A few months before Philaelphia’s Mütter Museum, exercising now familiar COVID-19 precautions, closed its doors to the public, it co-sponsored a parade to honor the victims to the previous century’s Spanish Flu pandemic, as well as “those who keep us safe today.”
Another temporary exhibition, Going Viral: Infection Through the Ages, opened in November, and now seems even stronger proof that the museum, whose 19th-century display cabinets are housed in the historic College of Physicians, is as concerned with the future as it is with the past.
For now, all tours must be undertaken virtually.
Above, curator Anna Dhody, a physical and forensic anthropologist and Director of the Mütter Research Institute, gives a brief introduction to some of the best known artifacts in the permanent collection.
The museum’s many antique skulls and medical oddities may invite comparisons to a ghoulish sideshow attraction, an impression Dhody corrects with her warm, matter-of-fact delivery and respectful acknowledgment of the humans whose stories have been preserved along with their remains:
Mary Ashberry, an achondroplastic dwarf, died from complications of a Cesarean section, as doctors who had yet to learn the importance of sterilizing instruments and washing hands, attempted to help her deliver a baby who proved too big for her pelvis. (The baby’s head was crushed as well. Its skull is displayed next to its mother’s skeleton.)
Madame Dimanche is represented by a wax model of her face, instantly recognizable due to the 10-inch cutaneous horn that began growing from her forehead when she was in her 70s. (It was eventually removed in an early example of successful plastic surgery.)
Albert Einstein and the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker are among the household names gracing the museum’s collection.
One of the most recent additions is the skeleton of artist and disability awareness advocate Carol Orzel, who educated the public and incoming University of Pennsylvania medical students about fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), a rare disorder that turned her muscle and connective tissue to bone. She told her physician, Frederick Kaplan, below, that she wanted her skeleton to go to the Mütter, to join that of fellow FOP sufferer, Harry Eastlack… provided some of her prized costume jewelry could be displayed alongside. It is.
Get better acquainted with the Mütter Museum’s collection through this playlist.
The exhibit Spit Spreads Death is currently slated to stay up through 2024. While waiting to visit in person, you can watch an animation of the Spanish flu’s spread, and explore an interactive map showing the demographics of the infection.
Let us pray that organization expert Marie Kondo never comes within spitting distance of A Boy’s Room, part of the Studio Ghibli museum’s Where a Film is Born installation.
It’s not likely that every single item in the massive (and no doubt well dusted) collection of books, postcards, hand tools, pictures, figurines, and other assorted tchotchkes pictured above sparks joy, but the suggestion is that any one of them might prove the gateway to a fantastical tale, such as those spun by the museum’s executive director, master animator Hayao Miyazaki:
The room seems to belong to someone who was sketching at the desk just a few minutes ago. The room is filled with books and toys. The walls are all covered with illustrations and sketches. Hanging from the ceiling are a model of an airplane and a model of a Pteranodon. It’s a place where the owner of the room has stored his favorite things. This room provides lots of inspiration for what will go on to the blank piece of paper on the desk to become the origin of an actual film.
The Museum, which announced it would delay its reopening out of ongoing concerns related to social distancing during the COVID-19 crisis, recently shared some brief video tours of the Miyazaki-designed space, perhaps all the more magical for being empty.
One lucky viewer, who had trekked to the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka for an in-person visit, recalled the experience of actually being in A Boy’s Room:
Open up the drawers in this room, take the books off shelves to look at them, touch things, look through trunks—you might find little secrets to be discovered. One time I took an art book from the shelf and one of the employees came over to me. I was expecting to get reprimanded, but instead she kindly guided me over to a couch so that I could read the book. Miyazaki took care to design the space to be friendly to the exploratory nature of children, making sure that they could play unobstructed. It’s one of the reasons why you aren’t allowed to take photos inside—he didn’t want parents interrupting their experience to pose for photos they could care less about.
That philosophy is enacted throughout the museum. Kids can climb all over a life-size plush recreation of My Neighbor Totoro’s cat bus, but would-be Instagrammers are S.O.L.
