Here’s another great offering from the folks at the SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport:

Italian motorcycles from the 1950s and 1960s.

175cc CSS Super Sport "Disco Volante" 1955

Stunning indeed..

125cc Turismo 1951 FB Mondial (1948–79), Milan, Italy

Moto Bellissima: Italian Motorcycles from the 1950s and 1960s is located pre-security in the International Terminal Main Hall Departures Lobby at San Francisco International Airport. The exhibition will be there through April 28, 2012.

Categories: Art, Museums
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The folks at MoOM – the Museum of Online Museums – share links to some wonderful places, including The Library of Dust . The Travel Film Archive and Penny Postcards.

That last one is where I found the postcard above, from 1956, which celebrates “The New $11,000,000.00 Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.”

Categories: Museums
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In a previous post, I shared a few of the hidden museum treasures I included in a slide show I put together for Bing Travel: fleas in a hazelnut inside a matchbox, a quilt made from Ku Klux Klan masks and a glass Portuguese man of war.  You can see those items here.

Here are few more:

This mounted skull, at Alaska’s Anchorage Museum, was labeled by the donor as the “first known Alaskan atomic victim;” it’s from a walrus supposedly killed when Russians exploded an atomic bomb near Siberia in about 1953. Exhibited briefly at the museum in 1966, the skull was put away over concerns that it was radioactive. When tested in 2000, no radiation was found, but the walrus stays in storage.

The National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., has more than 1,000 objects in its spacesuit collection, including most of the suits, gloves, boots and helmets worn during the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions. Built to withstand space — but not time — many now-fragile spacesuits are kept in storage facilities with special light, temperature and humidity controls. Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit, considered the most important spacesuit ever built, has been in storage since 2006.

At the Denver Art Museum, “Linda,” a popular piece of artwork by John DeAndrea made from plastic materials, emerges from storage for a short time every few years. Kate Moomaw, assistant conservator for modern and contemporary art, says, “Deterioration of plastics typically leads to issues like color change, distortions and increased brittleness … so ‘Linda’s’ time on view is rationed out. … When not on display, ‘Linda’ is kept in dark storage.”

You can see the full slide show here.
I’m working on a book on this same topic – so if you know of museum that has a hidden treasure you’d like to nominate, please drop me a note.

(All photos courtesy of the respective museums.)

Categories: Museums
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We visit museums to see rare, wonderful and unusual objects on display. But most museums have room to exhibit just 10 percent of their holdings. The rest rarely — or never — sees the light of day. Unless, that is, you have a key to the back rooms where they keep hidden treasures like the ones I found for a slide show on Bing Travel.

Here are some of the highlights from that story.

In the United States, flea circuses were once regular features in carnivals and sideshows. This diorama in the collection of the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in Indiana features four fleas (heads only) in a village scene and is mounted in a hazelnut that is encased in a matchbox. According to a museum staff member, the tiny diorama is kept in storage because “people would have to line up to see it and it would be difficult for a family to view together.”

This pretty but rarely displayed quilt in the collection of Washington’s Yakima Valley Museum was made in 1928 by the wife of a berry farmer and has a story far more complicated than meets the eye. According to the note that came with the donation, the white fabric in the background came from masks once worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Mass., displays 3,200 hand-crafted glass models of flowering plants created between 1886 and 1936 by German glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. Not on display are the university’s 430 Blaschka glass models of marine invertebrates, such as this glass model of a Portuguese man of war, which Harvard acquired in the late 19th century.

For more hidden treasures, check back tomorrow.

Categories: Museum Monday, Museums
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If Dorothy’s ruby red slippers and a green Kermit the Frog puppet can be part of the collection at the Smithsonian Institution, why not one of the gray bins from the modern-day airport security checkpoint.

That’s exactly what’s happened.

According to a guest blog post by Transportation Security Administration historian Michael P. C. Smith on the National Museum of American History website, the TSA recently donated several artifacts to the museum’s National September 11 Collection, including some original TSA uniforms, a firearm carried by a Federal Air Marshal and various pieces of aviation security technology, such as a gray security bin and a “put your feet here” mat.

Here’s a link to website for the Smithsonian’s Remembrance and Reflection page, which has details about the museum’s current exhibition of 9/11 items and pictures of many of the items in its September 11 collection.

Categories: Exhibits, Museums, TSA
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