Pick Your Poison
Featuring over forty medicines, advertisements, historic and popular culture documents and books, video footage, and paraphernalia, the exhibition explores why some drugs remain socially acceptable, while others are outlawed because of their toxic, and intoxicating, characteristics.
These classifications have shifted at different times in history because of social and historical factors, and will continue to change. The exhibition explores some of the factors that have shaped the changing definition of some of our most potent drugs––alcohol, tobacco, opium, cocaine, and marijuana––from medical miracle to social menace.
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- The poisonous manchineel tree in Mark Catesby’s Mancaneel Tree, Misleto, Butterfly, 1743, Plate 95 from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, Vol. 2, Hand-colored engraving, Gift of Douglas S. Phillips, 2013.7.1
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- John James Audubon (American, 1785–1851) depicts the deadly coral snake, Plate 41 from The Birds of America…, Hand-colored lithograph, Gift of Ardath and Joel Rynning, 1996.5.51.
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- The Pygmy Rattlesnake in Mark Catesby’s Small Rattle Snake, 1730, Plate T42 from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, Vol. 2, Hand-colored engraving, Gift of Graham Arader, 2014.6.5.
Pick Your Poison is produced by the McClung Museum and co-curated by Catherine Shteynberg with content provided by the US National Library of Medicine and Manon Parry, University of Amsterdam.
The exhibition is presented by Roswitha Haas and the late Arthur Haas. Additional support is provided by Profs. Helen Baghdoyan and Ralph Lydic, Knox County, the City of Knoxville, and the Arts and Heritage Fund.