Currently displayed at Yale Health (55 Locke St / 3rd Floor, New Haven, CT), Dreaming Animals is an award-winning collaboration between Beinecke Library’s Meredith Miller (photographer) and MJ Millington (poet), exploring the complex relationship between humans and animals. Playing with words and images, each artist uses her own medium to explore the disjuncture between how we think and speak about animals, and how we behave towards them. Inspired by animal-themed children’s games, Miller prints images of endangered animals from the Beinecke Library’s digital collections and re-photographs them in playful scenes she creates with household objects. Millington then writes a poem to pair with each image, playing with common linguistic tropes, phrases, and clichés about animals to recast the stories found in well-worn expressions.

All are welcome to visit the following SoundCloud link to listen to all readings of poems shown in the exhibition. 

Words from the artists

“We began the project when Beinecke went into Covid lockdown in March 2020 and we were working from home. The project has since won two awards: The Vermont Studio Center Broadside 2020 award, and a 2021 Yale University Environmental Humanities Grant, which allowed us to produce this exhibit.”

The exhibition is on view through the summer of 2022.