The architectural elements are a particular treat, and suggest that there’s serious bank to be made, should Miyazaki ever consider extending the brand into a theme park-style hotel. (Something tells us he won’t.)
Once having seen a photo essay featuring some of the fancy refreshments others have enjoyed there, the tour of the empty Straw Hat Café does underwhelm a bit. Those cute little plates are just calling out for a slice of strawberry shortcake…
We’re unsure if museum staffers will be releasing more videos during their downtime, though we’re hopeful, especially since several in-person visitors have noted that the museum’s toilets are pretty noteworthy.
Meanwhile, here is Miyazaki’s manifesto detailing the kind of museum he wanted to make, right down to the café and the gift shop:
A museum that is interesting and which relaxes the soul
A museum where much can be discovered
A museum based on a clear and consistent philosophy
A museum where those seeking enjoyment can enjoy, those seeking to ponder can ponder, and those seeking to feel can feel
A museum that makes you feel more enriched when you leave than when you entered!
To make such a museum, the building must be…
Put together as if it were a film
Not arrogant, magnificent, flamboyant, or suffocating
Quality space where people can feel at home, especially when it’s not crowded
A building that has a warm feel and touch
A building where the breeze and sunlight can freely flow through
The museum must be run in such a way that…
Small children are treated as if they were grown-ups
Visitors with disabilities are accommodated as much as possible
The staff can be confident and proud of their work
Visitors are not controlled with predetermined courses and fixed directions
It is suffused with ideas and new challenges so that the exhibits do not get dusty or old, and that investments are made to realize that goal
The displays will be…
Not only for the benefit of people who are already fans of Studio Ghibli
Not a procession of artwork from past Ghibli films as if it were “a museum of the past”
A place where visitors can enjoy by just looking, can understand the artists’ spirits, and can gain new insights into animation
Original works and pictures will be made to be exhibited at the museum
A project room and an exhibit room will be made, showing movement and life
(Original short films will be produced to be released in the museum!)
Ghibli’s past films will be probed for understanding at a deeper level
The café will be…
An important place for relaxation and enjoyment
A place that doesn’t underestimate the difficulties of running a museum café
A good café with a style all its own where running a café is taken seriously and done right
The museum shop will be…
Well-prepared and well-presented for the sake of the visitors and running the museum
Not a bargain shop that attaches importance only to the amount of sales
A shop that continues to strive to be a better shop
Where original items made only for the museum are found
The museum’s relation to the park is…
Not just about caring for the plants and surrounding greenery but also planning for how things can improve ten years into the future
Seeking a way of being and running the museum so that the surrounding park will become even lusher and better, which will in turn make the museum better as well!
This is what I expect the museum to be, and therefore I will find a way to do it.
This is the kind of museum I don’t want to make!
A pretentious museum
An arrogant museum
A museum that treats its contents as if they were more important than people
A museum that displays uninteresting works as if they were significant
No matter how accustomed we’ve grown over the centuries to flat maps of the world, they can never be perfectly accurate. Strictly speaking, no map can perfectly capture the territory it describes (an impossibility memorably fictionalized by Jorge Luis Borges in “On Exactitude in Science”), but there’s a reason we also call the Earth “the globe”: only a globe can represent not just the planet’s true shape, but the true shape of the land masses on which we live. This is not to say that globes have always been accurate. Like the history of mapmaking, the history of globe-making is one of educated (or uneducated) guesses, free mixture of fact and legend, and labels like “terra incognita” or “here be dragons.” You can see that for yourself in the British Library’s new online historic globe archive — and not just through flat photographs and scans.
“The archive presents 3D models of 11 globes — a subset of the library’s historic maps collection — that can be rotated and zoomed into for greater detail at every angle,” writes Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp. She points to one in particular, “stunning 1602 celestial globe by Dutch cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu, first produced in 1602. In addition to representing the constellations as their fantastic and mythological namesakes, it identifies a nova in the constellation of Cygnus which Blaeu had personally observed in 1600.”
