Calling all Space Cadets: a new exhibit at St. Louis Lambert International Airport (STL) features vintage space-inspired toys on loan from the Space Museum in Bonne Terre, Missouri. Here’s a sampling of what you’ll see if you stop by STL Terminal 1, plus a fun video from ‘Living St. Louis’ all about the museum and its creator.
All images courtesy STL Airport.
Most museums around the country are open again and waiting for your visit. And while you will still want to wear a mask and keep your distance from other patrons when you do stop in, on Saturday, September 18 you may be able to visit your favorite museum for free.
Saturday is Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day, when many museums, attractions, and gardens around the country offer admission for free to anyone who has downloaded a free ticket.
For The Points Guy site, we put together this list of Air & Space museums on the free-ticket list that are certain to please avgeeks. You can read more about the museum in the article and search the Museum Day website for a participating museum near you.
Seattle, WA: The Museum of Flight (regular adult admission: $25) welcomes Museum Day ticket to the museum’s new exhibit, Stranger Than Fiction – The Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine, and everything else in their vast collection.
Titusville, FL: American Space Museum (regular adult admission: $10): Exhibits include everything from spacecraft parts to astronaut suits and Soviet cosmonaut mementos.
Hutchinson, KS: Cosmosphere (regular adult admission: $24.50) In addition to having the largest collection of Russian space artifacts outside of Moscow, this museum boasts a collection of U.S. space artifacts that it claims is second only to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
Dallas, TX: Frontiers of Flight Museum (regular adult admission: $10). This museum on the southeast corner of Dallas Love Field and has more than 40 air and space vehicles, 20 galleries (including the Braniff Gallery, the Golden Age Gallery, and a gallery devoted to the history of Southwest Airlines).
New York, NY: Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum (regular adult admission: $33) is a legendary aircraft carrier and a National Historic Landmark that is big enough to house 28 aircraft, the space shuttle Enterprise, a British Airways Concorde, and Growler, the only guided missile submarine open to the public.
Between shutdowns, staff layoffs, and budget cuts, the pandemic has been tough on museums and cultural attractions across the United States.
But that won’t stop more than 1000 museums, zoos, and cultural centers from opening their doors for free on Saturday, September 18 as part of Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day 2021.
Each participating museum will offer free admission to guests who present a museum day ticket downloaded from the Museum Day site. Visitors may request one ticket per email and each ticket provides general admission to the ticket holder and one guest.
In addition to offering savings on admission fees, which can be quite hefty, Museum Day gives guests a chance to revisit a favorite museum or explore a new one.
The event, which was canceled last year due to COVID-19, celebrates the reopening of museums and the return of arts and cultural experiences with this year’s theme of Experience America.
You can search by city, zip code, or state for a museum near you. Here are a few examples of museums you might want to visit with your free Museum Day ticket – or any day.
The Flight Path Museum and Learning Center is a great aviation and aerospace museum at Los Angeles International Airport.
The museum houses more than 40 historic rail cars including the Presidential Rail Car ‘Ferdinand Magellan,’ and Florida East Coast Steam Locomotive #153.
The legendary aircraft carrier Intrepid is a National Historic Landmark. See 28 aircraft, the space shuttle Enterprise, and enter Growler, the only guided missile submarine open to the public.
The Museum of Flight is the world’s largest independent air and space museum. It displays over 160 airplanes and spacecraft on a 23-acre campus. The museum’s six buildings include the original Boeing Aircraft factory.
Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day returns on September 18, 2021 and on that day more than 1000 museums, science centers, and gardens around the country will be offering free admission to anyone who shows up with a downloaded Museum Day ticket.
Seattle’s Museum of Flight (where regular admission is usually $25) is on the list this year and we’ve already downloaded our ticket so we can go see the museum’s newest exhibit called Stranger Than Fiction – the Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine.
The exhibit includes dozen of artifacts, including medical kits, airsickness bags, flight suits, and spacesuits. and tells the story of aviation and space adventurers, doctors, and researchers who make it possible for people to fly through the air and off into space.
Below are some of the retro comic book-style images the Museum of Flight is using to help make the exhibit accessible to all. And here is the official Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack, created by artist Leeni Ramadan.
(All photos courtesy Museum of Flight)
We’re setting off for Iceland in a few weeks to join Viking for one of their Welcome Back cruises. So we have been poking around the company’s website.
One impressive resource there for the general public is Viking.TV. It was created in response to the pandemic and this channel is chock full of videos about art, culture, history, food, music, architecture, and destinations around the world.
Our favorite feature is Museum Monday. Stop in and you’ll see that there are now more than 60 videos about museums and collections. including some wonderful behind the scene tours.
You’ll find your own favorites, but here are a few of the videos that captured our attention and our imagination this week. We started with a visit to the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway, home to Thor Heyerdahl’s original Kon-Tiki raft and the papyrus boat Ra II.
We also went down a rabbit hole at London’s British Museum learning about how prepared the museum for lockdown and toured the collection of the Alaskan objects at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, England.
We are getting ready to get on the road. And we are making a list of museums we want to visit and art we want to see.
So we were pleased to find the “Masterpiece Moments” series of short, 5-7 minute videos that Bank of America started putting out in January.
The features showcase works of art in the collections of 25 museums across the country. And there’s a new video rolling out every two weeks.
