So we were delighted to be back in touch with Bobj Berger. The model train enthusiast, train manager and seasonal Santa Claus lives in Washington state and is the curator of a Toilet Paper Museum that has more than 200 rolls of historic, odd and unusual toilet paper rolls.
We’ve written a story about him and his collection for Fodors, which we’ll link to here as soon as it’s published. But we wanted to share some fun pics from Berger’s Toilet Paper Museum with you here. Because even though it’s not Museum Monday, right now we could all use something light.
Berger has been collecting toilet paper rolls, toilet paper dispensers and toilet paper memorabilia since the late 1960s and the collection is filled with some treasures.
There’s glow-in-the-dark Y2K toilet paper, celebrity-themed toilet paper and, of course, toilet paper that lets users wipe up with the faces of past and present presidents.
(All photos from the Toilet Paper Museum courtesy Bobj Berger.)
Planning your 2020 travel? Some museum-centric ideas
If history, art
and eclectic adventures are what you seek out when you travel, you’ll have plenty
of excuses to pull off the road in 2020.
For CNBC we put together a list of great options, from a retrospective celebrating 25 years of outsider art to fresh shrines and exhibitions devoted to everything from eyesight, motion pictures, shoes, music and rodeo culture.
Celebrate Southern Rock in Georgia
Courtesy the Mercer Museum at Capricorn
In early
December, Macon, GA celebrated the reopening of the Capricorn Sound Studios, which
captured the music of the Allman Brothers and other emerging bands playing a
new musical genre dubbed ‘Southern rock’ during the 1970s.
The new Mercer Music at Capricorn now operates as a music incubator, with
the Museum
at Capricorn opening
on January 2 to tell the history of the iconic studio with artifacts, photos,
recordings, album art and music-filled interactive digital kiosks. (Museum
admission: $7; Studio tour: $5)
Radical rodeo in Fort Worth
Red Grooms – Rodeo Ruckus – Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
If you’re headed to Fort Worth, Texas to attend the parades, shows, contest and other events that take place during the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo in Fort Worth, Texas (January 17- February 8, 2020) be sure to stop by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
The museum will display artist Red Grooms’ rollicking Ruckus Rodeo installation, a giant walk-through work that celebrates the Fort Worth rodeo with 3-D caricatures of rodeo regulars ranging from the rodeo clowns and cowboys to broncos to and bulls. (January 17-March 29, 2020; Admission: $16; half-price Sundays; free admission Fridays.)
Fancy Footwear in Florida
– Peep Toe Ankle-Strap shoes. Stuart Weitzman Collection. Photo Glen Castellano, New -York Historical Society.
The grandiose
Gilded Age estate that is now the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida is an appropriate exhibition space
for Walk This Way: Historic Footwear from the Stuart
Weitzman Collection. Organized
by the New-York Historical Society, the 100 shoes in this exhibition are not
just pretty to look at, they tell stories of culture, consumerism, power and
history. (Jan 28-May 10, 2020; Admission: $18).
In the Bronx, NY, the 250-acre New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) will present KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature, by celebrated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama from May 9 through November 1, 2020. The garden-wide exhibit will include the artist’s signature mirrored environments, paintings, giant polka-dotted sculptures flowers and pumpkins, site-specific sculpture and a new greenhouse installation. Tickets go on sale on sale on January 20.
When women got the right to vote
Library of Congress
The 2020
Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative has an extensive list of museum exhibits around the country
marking the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th
amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote.
Wyoming, which gave women the right to vote 50 years before the rest of the
nation, kicked off its suffrage celebrations in 2019 and continues with many
special exhibits statewide in 2020.
In Washington,
D.C. the National Museum of American History will present “Creating Icons: How We
Remember Women’s Suffrage,” with artifacts from 1919 and 1920 donated by the
National American Women Suffrage Association, the precursor to the League of
Women Voters (Opens March 6; free).
A visionary retrospective
Matchstick sculpture by Gerald Hawkes. Courtesy American Visionary Art Museum
Baltimore’s American
Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) collects curates and celebrates
self-taught artists and “outsider” art and presents workshops, parades and
themed exhibitions filled with odd and exquisite creations. In November 2020,
AVAM will mark its 25th anniversary with a retrospective show featuring
work from its past 40 exhibitions, bring back some work which has been in
storage for years. (Admission: $15.95)
In Spring 2020, keep an eye out
for the opening of the Truhlsen-Marmor
Museum of the Eye at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. The free museum at
the headquarters of the American Academy of Ophthalmology will feature a
collection of more than
38,000 artifacts, books, and instruments and virtual reality activities.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, featuring a collection of photographs, films, videos, costumes, props and more, is scheduled to open in Los Angeles, CA (of course) in Spring 2020.