The British Library’s digital collection boasts several such “celestial globes,” which chart the sky rather than the Earth. However few of us have ever turned a celestial globe by hand, we can now do it virtually. If 1602 seems a bit too vintage, give a digital spin to the others from 1700, 1728, and 1783.
Back on land, these globes feature not just “fantastic creatures,” Sharp writes, but “charming archaic conceptions of the oceans — the ‘Atalantick Ocean’ in the 1730 Richard Cushee terrestrial globe, or the ‘Ethipoic Ocean’ in the 1783 terrestrial globe by G. Wright and W. Bardin.” In Chushee, Wright and Bardin’s times, few globe-users, or indeed globe-makers, would have had the chance to see much of those vast bodies of water for themselves. Of course, with the current state of pandemic lockdown in so many countries, few of us are taking transoceanic journeys even today. If you’re dreaming about the rest of the world, spend some time with the British Library’s 3D-modeled globes on Sketchfab — where you’ll also find the Rosetta Stone and Bust of Nefertiti among other artifacts previously featured here on Open Culture — and get your hands on an idea of how humanity imagined it in centuries past.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Of the many world class museums treating a stuck-at-home public to virtual tours of their collections, none inspire the resolve for future travel as the Stay At Home Museum, an initiative of the Flanders tourism board.
Before the COVID-19 epidemic response demanded the temporary shuttering of all such attractions, the region was entering the final year of a 3‑year festival celebrating such Flemish masters as Jan Van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, and Peter Paul Rubens.
Our sadness at missing these cannot be chalked up to FOMO. Right now, the whole world is missing out.
So, consider the Stay At Home Museum a preview, something to help us enjoy our trips to the region all the more at some point in the future, by educating ourselves on the painters who made Flanders famous.
The series is also a treat for the Zoom weary. The expert guides aren’t facing their webcams at home, but rather using their high level access to lead us through the empty museums in which the exhibits are still installed.
No jostling…
No crowding in front of the most celebrated pieces…
No inane lunch-related chatter from tourists who aren’t into art as deeply as you are…
Above, Van Eyck expert Till-Holger Borchert, Director of Musea Bruges, orients us to the artist and his work, most notably the Ghent altarpiece, aka Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a 12-panel polyptych that Van Eyck worked on with Hugo, the older brother who died 6 years before its completion.
Pay close attention to Adam and Eve’s body hair. Borchert certainly does.
He also sheds a lot of interesting light on the significance of materials, framing choices, and composition.
The restored altarpiece was slated to be reinstalled in its original home of Ghent’s Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, following the scheduled closing of Jan van Eyck: An Optical Revolution—April 30, 2020.
The Royal Museum of Fine Art’s director Michel Draguet takes us on a French-speaking journey inside Bruegel’s painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels.
Ben Van Beneden, the director of the Rubens House, invites us into Ruben’s “art gallery room”—something no self-respecting wealthy polyglot diplomat/aesthete who’s also a Baroque painter would do without, apparently.
The peek at Rubens’ garden is nice too, especially for those of us with no private outdoor space of our own.
Jumping ahead to the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, curator Mieke Mels of Ostennd’s the Mu.ZEE spills the beans on why native son, James Ensor, shielded his 1888 masterpiece Christ’s Entry into Brusselsfrom the public view for 3 decades.
Maybe it’s always too soon to make predictions, but historians of the future will likely view the time of COVID-19 as one of unprecedented cultural, social, and economic change on a vast scale. One of those changes, the opening of historic museum collections—photographed and uploaded in high resolution images, and viewable in the kind of fine detail one could never get close enough to see in person—has put an advancing trend into hyperdrive. The British Museum, for example, has just announced a “major revamp” of its digital collection, Vice reports, “making nearly 1.9 million images free to use for anyone under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.”
The museum is transparent about some “outstanding issues” with the online collection—including minor problems with layout and image order—but due to “extraordinary circumstances” they felt it in the public interest to launch sooner than later. Since access is free and unrestricted, one hopes there’ll be few complaints.
