Twelve enlarged framed images of coins greet visitors on the second-floor balcony of Olin Library, each one displaying a different face and telling a story from as long as two thousand years ago.
Curated by Art History and History double major Cian Mesch ’25 as part of his senior capstone in history, the exhibition Empire in the Palm of Your Hand: Coinage as a Tool of Imperial Power examines how empires project power across time and space.
The exhibition features high-resolution photographs of coins selected from the diverse numismatic assemblage of Wesleyan University’s Archaeology & Anthropology Collection (AAC).
I’ve always loved how something so small could say and mean so much. Blowing the coins up to this scale is a way of letting people really see the power and message they were meant to project, up close and in your face.
Cian Mesch ’25
Mesch originally intended to display the physical coins alongside the photographs, but there were no available vitrines to safely house the coins during the exhibition.
Art History Professor Phillip Wagoner, Mesch’s advisor, said that exhibiting coins presents the curator with numerous challenges, many of them stemming from their small size.
“These challenges can sometimes be turned to advantage. In the present exhibition, Cian arranged for Visual Resources Curator Charlie Coffey to take high resolution photographs of each coin, revealing the impressive detail with which their dies have been engraved,” Professor Wagoner said.
The final photographs were digitally retouched to make the coins’ legends and inscriptions more visible.
The coins date from 128 BCE to the nineteenth century and come from the empires of the Seleucid, Romans, Spanish, French, and the British. Bearing the portraits of emperors and monarchs, these coins demonstrate how states bolstered legitimacy by transforming currency into mechanisms of state propaganda and asserting their rule over vast and diverse populations.
Many of the coins in the AAC were acquired during missionary expeditions led by Wesleyan alumni in the 19th- and early 20th-century. A significant proportion of the coins on display originate from the Dahl Collection, a generous bequest of about 250 coins and tokens from Winthrop Dahl ’84, a former Classical Studies major.
Empire in the Palm of Your Hand will be on view until September 30, 2025. A printed catalog is available for visitors to take.