And in late 2020, the Museum of Science, Boston
will open “Arctic Adventure,” a major permanent exhibition that will immerse
visitors in a polar environment using state-of-the-art light projections and a real
ice wall. (Admission included with Exhibit Halls
ticket: $29 for adults, $24 for kids.)
Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day is coming up on September 21 and we’re celebrating because on that day 1500 museums will be joining in to offer free admission to anyone who downloads a ticket.
Many science centers, aquariums, zoos and gardens will be offering free admission on Museum Day as well.
The free nationwide event presents a great opportunity to stop in and revisit a favorite exhibit at a local cultural institution or visit a museum in a town you’re visiting without worrying about all the admission fees.
Where can you go?
This year, Museum Day is celebrating the Smithsonian Year of Music, with many participating museums offering special music-themed programming.
The Lightner Museum in Saint Augustine, FL, will host a museum-themed scavenger hunt in its galleries. The music will also demonstrate the electric self-playing violin, the Gem Roller Organ and many other early mechanical musical instruments in its collection;
The
Armenian Museum of America in Watertown, MA will have live Armenian music in
the galleries;
In
Missoula, the Montana Natural History City will offer demonstrations and
experiments to show and explain how different animals hear;
In
North Carolina, a high school
Rock Orchestra will play a selection of train related songs at the Wilmington
Railroad Museum;
And in Mumford, NY, the Genesee Country Village and Museum, the state’s largest living history museum will be celebrating early shape-note music with a shape-note sing open to all.
Many all-music-all-the-time museums are participating as well.
Museum Day visitors to MoPOP in Seattle, WA will have full access to galleries and to exhibits dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and more.
Music-fans will also get full access to the music history offered at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles; to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, VA; and in Memphis, TN, to the Blues Hall of Fame, the Memphis Rock ‘N Soul Museum and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.
And in Kansas City, MO, the American Jazz Museum
will host a jazz storytelling session that explores the sounds and styles of
jazz and present a screening of “Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane
Documentary.”
TThe full list of museums participating in Museum Day, September 21, can be found here. And Museum Day tickets can be downloaded here.
Only one ticket will be issued per email address, but each ticket is good for admission for two people.
(A slightly differen version of my story about Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day first appeared on CNBC)
Have you had enough barbecue, fireworks and parades yet on this holiday weekend? If you need more things to do, consider going to a museum – for free.
Free Museum Admissions
As part of the Museums on Us program, more then 225 museums, science centers, gardens and other attractions around the country are offering free admission this weekend (July 6 and 7) to Bank of America debit or credit card holders. Many other attractions around the country are hosting special events as well.
Participating museums in the Museums of Us program range from the Seattle Museum of Art to Chicago’s Alder Planetarium and the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York.
You can also take advantage of this offer at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan; at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia and the World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. Find more details here.
But don’t worry. The bugs are all under glass and are part of a new exhibit hosted by the SFO Museum.
The exhibit, titled The Intriguing World of Insects includes more than 1000 specimens, fine art photography and rare books. There’s also an atomical model of Musca domestica, the inscect we know better as the house fly.
Display drawer of camouflage insect specimens – courtesy SFO Museum
Why an exhibit of insects?
Besides that fact that they look really pretty and non-threatening inside the cases, insects, the exhibit notes tell us, are the most diverse macroscopic organisms on the planet.
Researchers have identified over one million species of insects – so far – and estimate that five to thirty million more insects are waiting to be discovered.
In fact, there are more species of ants than species of birds, and more species of beetles than all species of plants combined.
Display drawer of ladybug (Coccinellidae) specimens – courtesy SFO Museum
Here’s a quick insect class, to get you ready for the exhibit:
*Insects, spiders, lobsters, and their cousins are arthropods. That means they have jointed legs and an external skeleton.
*The first insects appeared around 400 million years ago and evolved wings over 300 million years ago.
*Fossils of dragonfly ancestors, called griffinflies, had wingspans of over sixty centimeters. In contrast, the tiniest insects today have wingspans of less than one millimeter.
*But not all insects have wings. Some species, like silverfish, never evolved wings, while others, like camel crickets, lost them millions of years ago.