Virtual visitors can get an incredibly detailed view of British Museum items like the 15th century silver and ivory hunting horn from Sierra Leone (top), an object you can’t see in person, not only because the museum is closed but because it isn’t on display. Online exhibits give us the kind of access previously only available to curators. They also take us deeper into art and archaeological history than most in-person visits can.
An encounter with the intricate Sutton Hoo helmet, above, recovered at an Anglo-Saxon burial site, is interesting enough sans context. At the museum site, however, visitors can dive into an entire lesson on the history and meaning of this and other incredible artifacts stumbled upon by a farmer in 1939 who found a ship buried in Suffolk that turned out to be “the most impressive medieval grave to be discovered in Europe.”
The democratic utility of vast online collections like this one cannot be overstated. The struggles of educators and parents these days are very real.“If you’re currently homeschooling your kids,” Lifehacker writes, “you may be interested in the British Museum’s free online learning resources geared towards students ages three to 16+. Want to learn how Egyptian mummies were made? There’s a lesson for that. Maybe you can learn what the Romans ate and drank and enjoy a Roman-themed lunch!” (Doesn’t that sound fun, parent who hasn’t been to the grocery store!) Take a virtual walkthrough of the museum. See the Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture gallery and the Lewis Chessmen in the Medieval Europe gallery.
While there are obviously much greater tragedies unfolding daily, it’s hard not to empathize with students who have watched countless special events—proms, commencements, spring sports, performances, hotly anticipated rites of passage—go poof.
In New York City, students in Parsons School of Design’s Narrative Spaces: Design Tools for Spatial Storytelling course were crestfallen to learn that their upcoming open-to-the-public exhibition of group and solo projects in the West Village—the centerpiece of the class and a huge opportunity to connect with an audience outside of the classroom—was suddenly off the menu.
Multidisciplinary artist Jeff Stark, who co-teaches the class with Pamela Parker, was disappointed on their behalves.
Stark’s own work, from Empire Drive In to Miss Rockaway Armada, is rooted in live experience, and New York City holds a special place in his heart. (He also edits the weekly email list Nonsense NYC, an invaluable resource for independent art and Do-It-Yourself events in the city.)
Student Rylie Cooke, an Australian who aspires to launch a design company, found that her research deepened her connection to artifacts she encountered at the Reliquary, as she came to appreciate the fabled Copacabana’s influence on the popular culture, food, and music of the period:
… with COVID-19 it became important to have this connection to the artifacts as I wasn’t able to physically touch or look at them when Parsons moved to online for the semester. I am a very hands-on creative and I love curating things, especially in an exhibit format.
Rather than scrap their goal of public exhibition, the class decided to take things into the virtual realm, hustling to adapt their original concepts to a purely screen-based experience, The New York Supper Club: From Nightlife to Social Distancing.
The plan to wow visitors with a period-appropriate table in the center of their West Village exhibition space became a grid of digital placemats that serve as portals to each project.
Cooke’s contribution, A Seat at the Copacabana, begins with an interview in which baseball great Mickey Mantle recounts getting into a cloakroom brawl as he and fellow New York Yankees celebrated a birthday with a Sammy Davis Jr. set. Recipes for steak and potatoes, Chicken a la King, rarebit, and arroz con pollo provide flavor for a floorshow represented by archival footage of “Let’s Do the Copacabana” starring Carmen Miranda, a Martin and Lewis appearance, and a dance rehearsal from 1945. The tour ends at the Copa’s current incarnation in Times Square, with a vision of pre-socially distanced contemporary merrymakers salsa-ing the night away.
(Navigate this exhibit using toolbar arrows at the bottom of the screen.)
Student Hongxi Chen’s investigations into The China Doll nightclub resulted in an elaborate interactive immersive experience on the topic of cultural appropriation:
The China Doll… was founded in 1946 by Caucasian stage producer Tom Ball, who deemed it the only “all-oriental” night club in New York. While the club sometimes played off “Oriental” stereotypes, and titled one of its shows “Slant-Eyed Scandals,” they featured Asian dancers and Asian singers presenting popular songs in a way New Yorkers had never seen before. The Dim interactive experience unfolds with the story of Thomas, a waiter at the China Doll.
