget! Lists also function as instruments for the exercise of power (think registries of births and deaths, lists of eligible voters, blacklists, the list of Federally recognized Native American Tribes, the TSA’s No Fly list.)

Some thinkers make a distinction between the pragmatic list and literary list. We understand these categories as interwoven, and identify a poetics of lists and notes that springs from the place where their information-holding and storytelling qualities intersect. We recognize lists and notes as so often affective, steeped in emotion. We have feelings about our To-Do lists. We write notes in the margins of a book when passages inspire us or are intensely moving. We see the face of a loved one in the scribbled reminder to pick up milk at the store or feed the dog. Powerful, affective, poetic, infinite – we celebrate lists and notes here as essential elements of our humanity.