*Insects play integral roles in ecosystems. They pollinate the flowers of many fruits and vegetables, produce wax and honey and keep pest plants and insects at bay. Insects also recycle nutrients through decomposition, and are important food sources for other species.
Class over, for now.
Display drawer of scarab beetle (Scarabaeidae) specimens- Courtesy SFO Museum
The SFO Museum’s exhibition, The Intriguing World of Insects, comes to San Fransicsco International Airport from the Essig Museum of Entomology which is has a collection of more then 5 million arthropods stored at the University of California, Berkeley.
Look for the exhibit pre-security in SFO’s International Terminal, on the Depatures Level through August 18, 2019.
Display drawer of blue and green butterflies (Rhopalocera) and colorful beetles (Coleoptera) – courtesy SFO Museum Wasp (Vespula vulgaris) sculpture – by Gar Waterman courtesy SFO
Today’s post on StuckatTheAirport.com is
made possible by Deem – your most powerful solution for
booking and managing corporation travel online.
Courtesy SFO Museum
Here at StuckatTheAirport.com
we’re big fans of the Philadelphia International
Airport, Phoenix Sky Harbor International
Airport, San Francisco International
Airport and the many other airports which have robust exhibition programs or
their very own museums.
Of course, we’re big fans of museum
exhibitions outside of airports too.
Three we’ve spotted that may be worth planning trips, or side-trips, around, are at America’s Car Museum (ACM) in Tacoma, WA, the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) and the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
See the USA in your Chevrolet
1960 Chevrolet Corvette – Courtesy ACM
In Tacoma, WA, America’s Car Museum (ACM) is celebrating summer driving with a display of classic Chevrolet cars in the Route 66 exhibit showcasing vehicles that traveled the Mother Road during the golden age of American motoring.
The “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” display runs through October 14, 2019 and includes a 1960 Chevrolet Corvette Convertible and almost a dozen other great examples of early Chevys ranging from a 1919 Chevrolet FB Baby Grand Touring Sedan to a 1972 Chevrolet El Camino Pickup.
On view are Italian espresso makers, inventive coffee sets and unique crockery from the mid-twentieth century to today.
From June 29 to September 29, MODA’s
featured exhibition will focus on guitar design and construction, with a great
line-up of guitars played by performers such as Bo Diddley, Jack White, St. Vincent
and others.
Visitors will first see guitars in their most minimal form
and be asked to consider how simple and traditional design elements such as the
shape of an instrument and the species of wood affect the sound.
The exhibition will then take visitors through advancements in the craft of making string instruments (luthiery) and share stories of how some of the 20th century’s most famous guitars came to their honored status.
Guitars scheduled to be on view include:
Junior Brown’s Custom Guit-Steel, Bo Diddley’s Gretsch 6138, Jack White’s Diddley Bow(from It Might Get Loud), Buck Owens’ Harmony Acoustic, Rich Robinson’s Scala Telecaster, Derek Trucks’ Gibson SG and St. Vincent’s Signature Ernie Ball Music Man
Out of this
world: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing
Lunar spacesuit worn by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 mission showing the reflection in the face shield (NASM photo by Jim Preston)
While we’re talking about museum exhibits worth planning a trip around, keep in mind that in July the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing with a five-day celebration at the museum and on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
The celebration will stretch from July 16 – exactly 50 years from the launch of Apollo 11 – to July 20, the day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first steps on the moon.
A wide range of educational and commemorative activities are on the schedule, but perhaps most noteworthy is the fact that Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit will go on display July 16 for the first time in 13 years. Look for it near the 1903 Wright Flyer.
Museum Monday: Cars, Guitars, Espresso and the Moon Landing is made possible by Deem – your most powerful solution for booking and managing corporation travel online.
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If you’ve been to London more than once, you’ll want to start exploring the neighborhoods and attractions beyond the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the like.
Upstairs is a cocktail bar with an emphasis on absinthe.
Downstairs, entered via a narrow winding staircase, is a highly entertaining cabinet of curiosities filled with natural history specimens, assorted taxidermy, skulls, marine creatures and a collection of books with titles ranging from ‘A Guide to Faking Exhibition Poultry’ to ‘A Sex Guide for Irish Farmers,’ and “Shopping Center Sex.”
Here are some snaps a two-headed lamb and other snaps from a recent visit:
Sharing some snaps today from a recent visit to the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, which collects, preserves and exhibits iconic signs that were part of the city’s history.
If you’re planning a trip to Las Vegas or must go there for a meeting or convention, this is a great stop.
