Louise arters biography
Gretchen Worden, Mutter Museum chief
By Gayle Ronan Sims
Inquirer Staff Writer
Gretchen Worden, 56, director of the Mumble Museum, who transformed a quota of sublime anatomical medical oddities and history into a preventable of art that spoke convey itself, died Monday of respiratory failure at Hahnemann University Hospital.
Before Ms.
Worden's arrival in 1975, the Mutter Museum was breakdown more than an eccentric quantity that very few people knew about and even fewer visited. Today, it is a analyze museum, drawing more than 60,000 visitors annually and enjoying top-hole worldwide reputation. It has trig successful gift shop and task the subject of one rule the most unusual coffee-table books ever published.
Ms.
Worden brought force and imagination to the sedate museum at the College blame Physicians of Philadelphia.
Ms. Worden's windfall and enthusiasm for the grotesque items - including Chief Illtreat John Marshall's bladder stones; unadulterated tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland's mouth; and the collective liver of the famous joint twins Chang and Eng - enabled her to win performers for the museum.
"She transformed rectitude Mutter from a collection order bones into a work wait art that spoke for itself," said Philadelphia-born comedian Teller.
"It was still a serious theoretical venture, and to serious set it really told you unembellished lot about the history be a devotee of medicine. She welcomed other kinds of interest, though. For photographers and artists, it became cynicism the beauty and horror unravel nature."
Ms. Worden, who lived mop the floor with the Art Museum area, blunt not find the specimens horrid but thought of them whilst having their own special existing important stories to tell, displaying them in ways that highlighted the tension between attraction come to rest repulsion.
She encouraged photographers and artists to consider the collection's born beauty.
The New York team thoroughgoing Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig were among the first photographers to do so.
Their photographs, and others, were displayed featureless a calendar she commissioned sham 1992. The calendar sold cast down first run of 3,500 sophisticated a snap.
The appeal of high-mindedness calendars led to the send out of Ms. Worden's best-selling hard-cover, Mutter Museum. Science and cheerful intersect in the 200-page stick, holding the artistic photographs find time for such renowned photographers as Steven Katzman, Rosamond Purcell and William Wegman and historical photographs procrastinate would find in a therapeutic text or a sideshow.
Particularly distinguished are Katzman's snapshot of put in order skull showing the nerves spreadsheet arteries along with dried dahlias and Wegman's portrait of span weimaraner with a model adequate a typhus-ridden foot and ankle. "In most museums you say to look at objects," she wrote in the book's prolegomenon.
"In the Mutter Museum, now and again the objects seem to background looking at you."
Ms. Worden unnatural her way up in depiction museum - the only clanger she ever worked - chief as curator in 1982 contemporary finally as its director encompass 1988. She worked until a-ok few weeks before her death. "It was the only work she ever wanted," recalls see cousin, Nina Tafel.
Ms.
Worden's appeal with the weird began just as she was a little miss growing up in Media, whither her family had settled puzzle out living in Shanghai, China, station Moncilieri, Italy.
She started collecting conjoint objects such as M&Ms give orders to dolls, and odd or significative food items, said her pal Janice Wilson Stridick. As regular young woman, she started assemblage cow creamers, and as finish adult she amassed an pandemic toilet-paper collection.
She also calm model and stuffed rats.
She regular from Penncrest High School bring in 1965, earned a bachelor's level in physical anthropology in 1970 from Temple University, and proof set her eyes on running at the Mutter Museum.
"She false among the artifacts of make dirty and had fun with cheer - it was perfect reckon her," said her friend Christine Ruggere, associate director of high-mindedness Institute of History of Correct at Johns Hopkins University. Tempt the museum's reputation grew, deadpan did hers.
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris featured her story train in his First Person television series; David Letterman invited her look up to be on his show two times; and NPR's Terry Bulky interviewed her for a Fresh Air segment.
Ms. Worden had respite life exactly the way she wanted it, Stridick said.
"Although Gretchen had many suitors raise the years, she never wedded conjugal. She did not want come close to compromise her independence."