Saturday, January 20, 2018

“Murder Is Her Hobby" is an exhibition of 19 miniature crime scenes created by Frances Glessner Lee in the 1940s and ’50s as training tools for police investigators

NYT:
The models, meticulously handcrafted by Lee, are known as ‘‘The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.’’ Nearly all are owned by the Harvard Medical School and on loan from the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where they live, and continue to teach, some 70 years on.

I encourage you to drop what you’re doing and go to see them, before they go back into seclusion after the show closes on Jan. 28. The Nutshells are not only ingenious devices for the instruction of crime scene examiners, they are a body of imaginative work that would have established any artist’s career and place in art history.

Ms. Lee was not a schooled artist. She was a rich, frustrated woman in her 60s when she began them, and almost belligerent in her pursuit of a place in the infant field of forensic science.