#29 Brooks Hall Mammoth

#29 Brooks Hall Mammoth

Brooks Hall

This wooly mammoth, constructed of cardboard and paint by a group of UVA students in 2012, is a replica of a plaster mammoth that once towered over the interior of Brooks Hall. The idea of the so-called Cardboard Company, led by artist-in-residence Tom Burckhardt, was to recreate whimsically the natural history museum that had made its home in Brooks Hall beginning in 1878. Christened the Lewis Brooks Hall of Natural Science, the building was crammed with tens of thousands of specimens and artifacts, including a great Siberian mammoth built of plaster and fake hair. The towering creature, who stood an imposing sixteen-and-a-half feet tall and more than forty-nine feet around, presided over the collection until the museum was decommissioned in the 1940s.