Morbid Anatomy Museum: The Dark Side Gets Its Due

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Some of over one million photographs owned by Dr. Stanley Burns, who collects images of medical history and what he calls "the darker side of life," in New York, June 12, 2014. Burns is a contributor to the first exhibition at the Morbid Anatomy Museum, w

There will be a ribbon-cutting on the stylish black facade, a "spirit photo booth" and traditional mourning foods, prepared from a cookbook called "Death Warmed Over." But the museum's broader mission - showcasing aspects of culture we might wish to dismiss as morbid or marginal - is deeply (if not deathly) serious, Joanna Ebenstein, its creative director and animating spirit, said recently.

"I want people to walk in and say: 'Wow, this is really interesting. Why don't we know about that? And what does it say about us today that we don't know about it?' " she said.

The nonprofit museum grew out of the Morbid Anatomy Library, Ebenstein's private collection of more than 2,000 books on medical history, death rituals, the human body and esoterica that was housed until recently in a tiny room tucked away in an alley. From that modest space, Morbid Anatomy has grown into a regular lecture series and DIY intellectual salon that brings together artists, writers, curators and passionate amateurs dedicated to what she sums up as "the things that fall through the cracks."

Now the Morbid Anatomy brand - which includes a popular blog and a just published anthology - is getting a foothold in the mainstream, with a sleek new three-story home in a former nightclub.

The refurbished building includes a library, classroom space, a gallery for temporary exhibitions and a ground-floor cafe and gift shop that may lure unsuspecting latte drinkers with no pre-existing interest in Victorian taxidermy or Renaissance anatomical models. But while the audience may change, Ebenstein said, the mission - highlighting the obscure, the forgotten and the strangely beautiful - has not.

Those adjectives apply to the opening exhibition, "The Art of Mourning," which features more than 90 objects - memorial photographs, Victorian hair art, mourning china, death masks - that might once have been displayed in any respectable parlor, mounted in a style that infuses familiar gallery conventions (white walls, explanatory labels) with the spirit of the old cabinets of curiosity.

In advance of the opening, we visited the private domains of three collectors - all contributors to this first exhibition - whose approach to the sometimes surprising objects of their obsession ranges from the scientific to the poetic to the practical.

"Private collections sometimes speak in a way that museums can't," Ebenstein said. "Part of the fun of curating is getting to go into people's collections to see what they have."

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Morbid Anatomy Museum: The Dark Side Gets Its Due