When the Stuck at the Airport team isn’t hanging out in an airport, it can usually be found in a museum.
And this week, while traveling through Australia and New Zealand on Holland America’s Westerdam cruise ship, we’ve been delighted to stop in towns with truly wonderful museums.
One of our favorite museum discoveries is the Tūhura Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand. The museum has been collecting for over 150 years and houses more than 1.5 million objects from around the world.
Among its treasures is the Kodak camera that New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary carried to the summit of Mount Everest in 1953.
It is one of the objects in the Museum Director’s Choice exhibition, with a note that says in part that the camera is “arguably the most famous camera on the planet” and was used to take the iconic picture of Tenzing Norgay on top of Mount Everest on May 29, 1953.
Hillary and Nepalese-Indian Sherpa mountaineer Norgay were to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
The director’s note goes on to explain that back then, the Kodak Retina Type 11 represented “the pinnacle of photographic technology” and was celebrated for its compactness, reliability, and high-quality images.
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.
Located on LAX property, a short drive or taxi ride from the terminals, the museum includes one of the largest airline uniform collections, as well as space exploration memorabilia, a great research library, and a wide range of commercial aviation artifacts.
Right now is an especially good time to visit because the museum has Barbiemania. In honor of the new Barbie movie, the museum is showing an exhibit of aviation-themed Barbies and Barbie accessories, including Barbie dolls inspired by famous aviators, including Bessie Coleman and Amelia Earhart.
Unconventional enamels at SFO Airport
The SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) oversees twenty-five sites throughout the airport terminals. So if you’ve got a long walk to your gate or a long layover at SFO, it’s a good bet something will catch your eye.
One of the newest exhibitions at SFO features the unconventional enameled art of June Schwarcz (1918–2015) on view in the Harvey Milk Terminal 1, Departures Level 2, Galley 1 E now through early May 2024.
Here’s an intro to Schwarcz’s work from the SFO Museum;
Inspired by nature and fashion, as well as abstract, African, and Asian art, Schwarcz developed unique metalworking techniques, always experimenting and embracing complex technical challenges. She initially worked with copper panels and spun-copper bowls, infusing them with her own interpretation of traditional enameling. During the 1960s, Schwarcz pioneered electroforming, an innovative method that involved electroplating pieces made from thin copper foil. Schwarcz focused on sculptural vessels and when asked about her abstract forms, she explained, “They simply don’t hold water.”
(Images of June Schwarcz’s artwork courtesy of SFO Museum and the collection of Forrest L. Merrill)
They are easy to miss as you cross the pedestrian bridge connecting the main campus of Seattle’s sprawling Museum of Flight to the museum’s Space Gallery and Aviation Pavilion across the street.
But as part of the delightfulArt+Flightexhibit currently underway at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, there is a display of charming motivational posters created for the Boeing Model 2707, a supersonic transport (SST) aircraft developed in the 1960s to compete with the British and French Concorde.
Boeing had a government contract to develop and build the supersonic airliner, but the contract was canceled in 1971 before the prototypes were even completed.
These posters are from the archives of the Museum of Flight, which says all it really knows about them is that they were made as motivational posters for employees working on the 2707 SST program during the 1960s. The colors and imagery clearly take influences from the pop art of the time. And the messages and slogans are all about making the plane as light as can be.
Images are courtesy of Seattle Museum of Flight’s Holden Withington Boeing SST Poster Collection and the Clarence S Howell Collection of Boeing SST Posters
First built as the Hotel Alcazar in 1888, the building opened as the Lightner Museum of Hobbies in January 1948.
The museum was created by Otto Lightner, a great advocate of collecting and the publisher of Hobbies magazine.
Lightner promoted every kind of hobby, from collecting matchbooks and cigar labels to whittling wood. But he was also a great collector himself and had the means to amass a substantial personal collection of fine and decorative art, natural history specimens, Americana, and just plain stuff.
Cigar Lables
Lightner first opened a museum of hobbies in Chicago in 1934. And in addition to his eclectic and eccentric collections, he encouraged the readers of Hobbies magazine to send him their collections.
They did.
Following a stay in St. Augustine’s in 1946, Lightner purchased the Hotel Alcazar to serve as the permanent home for his collections.
The collections include lamps by Louis Comfort Tiffany, shells, geological specimens, a vast number of salt & pepper shakers, Victurian mechanical insturments, and hundreds of thousands of buttons.
We know there also some shrunken heads in the collection.
And in celebration of the museum’s 75th diamond anniversary in 2023, the museum is hosting a special exhibition titled, 75 for 75.
On display is a selection of artwork and objects from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibit opens on February 2nd and we’re making plans to visit soon.
From the Lightner Museum Collection
Ride On!
We love anything transportation. So the Lightner Museum’s new exhibit “Ride On!: Historic Bicycles from the Keith Pariani Collection,” is also of great interest.
Here are some of the exhibit notes on the early popularity of the bicycles and the Hotel Alacazar’s ‘bicycle academy:’
In the 1890s the bicycle took over the hearts and minds of Americans. By the early twentieth century, almost 300 bicycle manufacturing firms were established in the US. Swept up in the craze for cycling, the Lightner Museum’s historic building, the Hotel Alcazar, offered its own bicycle academy, allowing its guests to tour Gilded Age St. Augustine on two wheels.
First developed in Europe in the early nineteenth century, the bicycle took decades of design and engineering to make it safe and convenient for the average rider. The first popular models of the bicycle were high-wheeled and dangerous for unskilled riders because of the frequency of falls. However, with the invention of the “Safety” bicycle, the vehicle became a safer and more popular mode of transportation. The women’s safety bicycle, allowing for women’s dress, helped boost the bicycle’s popularity even more. By the 1890s, the safety bicycle was widely used in the U.S. by everyone, regardless of age or gender, for both transportation and recreation.
The “Ride On!” exhibit runs February 2 through September 30, 2023.