Here are just a few of our favorites. You can sign up to get alerts when a new video is released and see the full list of participating museums here.
Are you ready to visit a museum? If so, it’s a good bet you’ll find a museum near you that’s open, or getting to ready to open its doors to the (masked ) public again soon.
Here are some of the museums we’ve got on our list.
It was cute when animals from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo got to visit the Museum of Flight. But we were still jealous. Now we’re happy people can visit the museum too.
Can’t make it? Don’t worry. The museum’s collection can be viewed online. In the artifact section, we found this talking GI Joe Astronaut from 1970.
“When his dog tag is pulled, GI Joe narrates his way through a lunar mission, from liftoff to Moon landing to splashdown.”
The Mütter Museum is a medical museum with far-ranging collections of anatomical specimens, models, and medical instruments. Einstein’s brain is here. And so is a specimen from John Wilkes Booth’s vertebra.
We’ve spent a lot of time with Memento Mütter, the museum’s online exhibit of more than 60 items from the Museum’s collection, about half of which are not on public display. If you check it out, be warned that the paper mache eyeball is one of the least alarming objects you’ll see.
Now that the museum has reopened, there’s a new exhibit of photographs by Nikki Johnson, who got to go behind-the-scenes at the museum and create still-life photos of items that intrigued her.
A new exhibit at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY features life-size costumes that look like fabric but are actually made from paper. Beginning in 1994, Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave started creating these incredible paper works. She ended up with four collections ranging from the fashion of Elizabeth I to 20th century Venice and tributes to famous artists like Picasso and Matisse. All four collections are part of this exhibit.
The museum made a video of the ‘unboxing’ of some of the dresses in the exhibit.
If we can’t fly anywhere right now, how about a ride on a motorcycle?
A new exhibition by the SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) explores the history of motorcycling from the 1890s to 1915. On display are fourteen motorcycles that were made prior to 1916, rare engines, and photographs from the pioneering era of motorcycling.
From the exhibition notes:
“Along with the automobile, the motorcycle was one of the earliest and most exciting applications of another new invention, the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. Motorcycle technology progressed rapidly during the early 1900s, and as motorcycling gained traction, riding evolved from a novelty to a hobby, sport, and reliable source of transportation. By the 1910s, there were approximately 100 motorcycle manufacturers in the United States, all vying for consumer attention with distinctive attributes and designs.
Today, early American motorcycles are prized by collectors around the world who showcase their bikes on vintage rides, endurance runs, and at special events.“
Here are some photos of the motorcycles on display in the Early American Motorcycles exhibition in the International Terminal of San Francisco International Airport. The exhibition will be on view through September 19, 2021.
Here’s proof that you never know when you’ll come across something cool in an unexpected place.
Case in point: the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. The sprawling museum is not just the largest children’s museum in the world. It is also home to more than 130,000 artifacts, many of them true treasures.
One example: these aviator goggles that belonged to Amelia Earhart. According to museum notes, Earhart “supposedly didn’t enjoy wearing goggles, and would only put them on at the end of the runway and would take them off as soon as she landed.” The museum says these goggles were given to Earhart by a friend who also gave her a leather jacket and a flight cap.
No word on what happened to the leather jacket and the flight cap. But the goggles are on display at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis right now as part of an exhibit called Barbie You Can Be Anything: The Experience. In addition to telling the story of the iconic doll, the exhibit highlights more than 200 careers Barbie has had over the years. Airline pilot is one of them.
Mattel’s Amelia Earhart Barbie doll and the museum’s Amelia Earhart goggles are part of the exhibit.
In ‘normal’ times, when we’re not in airports, we’re in museums.
And the ongoing pandemic is wreaking havoc with museums.
“The financial state of U.S. museums is moving from bad to worse,” said Laura Lott, President and CEO of the American Alliance of Museums.
AAM has been surveying its membership since the pandemic began. And in its latest survey of 850 museum directors around the country it finds that 30% of museums remain closed since the March lockdown.
“Those that have reopened are operating on an average of 35% of their regular attendance—a reduction that is unsustainable long-term,” says Lott. “Those that did safely serve their communities this summer do not have enough revenue to offset higher costs, especially during a potential winter lockdown,” she adds.
And, as we know, communities around the country have already begun to institute winter lockdowns.
Here are some other key points from the survey that are sure to alarm museum-lovers.
*Over half (52%) of museums report that they have six months or less of operating reserves.
*Over half (53%) of responding museums have had to furlough or lay off staff. And about 30% of museum staff around the country are currently out of work.
*On average, museums responding to the survey anticipate losing approximately 35% of their 2020 operating income and an additional 28% of normal operating income in 2021.
Why care?
Because besides the wonderful exhibits museum present and the special collections they protect, museums employ a lot of people. And they add a lot to the economy of their communities.
Prior to the pandemic, museums supported 726,000 direct and indirect jobs and contributed $50 billion each year to the economy, according to
AAM.
Museums are asking federal, state, and local governments for financial support.
They deserve it.
We can help out museums by making donations to our favorites. By joining museums as new members or by making sure to renew our memberships. We can give memberships as holiday gifts, shop in museum giftshops (many are online), and we can make a point to visit the museums that are open in our communities and/or offering activities online.
