The exhibition includes a print of Andy Warhol’s f Queen Elizabeth II (1985) and prints from his Campbell’s Soup series, alongside works by other Pop Art figures such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg.
Pop Icons runs January 18 – April 13, 2025
(Stitches by Robert Rauschenberg. Courtesy of UCR ARTS)
The Stuck at the Airport Museum Team missed visiting the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix, AZ our last time through and we plan to make the MIM our first stop the next time we head that way.
Which may be soon.
The museum displays more than 4,200 instruments representing all the world’s countries and many territories.
This week MIM unveiled Stradivarius and the Golden Age of Violins and Guitars, showcasing more than 70 exceptional string instruments and bows crafted by master luthiers such as Antonio Stradivari, Andrea Amati, and Giuseppe Guarneri “del Gesù.”
This exhibition includes violins, guitars, lutes, and bows from the 16th to 19th centuries—many of which have never been publicly displayed before.
Exhibition highlights include:
The “Tartini” violin by Antonio Stradivari (1726). This comes from late in his golden period when he made his most mature instruments.
A mandolino coristo by Antonio Stradivari. This is one of only two known surviving mandolins crafted by the iconic luthier.
A violin by Andrea Amati who created the violin and the violin family as we know them today. This violin is one of only twenty-three documented Amati instruments known to survive today.
A guitar from the school of Matteo Sellas, c. 1625. This Venetian guitar is embellished with ivory, ebony, tortoiseshell, and pearl, and it has a tiered “wedding cake” rose, a common feature of guitars until the mid-18th century.
If you’re a music fan flying into Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX), check the airport’s Traveling Tunes live music program schedule. Local artists take the stage and play live music on the Traveling Tunes music stage in Terminal 3, Level 4 on the main concourse, and in the Terminal 4 Food Court on Level 3.
There’s a different musical genre featured each month. And for November the theme is classical.
It’s been a while since we had a chance to visit the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus.
The whole museum was closed for more than a year while seismic upgrades were made to the spectacular Great Hall, which has 50-foot-tall glass walls and displays of Northwest Coast poles, house posts, carved figures, canoes, feast dishes and other objects primarily from the mid-19th century.
Work by contemporary artists are mixed in here and there, and there are other temporary exhibitions as well as permanent galleries, including the Koerner European Ceramics Gallery, which displays one man’s collection of over 600 objects.
Beyond the Great Hall, our favorite part of the museum is the Multiversity Galleries displaying more than 16,000 objects from the museum’s permanent collection in open storage and in enticing pull-out drawers.
Impossible to see in one visit, many of the exhibit groupings were created in consultation with members of the communities whose relatives and ancestors made the pieces on display.
The SFO Museum‘s newest exhibition, San Francisco: City of the World, offers travelers a thoughtful, fun and educational look at the iconic city’s colorful history.
Find it post-security in Terminal 2 through July 6, 2025.
A preview of images and information from the exhibit is below.
Content and images courtesy of SFO Museum.
In 1848, gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The following year, more than seven hundred ships arrived in San Francisco.
The Gold Rush transformed the region into a bustling city of approximately twenty-five thousand inhabitants, including thousands of Chinese immigrants who established California’s oldest and largest Chinatown.
Andrew Smith Hallidie (1836–1900) tested the first cable car in 1873 on Clay Street and public service began in September that same year.
By the turn of the twentieth century, San Francisco was known as the “Paris of the West,” until the 1906 earthquake and resulting fires leveled the city.
The resilient metropolis was quickly rebuilt, and during the early 1900s numerous San Francisco landmarks, such as Coit Tower (1933) and the Golden Gate Bridge (1937)—the most photographed bridge in the world—were built. In addition to its natural beauty and historical sites, San Francisco has long served as a meeting ground for diverse groups of people and countercultures, which are also explored throughout the exhibition.
(D.B. Cooper pink parachute courtesy Washington State History Museum)
The only unsolved commercial airline hijacking in the U.S. remains the November 24, 1971 hijacking of Northwest Orient flight 305 to Seattle by someone who has come to be known as “D.B.” Cooper.
(Sketch courtesy FBI)
In 1971, Cooper boarded a Boeing 727 on Thanksgiving eve, November 24, that was heading from Portland, Oregon to Seattle.
During the flight, he passed a flight attendant a note saying that he had a bomb and would blow up the plane unless he was given $200,000 in $20 bills and some parachutes.
His demands were met and he parachuted out of the plane, with the money, somewhere over southwest Washington State.
In 1980 some of the money was found along the banks of a river. But Cooper remains at large.
And the mystery lingers on.
Cooper’s hijacking demands included four parachutes. He got them but didn’t choose the pink nylon reserve parachute that the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, WA is displaying this fall.
The parachute was part of the evidence the FBI recovered for its hijacking investigation and has since been given to the museum for safekeeping and occasional display.
You can see this parachute and contemplate what you think happened to Cooper and the money from September 22 through November 16, 2014.
If you can, come by the museum on November 14 for the History After Hours program.
I’ll be there for a presentation about some of the weird and wonderful objects, like the D.B. Cooper parachute, that museums rarely or never display.
Here’s a short video about D.B. Cooper from Seattle’s public TV station.