Of course, it’s best to go at night when you can get a tour, see many of the signs lit up and enjoy Brilliant!, artist Craig Winslow’s neon installation that takes you back into the history of Sin City through sight and sound.
Like the free ice water that made South Dakota’s Wall Drug famous, free stuff is a great treat when you’re on the road or out and about in your own town.
Here are few free offers and cool deals to take advantage of this weekend and into next week:
Free Museum Admission
On the first full weekend of each month, anyone who has flashes a Bank of America, Merrill Lynch or U.S. Trust credit or debit card and a photo ID gets free admission to more than 200 museums, science centers, gardens and other attractions participating in the Museums on Us program around the country.
Free food
PotBelly Sandwich Shop is offering a bunch of free food items to members of its free-to-join Potbelly Perks program August 6-12.
Air fare deal
Need to bring a few suitcases of cash to the Cayman Islands? Or just want a great deal on a flight to this vacation destination?
From August 3 to 11, Cayman Airways is celebrating its 50th anniversary with some great discounted fares, plus extra perks such as 3 checked bags and lounge access, for flight from Miami, Tampa and New York booked for travel September 7 through November 7.
Fun hotel package for Pearl Jam fans
Not free – but fun: In Seattle, The Edgewater over-the-water hotel has put together a package with the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP). The Rock the Suite package includes tickets to the museum’s Pearl Jam: Home and Away exhibition, overnight accommodations at the hotel’s Pearl Jam Suite, and signature Pearl Jam cocktails in the Six Seven Restaurant & Lounge.
Pearl Jam fans should also note that there’s a free Pearl Jam exhibit put together by the Museum of Pop Culture in the-presecurity area of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Know of a great freebie for travelers? Please send it along.
July 3 is opening day for the new museum at the iconic Gateway Arch, the iconic 630-foot-tall concrete and stainless-steel structure on the St. Louis riverfront that commemorates Thomas Jefferson and the role St. Louis played in the westward expansion of the United States.
Completed in 1965, the arch began offering tram rides to a viewing platform at its top in 1967. Now $380 million of upgrades to the parkland around the country’s tallest man-made monument and to the underground museum below it are being readied for visitors.
Here’s a preview of the upgraded ground-level Gateway Arch experience that I originally prepared for CNBC.
The arch itself and the tram ride that brings visitors to the small observation room at the top of the arch remains unchanged, but the way visitors get to the arch and experience the Gateway Arch Park has been transformed.
“You don’t change a masterpiece,” said Eric Moraczewski, Executive Director of the Gateway Arch Park Foundation, “What we’ve done is renovate about 100 acres of park space, added 46,000 square feet of museum space, a café and raised the riverfront about 30 inches to prevent flooding and give us more useable days on the riverfront. We also built a land bridge over Interstate 44 to make the park more accessible to visitors.”
When the free museum inside the Gateway Arch reopens on July 3, visitors will see some old favorites, such as the statue of Thomas Jefferson, and many new artifacts, including a resin version of the much-loved taxidermy buffalo that park officials say was showing too much wear and tear.
The new museum has six galleries: Colonial St. Louis explores the founding of St. Louis and the indigenous and Creole culture before the Louisiana Purchase; Jefferson’s Vision documents how St. Louis shaped the west; and Manifest Destiny follows the trails, the settlers and the conflicts for those heading west. The Riverfront Era gallery shows how steamboats created an American metropolis at St. Louis and New Frontiers presents the history of railroads, industry, and the myth of the West. Finally, Building the Gateway Arch presents the history of the Eero Saarinen-designed monument itself.
The Riverfront Era gallery in the new museum at the Gateway Arch features a façade made with stones from the Old Rock House, a structure built as a warehouse in 1818 that was demolished to make may for the construction of the arch.
“The history preservation team for National Park Service kept the stones, carefully stored them and was able to reuse them. Now you walk into the museum through the stones of the Old Rock House,” said Eric Moraczewski, Executive Director of the Gateway Arch Park Foundation.
A new feature in the tram lobby will offer visitors on the ground a live webcam stream of the view from the observation space at the top of the Gateway Arch. The webcam will give those waiting for the ticketed tram ride a preview of what they’ll see and also make the view accessible to people who use wheelchairs, visitors afraid of heights and others who choose not to purchase a ticket to the top.
The new museum and visitor center on the renovated grounds of the Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, MO will be celebrated with a ribbon cutting ceremony on July 3 as part of Fair St. Louis, a July 4th celebration dubbed “America’s Biggest Birthday Party.”
