For this artist-curated installation of the Frye Art Museum’s collection, the research collective ESTAR(SER) reaches into an archive of dreams to assemble an exhibition that asks fundamental questions about museums and the works of art they hold: What do artworks want from us? And what do we want from them?

THE THIRD, MEANING: ESTAR(SER) Installs the Frye Collection is guest curated by the research-based artist collective ESTAR(SER), with D. Graham Burnett, Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University, and Joanna Fiduccia, Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, as project leads.

D. Graham Burnett works at the intersection of historical inquiry and artistic practice. He makes texts (and occasions) using experiential approaches to archival material, pedagogical modes, and hermeneutic activities traditionally associated with the research humanities. Based in New York, Burnett trained in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University and teaches at Princeton. He edits a series in speculative historiography, “Conjectures,” for The Public Domain Review (UK), and is the author of a number of books, including Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Trying Leviathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); The Sounding of the Whale (2012); and Twelve Theses on Attention (New York: FoA/PUP, 2022), co-authored and co-edited with Stevie Knauss and the Friends of Attention, with whom he often collaborates. Burnett’s essays, pseudonymities, and metafictions have appeared in: Cabinet (where he is an editor), October, Parkett, Texte zur Kunst, TANK, Geist, and elsewhere, including the catalogue of the 55th Venice Biennial.