Museums

Fresh art at Phoenix and Austin airports

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Stuck at the airport?  Look around. You may find an art exhibit right around the corner.

A new exhibit at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport- Fiber Art Unraveled: Material and Process – features work by 19 Arizona artists.

Here are a few samples:

Nick Georgiou’s Green Reindeer is made from newspapers and discarded books;

Clare Verstegen’s Compass is made with screen-printed wool, felt and birch plywood;

And Carol Eckert’s, The Raven Addresses the Animals is made with cotton embroidery thread and wire.

Fiber Art Unraveled: Material and Process will be on display until September 21, 2011 at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX), Terminal 4, Level 3 in eight display cases outside the security checkpoints.

At Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS), the newest exhibit shows off beads and beadwork from members of the Austin Bead Society (ABS) and includes vintage African trading beads, handmade jewelry  and the work of 20 Austin artists, including this polymer clay face framed with bead embroidery by Laura Zeiner.

AUSTIN Airport beadwork on display

The beadwork exhibit at Austin Bergstrom International Airport will be on display through October 18, 2010 in the airport concourse showcases, post-security, across from gates 7-11.

Have you seen some great art while you were stuck at the airport?

Museum Monday: 1940 Air Terminal Museum, Houston Hobby Airport

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There are close to 700 aviation and space museums in this country. Each Monday, we take a look at one of them.  Stick around. Eventually we’ll visit them all!

This week: The 1940 Air Terminal Museum at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport.

Vintage view of Houston Hobby Airport terminal

Greetings from Houston Hobby Airport

Housed in the airport’s original art deco air terminal,the museum is dedicated to showcasing the city’s aviation history.

In addition to this classic, restored terminal building, the museum has historic aircraft on display in the restored 1928 Carter Field Airmail Hangar.

Restored 1928 Carter Field Airmail Hangar

1928 Carter Field Airmail Hangar

The 1940 Air Terminal Museum recently raffled off an airplane and is now accepting entries for a “Flying Times” art exhibition featuring artwork and objects relating to Commercial aviation, General Aviation, or Space.

Not sure if you want to enter? Consider this: cash prizes will be awarded for the best work (1st prize: $500, 2nd Prize: $250, 3rd prize: $100) and for the work that best depicts the terminal building ($50 prize.)  Cash prizes will also be awarded in several other categories. The deadline for entries is September 1, 2010 and the show will run from September 17 through October 31, 2010.  Look here for entry forms and more information about the 1940 Air Terminal Museum’s art contest. And good luck!

Houston Hobby Airport opening day

Houston Hobby Airport - Opening Day

Do you have a favorite aviation or space museum?  If so, nominate it here and it may be featured on a future edition of Museum Monday here at StuckatTheAirport.com.

Love the layover: Meet some mummies

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Zombies may be trendy right now, but the madness for mummies is eternal.

Coffin of TAHAT

Coffin of Tahat from Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University

That’s what I found out while putting together a Mummy Madness story this week for msnbc.com.

Before I started my research I called my buddy Adam Woog, who wrote a book about mummies for the middle-school market. “Mummies are creepy and cool,” he told me. “Everyone knows about Egyptian mummies. Make sure you write about mummified people that have been discovered in deserts, on icy mountains, in bogs and other places. That’s part of what makes mummies so mysterious.”

He’s right. Mummies are mysterious. And, William Jamieson told me, “Mummies sell tickets.” Jamieson is a Toronto-based dealer and collector of ancient and tribal artifacts who’s sold mummies (and shrunken heads!) to museums and attractions around the world. During the late 1800s and early 1900s in North America, he says, “You couldn’t even really call yourself a museum unless you had a mummy.”

So that’s why, in addition to the museums around the world that have multiple mummies, you’ll find ‘one-off’ mummies in places like the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and the Charleston Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.

Have you been meaning to meet some mummies? Then consider adding these museums and attractions to your travel plans.

Cat Mummy from the British Museum

Cat mummy from the British Museum

Both kids and adults visiting London’s vast British Museum usually make a beeline for Rooms 62-64. One of the world’s largest collection of Egyptian mummies and their coffins is displayed here along with funerary masks, mummified cats, fish and other animals, as well as other objects once buried with and associated with the dead.

Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato exhibition

On exhibit at Mexico’s Mummy Museum of Guanajuato (Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato) are more than 100 naturally preserved mummies exhumed from a municipal cemetery between 1865 and 1989. The mummies are displayed in themed groupings that include baby mummies (including what may be the world’s smallest mummy), mummies still dressed in complete burial outfits, and the mummies of people whose lives clearly ended tragically.

Thirty-six mummies from the Guanajuato museum’s collection are now part of an exhibit scheduled to tour the United States through 2012. Called the “ Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato,” the exhibition closed its run at the Detroit Science Center in May. The next stop on the tour should be announced shortly.

Egyptian Galleries at Emory University Michael C. Carlos Museum

Egyptian Galleries at Michael C. Carlos Museum

In Atlanta, the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University displays some of the 10 coffins and nine mummies it purchased from Canada’s Niagara Falls Museum, which began exhibiting Egyptian mummies in the 1850s and went out of business in the 1990s. “Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and P.T. Barnum saw those mummies,” says Peter Lacovara, curator of the Michael C. Carlos Museum, “And they are some of the earliest mummies exhibited outside of Egypt.” In addition to three or four mummies in their own coffins, the museum currently displays animal mummies, including a crocodile, a cat and a hawk, and coffins created for a lizard, an ibis, a snake and a shrew.

Mummy on display at San Diego Museum of Man

Multiple mummies are also on display at the San Diego Museum of Man. In addition to replicas of “Bog Bodies” from Denmark and “Chinchorro Mummies” from coastal Chile and Southern Peru, the museum displays two authentic Egyptian mummies on loan from the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, five naturally mummified bodies from Peru (four are children; the fifth is a young woman) and a female mummy from Mexico who was seven to eight months pregnant at the time of death.

Mummies of the World exhibit

Mummified head from Mummies of the World.

The California Science Center in Los Angeles doesn’t have any mummies in its own collection, but it is currently partnering with 20 other museums from around the world to exhibit the mummies (or mummified body parts) of 45 humans and animals, along with about 100 mummy-related artifacts from South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania And Egypt.

“The Mummies of the World exhibit focuses on the scientific research and analysis being done on these mummies,” says the Science Center’s Diane Perlov, but it’s clearly the Peruvian child mummy dating to 3,000 years before King Tut, the 18th century mummified family (a son and his parents) and the other “Ew-I-can’t-look-but-I-can’t-look-away” mummies that people are lining up to see.

The exhibit will stay in Los Angeles through November and then move on to Milwaukee, where the mummies will be on display through May 2011.

Have you seen a mummy on display in your travels? Tell us about it below.

Museum Monday: 1928 biplane inside Ottawa International Airport

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There are close to 700 aviation and space museums in the country. Each Monday, we explore one of them.

De Havilland Tiger Moth from Vintage Wings Canada

De Havilland Tiger Moth from Vintage Wings Canada

This week we have the story of a fun partnership between Canada’s Ottawa International Airport (YOW) and Vintage Wings of Canada, a local organization that acquires, restores, maintains and flies classic and significant aircraft, with an emphasis on Canadian airplanes.

You can see photos of the all of the museum’s aircraft on its website. To see the planes in person, though, you’ll have to be part of a scheduled group tour or show up at one of the organization’s special summer events.

But as this article (with video) in the Ottawa Sun describes, for a while at least, air passengers will be able to see one of the museum’s treasures in the baggage claim area at Ottawa International Airport.

Last week museum volunteers flew a 1928 WACO Taperwing biplane to the Ottawa Airport, disassembled the plane enough to get it into the terminal, and then put the plane back together in the baggage claim area.

WACO Taperwing 1928 from Vintage Wings Canada

The biplane plane was recently featured in the film, “Amelia,” starring Hilary Swank and is scheduled to be at the YOW airport until mid-September. Volunteers from Vintage Wings will be on-site to tell passengers about the history of the airplane.

1928 WACO Taperwing inside Ottowa Airport

Volunteers reassemble the 1928 WACO Taperwing inside YOW airport

Do you have a favorite aviation museum you’d like others to know about?

Leave a comment here and we’ll try to add the nominated sites to the Museum Monday schedule.

Museum Monday: National Museum of the U.S. Air Force

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There are close to 700 aviation and space museums around the country.

Each Monday here at StuckatTheAirport.com, we feature one of them.

This week: The National Museum of the US Air Force.

This museum has a lot of fans and I took a lot of heat for leaving it out of a recent msnbc.com column – Aviation Museums that Soar – that only had room to mention six aviation and space museums around the country.

