June 20 –December 12, 2022

The Marquette Core Curriculum is the center of every Marquette University student’s educational experience. The newly redesigned MCC aims to better connect students to their studies—and to the world—through a thematic, tiered approach. This exhibition is the fourth in a series that explores the five MCC Discovery Tier themes.

Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence: Knowing and Communicating explores the ways that humans try to systematize and process data so that we can better understand the world around us and share that understanding with others. From the acquisition of language to the imaginative art of storytelling to the advent of data science and machine learning, so many of our ordinary and extraordinary human activities depend on memory making, cognitive processing, and mental analysis. The works in this exhibit highlight these essential functions of cognition, demonstrating how the Marquette Core Curriculum’s “Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence” theme equips us to appreciate the interconnections between personal thought, self, and the other.

Marquette faculty from across campus who have expertise (and often teach classes in) the Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence theme have curated pairs of images that address, explore, and challenge our notion of what it means to learn, understand, and communicate through our cognitive processes.

Cognition, Memory, and Intelligence: Knowing and Communicating was supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.