In the realm of collecting, everything is fair game: comic books, rare porcelains, bottle caps, Old Master drawings, butterflies, antique dolls, modern art-anything that becomes the object of an individual's enthusiasm for acquiring and saving. Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More offers a representative selection of objects from three different kinds of collections: fine art, popular culture, and public record. From the Robert J. Shiffler Foundation, a collection of contemporary art in Ohio, is a selection of approximately 25 works in various mediums by Janine Antoni, Karen Finley, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joel Otterson, Kay Rosen, Doris Salcedo, Michael Snow, and other artists. From a private collection in New York come 100 examples of sock monkeys, a hand-crafted toy whose golden age was the 1950s. The third example of collecting originates in the archives of the United States Patents Office, to which every optimistic inventor submitted a miniature model of his or her big idea.

The show raises some provocative questions that are pertinent to institutions and individuals alike: Why do so many of us accumulate objects? What distinguishes an object as art? How do art objects differ in value, interest, and purpose from other groups of objects?

Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More presents a unique opportunity for outreach for the institutions that host this exhibition. In addition to displaying the objects from the three collections selected by guest curator Ingrid Schaffner, each participating institution is encouraged to draw on its own permanent collection-or on a nearby private or public collection-to contribute a local component to the exhibition and to raise fundamental questions about collecting. Schaffner is an independent curator based in New York whose recently created shows include Deep Storage (at P.S. 1, New York, and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle), and The Victorian Impulse (at the Armand Hammer Museum at UCLA).