Exhibits

At PHL Airport: a collection of collections

The exhibition program at Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) is offering an exhibition featuring a wonderful collection of collections.

Personal Collection – Private Obsessions features an assortment of private collections that are borrowed from residents of the Greater Philadelphia area and from employees at Philadelphia International Airport.

Passengers traveling through PHL between now and May 2024 will see some collections representing nostalgic objects, such as handbags, sewing thimbles, antique glass, airline silverware, and John F. Kennedy ephemera.

Other collections feature more familiar objects from popular culture—ice cream scoops, bobbleheads, bottle caps, Funko Pop! figures, travel magnets, and Philadelphia Eagles hats.

The exhibit notes point out that while the activity of collecting is a universal experience, each collection is as personal and unique as each object and often represents a specific remembrance or story.

“This is the 4th exhibition of collections that we have presented over the past 25 years of the exhibitions program,” said Leah Douglas, PHL’s Director of Guest Experience. “The current installation is by far the most extensive one to date and it is proving to be a big hit with our guests and employees,” she said.

Personal Collections – Private Obsessions is on view at Philadelphia International Airport through May 2024 and is located between Terminals C and D accessible to ticketed passengers.

What do you collect?

It seems everyone collects something. Or many things. Please share a note about your collections in the comments section below.

Cool collections on display at PHL Airport

Do you collect anything? (Or a lot of things?)

Here at the Seattle headquarters of Stuck at the Airport, we share space with Space Needle souvenirs, cowgirl memorabilia, and other collections. (Not counting that pile of unread New Yorker magazines).

So we’re delighted to see the Philadelphia International Airport’s (PHL) exhibition program kicking off the new year with a fun show titled “Private Collections: Personal Obsessions.”

On view in Terminal D, the exhibition is a festival of collections on loan from Philadelphia-area residents, including a few people who work at PHL.

The cases include a sampling of collections dedicated to architectural salvage, brooches, cable cars, beer bottles, hearts, masks, magnets, mail art, wind-up toys, and lots more.

“Most [of the collections] have been gathered primarily as a hobby for the collector’s own enjoyment or handed down from one family member to another,” says Leah Douglas, PHL Director of Guest Experience and Chief Curator.

“While the activity of collecting is a universal experience, each collection is personal and unique as each object often represents a specific remembrance or story,” she adds.

The beer bottles on display are courtesy of David Rosenblum, PHL’s photographer/videographer, whose late father collected more than 4000 bottles. “His most prized bottles were always the older bottles from Philadelphia-area brewers,” says Rosenblum.

The refrigerator magnets in the exhibit are on loan from the collection of PHL’s public affairs manager, Heather Redfern.

“[M]agnets are inexpensive trinkets that tell the story of where I have traveled, favorite trips, and great experiences I have had along the way,” says Redfern. “I am reminded of where I have been and where I would still like to go every time I walk past the refrigerator.”

Do you have a collection you have put together from your travels? We’d love to hear about it and see some snaps.

All photos courtesy of PHL Airport and David Rosenblum.

If/Then: Women in Aviation Statues at Dallas Love Field

In 2021. Dallas’ NorthPark Center will present #IfThenSheCan – The Exhibit, which will feature 123 3-D printed statues of contemporary women working in the STEM professions of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

In the meantime, 15 of those statues are on display through March 9, 2021, at Dallas Love Field. Included in the group are 10 statues that portray women who work in aviation or aerospace-related fields, including astrophysicists, a rocket scientist, and an aviation maintenance technician.

To create the statues each subject stands in a scanning booth that uses 89 cameras and 25 projectors to generate a 3D image. A special machine then takes up to ten hours to slowly build up the layers of acrylic gel that make the statue.

Here’s a list of the women whose statues are in the DAL pop-up exhibit.