So here we go:

USAF Museum Northrop B-2

Northrop B-2 Spirit at the National Museum of the U. S. Air Force

With 17 acres of indoor exhibition space and more than 400 aerospace vehicles in its collection, the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, OH, is the largest military aviation museum in the world.

In addition to an IMAX theater, and more than a half dozen huge galleries filled with one-of-a-kind aircraft and aerospace  vehicles, the museum has  personal artifacts, photographs, documents and exhibits that help tell the Air Force story.

Air Power Gallery National Museum of the US AIR FORCE

The Air Power Gallery at the National Museum of the US Air Force

If you plan to visit, you might have to pick just a few galleries to see.  And choosing won’t be easy.

In the Early Years Gallery, the aircraft, exhibits and artifacts start with the Wright brothers and continue through World War I and the beginning of World War II.

1909 Wright Flyer at National Museum of the US Air Force

Reproduction 1909 Wright Flyer at National Museum of the US Air Force

In the 140-foot tall, silo-like Missile and Space Gallery you’ll find a collection of missiles that can be viewed from the ground level or from a platform that runs around the inside of the gallery. There’s also the Apollo 15 Command Module, Mercury and Gemini capsules, rocket engines, satellites and balloon gondolas.

USAF Museum Missile and Space Gallery

The Missile and Space Gallery at the USAF Museum

And in the Presidential Gallery, for which there are special entry requirements, you’ll see the airplane that served as Air Force One the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as well as airplanes used by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

President Kennedy leaving Air Force One

President John F. Kennedy disembarking Air Force One

There’s more – lots more – so before you visit be sure to poke around the National Museum of the US Air Force Museum website.

Spad XIII USAF MUSEUM

SPAD XIII at National Museum of the United States Air Force

The USAF Museum is open daily. Admission is free.

A great time to visit might be during Labor Day weekend (Sept 3-5, 2010) when the museum hosts the Giant Scale Radio-Controlled Model Aircraft Air Show with model jets, helicopters and warbirds doing acrobatics in the sky.

Do you have a favorite aviation or space museum? If so, leave a comment below and we may feature your suggestion in a future Museum Monday on StuckatTheAirport.com.

In Spokane: the world’s oldest flying Boeing airplane

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I’ve been touring Spokane, WA and the surrounding countryside this week in search of unusual people, places and events to include in the 3rd edition of Washington Curiosities, one of the books I write for Globe Pequot Press.

The week will end with a visit to Felts Field to meet Addison Pemberton, who found and rebuilt (with the help of more than 60 people) the oldest Boeing airplane still flying.

I’ll report back on my visit with Pemberton and his airplane, but in the meantime, take a look at my new Spokane buddy. I found him while touring Marvin Carr’s One of a kind in the world museum, which is filled with wonders ranging from the oldest typewriter in the world to a taxidermied giraffe and Elvis Presley’s 1973 Lincoln Mark IV.

Spokane museum Marvin Carr squirrel

Museum Monday: Gallery of Flight at Milwaukee General Mitchell Int’l Airport

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If you like flying, chances are you like airplanes. And if you like airplanes, chances are you like visiting aviation museums once in a while.

Lucky for you there are more than 600 aviation and space-related museums around the country.   Each Monday, StuckatTheAirport.com visits one of them.

This week, it’s the Mitchell Gallery of Flight inside Milwaukee General Mitchell International Airport.

Hamiltion Metalplan at aviation museum inside Milwaukee Mitchell Int'l Airport

(Hamilton Metalplane display, courtesy Mitchell Gallery of Flight)

Like the airport, the museum is named in honor of General Billy Mitchell, who is regarded as the Father of the U.S. Air Force.

Mitchell is profiled in the People section of the museum, along with Wisconsin-born fighter ace Dick Bong and other aviators with Wisconsin links, including Charles Lindbergh, who visited the Milwaukee airport in 1927.  Two exhibit cases display artifacts and photos about Captain James Lovell, who is best known for his four Gemini and Apollo spaceflights.

James Lovell exhibit at MKE Gallery of Flight museum

In the Aircraft & Airships section of the museum, you’ll see antique propellers, aviation-related artifacts and loads of models, including a 22-foot, 1/36th scale model of the Graf Zeppelin II (a sister to the Hindenberg) and models of military jets, WWII aircraft and airplanes of all eras.

Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport Gallery of Flight exhibit

(Photo by Prateek Bahadur, via Flickr Creative Commons)

Best of all, the museum is located pre-security at Milwaukee General Mitchell International Airport and admission is free.

For information about hours and exhibits, see the Mitchell Gallery of Flight website.

aircraft models displayed at Gallery of Flight Museum in General Mitchell International Airport Milwaukee

(Photo by Prateek Bahadur, via Flickr Creative Commons)

Do you have a favorite aviation/space museum? Please feel free to nominate it for a future edition of Museum Monday.


Museum Monday: LAX Flight Path Learning Center and Museum

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There are close to 700 aviation & space museums around the county and in my recent msnbc.com column Aviation and Space Museums that Soar, I only had room to list six of them. The best of the rest we’ll get to know here, during Museum Mondays on StuckatTheAirport.com.

Last week, it was the New England Air Museum at Bradley International Airport in Windsor, CT.  This week, we’ll take a look at the Flight Path Learning Center and Museum, in the Imperial Terminal (once the home MGM Grand Airlines) on the south perimeter of Los Angeles International Airport.

LAX FLIGHT PATH Museum

(Photo courtesy: Kate Sedlmayr, KES Consulting.aero)

In addition to special exhibits, Flight Path features historic murals that depict the history of aviation in Southern California along with model airplanes, photographs, airline uniforms and a wide variety of artifacts and memorabilia that tell the story of Southern California-based airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and aerospace companies.

LAX Flight Path Museum airplane models

The exhibits inside the museum are great, but for many the real attraction is what passes by the museum’s windows:  the museum looks out onto LAX runways and visitors can watch airplanes take off and land.

LAX - A380 visits

(Photo courtesy Paul Haney)

Want to visit? The Flight Path Learning Center and Museum is located on the south perimeter of Los Angeles International Airport, a very short drive or cab ride from the airline terminals. Admission is free. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

A great time to visit the Flight Path Learning Center and Museum would be on Saturday July 17th, 2010 at 10 a.m. when the museum presents an audiovisual salute to 50 years of jet passenger service at Los Angeles International Airport that will include are photos and archival film clips of early passenger jets and jet terminal development at LAX.

(Photo courtesy: Kate Sedlmayr, KES Consulting.aero)

Do you have a favorite aviation or space museum? If so, please tell us about it in the comments below and it may end up featured on a future edition of Museum Monday at StuckatTheAirport.com.

Thanks to Paul Haney and Kate Sedlmayr for help with this week’s Museum Monday


Museum Monday: New England Air Museum

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I’ve been getting a lot of guff from aviation museum fans upset that I didn’t include their favorite museum in my recent msnbc.com column – Aviation and space museums that soar.

Airplanes in museum

I was asking for it.  There are close to 600 aviation and space museums in the country. And with room in the column for just six “top” places, I was sure to disappoint many readers. But now that I’ve read the comments and learned about the cool stuff at so many other aviation-related museums, I’ve decided to add Museum Monday to the line-up here at StuckatTheAirport.com.

To kick things off, I’ve chosen the New England Air Museum at Bradley International Airport in Windsor, CT.

Bradley is the airport where about 300 Virgin Atlantic passengers recently spent more than four hours stuck on an airplane when their Newark-bound flight was diverted and I’m sure they would have been much happier if they’d been hanging around this museum instead.

The New England Air Museum is the largest aviation museum in New England and has more than 125 aircraft and a huge collection of engines, instruments, aircraft parts, uniforms and personal memorabilia.

A few highlights in the collection include:

The last remaining four-engine American flying boat, the Sikorsky VS-44A, which was donated to the museum by  actress Maureen O’Hara and restored to its original condition;

A B-29 Bomber;

The Bunce-Curtiss Pusher (1912), the oldest surviving Connecticut-built airplane;

And a Kaman K-225 helicopter, the oldest surviving Kaman-built aircraft.

In addition to the artifacts and aircraft on display, the museum has Open Cockpit days, a flight simulator, special events and theme weeks throughout the summer. For example, the week of July 5th is Discover Blimps and Balloons Week.

There’s also a speaker program: this past weekend Sergei N. Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev (Prime Minister of the Soviet Union from 1957-1964) gave a lecture about the Cuban Missile Crisis, as viewed from the Kremlin.

Have a favorite aviation or space museum you’d like to see featured on Museum Monday?

Please nominate it in the comments section below. If you have photos to share, all the better!

