02596cam a2200325 4500 431870259 TxAuBib 20200901120000.0 200707s2020||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u bl2020015173 9780374216306 HRD 27.00 0374216304 HRD 27.00 TxAuBib eng spa Fonseca, Carlos, 1987- Museo animal English. Natural history [BOOK] / Carlos Fonseca ; translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. First American edition. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 303 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. "Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator's fascination with the hidden forms of the animal kingdom -- with camouflage and subterfuge -- and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the form of which itself remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the death of the designer, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues to the true story of the designer's family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungle. On the way, he discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion: an aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, who creates models of ruined cities; a former model turned conceptual artist -- and a defendant in a trial over the very nature and purpose of art; a young indigenous boy who has received a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, as the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of obsession. Natural History is the portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, between tragedy and farce.". 20200901. Museum curators Fiction. Designers Fiction. Museum exhibits Fiction. Photographers Fiction. Artists Fiction. Visions Fiction. McDowell, Megan, translator.