1. Adriana Bailey – Atmospheric Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
2. Charita Castro – Social Science Researcher, Office of the US Trade Representative
3. Xyla Foxlin – Engineer, Entrepreneur, and Nonprofit Director, Beauty and the Bolt
4. Miriam Fuchs – Telescope Systems Specialist, East Asian Observatory
5. Joyonna Gamble-George – Health Scientist, National Institutes of Health
6. Erika Hamden – Professor of Astrophysics, University of Arizona
7. Kelly Korreck – Astrophysicist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
8. Adele Luta – Scientist and Innovator, Oceaneering
9. Jenn Makins – STEM Educator and Inventor, Parish Episcopal School
10. Amanda Masino – Biologist, Professor and Research Director, Huston-Tillotson University
11. Tiffany Panko – Women’s Health Researcher, Rochester Institute of Technology
12. Jasmine Sadler – Dancing Rocket Scientist and STEAM Entrepreneur, The STEAM Collaborative
13. Nikki Sereika – Aviation Maintenance Technician, Southwest Airlines
14. Nicole Sharp – Aerospace Engineer and Science Communicator, Sharp Science Communication Consulting
15. Mary Beth Westmoreland – Vice President, Amazon

And here’s a short time-lapse video of the statues being installed.

DFW Airport pops open a new Coca-Cola themed lounge

Coca-Cola’s new ‘Around the World Experience’ lounge at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) is now open to travelers in Terminal D.

The 2, 106-foot-square lounge has seating and power charging stations and lots of Coca-Cola themed exhibits and attractions.

In addition to Coca-Cola vending machines, the lounge space has two display cases filled with vintage artifacts and memorabilia from the Coca-Cola Archives. The mini-museum has an 1896 syrup urn and pieces from ad campaigns featuring Run DMC, Max Headroom, and the Coca-Cola Polar Bear.

The Coca-Cola Around the World Experience also features an interactive photo booth, folk art Coca-Cola bottles, a digital coke store, and a digital display with interactive timelines, stories, trivia, and digitized images from around the world.

Oh, did we mention that Coca-Cola is the official beverage sponsor of DFW Airport? We didn’t know airports had official beverages either.

But, evidently, they do.

Surf Music exhibit at SFO has its own soundtrack

Fender Jazzmaster – 1965, played by Bob Demmon of The Astronauts

The SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) has a fun new exhibit celebrating the instrumental surf music popular in the United States in the early 1960s.

SFO Museum General Exhibition 2020

Surf’s Up! Instrumental Rock ‘n’ Roll

So much fun stuff comes from Southern California.

One example: surf music,

“Energetic and melodic with little or no vocal accompaniment, instrumental surf music originated in Southern California along with a booming interest in surfing and the subsequent pop-cultural craze,” the exhibit notes tell us.

“The most authentic surf music reflected a youthful lifestyle and started at the grassroots, often by teenagers who formed bands to play dances and other functions.”

Here are some of our favorite photos from the exhibit.

DoubleJunk” Fender Jazzmaster/Jaguar 1992 & Weather King bass drumhead  1989

Howard custom double-neck guitar 1960
played by Duane Eddy, “The King of Twangy Guitar”

More surf tidbits from the exhibit notes:

“Surf music was influenced by the rock ‘n’ roll instrumentals of the late 1950s when many bands replaced vocal melodies with leads played by the saxophone, piano, organ, and guitar.

Duane Eddy and The Rebels scored a major guitar hit with “Rebel Rouser” in 1958, the same year that “Rumble” by Link Wray & The Wraymen was banned by radio stations for its “suggestive” title.

The Ventures refined instrumentals with brilliantly simple lead-guitar lines layered over rhythm- and bass-guitar melodies. In 1960 their arrangement of “Walk—Don’t Run” landed at #2, the first in a string of instrumental hits by the group.”

“By 1963, surf music was a full-fledged phenomenon that received national attention. A revival of instrumental surf music occurred during the early 1980s and spread worldwide in the 1990s. The music is now more diverse than ever, and there are active surf and instrumental scenes throughout the United States and in Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Japan, and across Europe.”


Surf’s Up! Instrumental Rock ‘n’ Roll is located post-security in Terminal 2 of the San Francisco International Airport through July 18, 2021.

You can see many of the exhibit items in the online exhibition and, even better, listen to a Spotify surf music playlist here.

All photos courtesy SFO Museum.