(New England Air Museum aircraft photos used in this post courtesy Cliff1066 via Flickr Creative Commons. He’s got dozens of other great photos from the museum on his Photostream as well. )

Aviation and space museums on the must-see list

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Aviation museum Pima Air and Space

(Hanging planes at Pima Air & Space Museum, Tucson, AZ)

I am an idiot.

At least that’s what some fans of Dayton, Ohio’s United States Air Force Museum and many other aviation museums were calling me today.

They read my msnbc.com column – Aviation and space museums that soar – and were pissed that their favorite museum wasn’t among the six museums featured in the story.

I’m not surprised. The museums I included in the story are great. But there are around 600 other aviation and space museums around the country and each has its own unique collection and incredible team of supporters and volunteers.  So it was a good bet that a lot of people were going to be disappointed with the short list in my story.

United States Air Force Museum, Dayton

(Northrop B-2 Spirit on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force: U.S. Air Force photo)

What did I miss?

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio for sure.  According to Bobby Schlein, a self-described aviation enthusiast “with a degree and a job in the field,” the museum has“the most extensive collection of defense aircraft… from a replica of the Wright flyer to the F-22 and most in between; as well as a presidential and experiential hangar with many iterations of Air Force One and several very rare (some one of a kind) experimental vehicles including the X-70B Valkyrie.” Another huge plus …no admission fee.

What else?  The Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, MI, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL, the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, WI, and Kennedy Space Center in Florida were just some of the other “must-see” places people wished were on the list as well.

They are all certainly worth a visit. And in this day and age, when so many art and history organizations are hurting for money and support, they’re all lucky to have such devoted fans.

So apologies if I overlooked your favorite aviation or space museum on this list of six:

FUTURE OF FLIGHT AVIATION CENTER & BOEING TOUR
Everett, Wash.

What you’ll see: On Boeing’s 90-minute tour through the Everett factory, visitors go inside the world’s largest building (by volume) and see the production line for the 747, 767, 777 and the new 787 airplanes. The adjacent Future of Flight Aviation Center displays airplane engines and other giant airplane parts and offers a wide variety of interactive exhibits, including the knob and dial-encrusted flight deck from a 727 airplane.

EVERGREEN AVIATION & SPACE MUSEUM
McMinnville, Ore.

What you’ll see: The museum houses the infamous, huge Howard Hughes Flying Boat HK-1, better known as the Spruce Goose, and more than 50 aircraft from various eras, including a Wright 1903 Flyer replica, a Russian Photon space capsule and a Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird.

Fighter jets Pima Air & Space Museum

(Fighter jets outside the hangar dedicated to World War II Aircraft at the Pima Air & Space Museum; Courtesy Arizona Aerospace Foundation)

PIMA AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
Tucson, Ariz.

What you’ll see: The collection at this 80-acre museum includes more than 300 aircraft and spacecraft, 125,000 aviation-related artifacts, a relocated WWII barracks and a space gallery with a moon rock and a training version of an Apollo space capsule. The museum also displays President John F. Kennedy’s Air Force One, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, and hundreds of other rare, important and restored aircraft.

INTREPID SEA, AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
New York

What you’ll see: Located on and in the 900-foot-long ESSEX class aircraft carrier Intrepid, the museum is itself a national historical landmark with a collection that includes a Concorde as well as aircraft from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine and Coast Guard. The submarine USS Growler, the only submarine still in existence that fired nuclear missiles is also part of the museum and is open to the public.

SAN DIEGO AIR & SPACE MUSEUM
San Diego, Calif.

What you’ll see: Housed in a 1930s-era Ford Motor Company Exposition building, the museum presents science, aviation and space history in a series of themed airplane, spacecraft and artifact-filled galleries that include a 1928 Ford Tri-Motor passenger plane, a working flying replica of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 9 command module and many other one-of-a-kind private, military and commercial artifacts and aircraft.

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION’S NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

What you’ll see: The world’s largest collection of historic air and spacecraft includes a planetarium, an IMAX theater and thousands of artifacts, including the original Wright 1903 Flyer, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 command module Columbia from the first lunar landing mission, and a moon rock that you’re allowed to touch. And that’s just at the building on the National Mall. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, located near Dulles International Airport, contains many of the museum’s largest objects and artifacts, including the Space Shuttle Enterprise, a deHavilland Chipmunk aerobatic plane and the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay.

Have I missed your favorite aviation or space museum? Please share the details in the comments section below.