MONROE — Monroe Arts Center opens their 2019-20 gallery season Friday, Aug. 30 with the exhibit titled “Cabinet of Curiosities” by Levi Fisher Ames. The exhibit will be on display at MAC’s Wellington and Muranyi Galleries from Aug. 30 through Oct. 4. “Cabinet of Curiosities” has been made possible by special arrangement with the John Michael Kohler Center in Sheboygan. Monroe Arts Center is located at 1315 11th Street, Monroe.
Levi Fisher Ames (1840-1923) was born in 1843 in Pennsylvania. Ames’s family moved to Wisconsin when he was a young child. After fighting in the Union Army during the Civil War, Levi Fisher Ames returned to Green County Wisconsin and purchased a farm in Monroe where he spent the rest of his life to raise a family.
Ames was a Civil War soldier, musician and maker of musical instruments, carpenter, prolific wood-carver and animated storyteller. Having acquired his wood-carving skills during the war, Ames hand-carved his own impressive menagerie of over 600 domestic, wild and mythical animals. Each carving was encased in a glass-fronted, hinged shadow box.
In the 1890s, Ames took a selection of his imaginative carved menagerie on a regional tent road show tour as the “L. F. Ames Museum of Art.” He exhibited them at regional fairs as a comprehensive sideshow, believing they needed to be seen as an interrelated work and that his storytelling was a central component of the whole. He recounted both tall and truthful tales about his “specimens” to the delight of audiences, tapping into the popularity of the circuses and sideshows that were prevalent throughout Wisconsin.
Ames’s carvings have been exhibited at the Kohler Arts Center in several exhibitions including Levi Fisher Ames: Menagerie (2001), Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds (2007), Animals Wild and Tame (2012), and Folk and Fable: Levi Fisher Ames and Albert Zahn (2017). Several of Ames’s boxes were also shown as part of The Encyclopedia of the Mind at the Italian pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennale (Italy) and at the New Museum (New York, NY) as part of The Keeper exhibition in 2016.
Ames’s wooden beasts and bugs, carved from life and legend, outlived their creator and were passed down through Ames’s family (with a brief stay at a pawnshop during the Great Depression) until 161 shadow boxes and forty other pieces that belonged to Ames were given to Kohler Foundation, Inc., in 2001. After the works were conserved, the Foundation gifted the collection to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, where it remains today.