As a junior in Parsons’ Design and Technology program, Chen had plenty of previous experience forging virtual environments, but working with a museum collection was new to him, as was collaborating on a virtual platform.
He sought Stark’s advice on creating vivid dialogue for his fictional waiter.
Chen stayed up until 7 am for two weeks, devouring open source tutorials in an attempt to wrangle and debug the many elements of his ambitious project—audio, video, character models and animation, software, game engines, and game server platform.
As Chen noted at the exhibition’s recent Zoom opening (an event that was followed by a digital dance party), the massive game can be a bit slow to load. Don’t worry, it’s worth the wait, especially as you will have a hand in the story, steering it to one of five different endings.
Chen, an international student, could not safely return to China and has not left his student apartment since mid-March, but gamely states that remaining in the same time zone as his school allowed him to communicate efficiently with his professors and the majority of his classmates. (Cooke is back home in Australia.)
Adds Chen:
Even though we are facing a difficult circumstance under the pandemic and had to pivot our original ideas into a virtual presentation, I’m glad that our class was able to quickly change plans and adapt to the situation. This… actually inspired me a lot and opened up ways to invite and connect people with virtual artwork.
(Apparently, I’m headed to Cafe Zanzibar, below, where the drinks are cheap, the aspirin is free, and Cab Calloway is a frequent headliner.)
Stark admits that initially, his students may not have shared his swooning response to the source material, but they share his love of New York City and the desire to “get in the thick of it.” By bringing a Generation Z perspective to this historical ephemera, they stake a claim, making work that could help the City Reliquary connect to a new audience.
Enter The New York Supper Club: From Nightlife to Social Distancing here.
Explore the City Reliquary online here, and join in the civic pride by participating in its weekly Instagram Live events, including Thursday Collectors’ Nights.
(All images used with permission of the artists and The City Reliquary)
Museums around the world have temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and each of these institutions has used its downtime differently. Some have provided onlineversions of the experiences previously offered in their physical galleries; others have started prolonged battles on Twitter. No, not the kind of prolonged battle one normally associates with Twitter, but a friendlier, more productive competition between professionals. At times, however, the #curatorbattle, as it’s been hashtagged, has looked just as repulsive to the viewer as any Twitter conflict: especially last week, when the Yorkshire Museum threw down the challenge to pull the “creepiest object” out of the archives and post it.
“Museum curators are up to their ears in weird crap, some of which isn’t fit for display,” writes Ruin My Week’s Alison Sullivan. “There are lots of niche museums out there, too, who don’t get the kind of attention the Smithsonian receives. They’re about local history or specific interests, and their collections are the strangest of all.”
The Yorkshire Museum, which bills itself as offering “Britain’s finest archaeological treasures, and a walk through the Jurassic landscapes of Yorkshire,” is no different: they started off the challenge of the week by posting a “3rd/4th century hair bun from the burial of a #Roman lady, still with the jet pins in place” — albeit fully detached from the head it was buried on.
Other participating institutions saw the Yorkshire Museum’s hair bun and raised it a “sheep’s heart stuck with pins and nails, to be worn like a necklace for breaking evil spells,” a P.T. Barnum-style “mermaid” constructed through taxidermy, a “CURSED CHILDREN’S TOY that we found inside the walls of a 155-year-old mansion,” and small dioramas populated by gold-miners and card-players made of crab’s legs and claws.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Scanga’s installation involved hanging mini-replicas of works from the Metropolitan Museum’s American collection on extremely long wires that traveled from under-ceiling picture rail to the baseboard, where a collection of art-loving taxidermied mice waited expectantly. One rested on a familiar-looking, black vinyl upholstered bench, a tiny blue shopping bag from the Met’s gift store parked near its dainty, shoeless feet.
Filippo and Marianna’s art-loving rodents are gerbils, and unlike Scanga’s artfully stuffed models, theirs—9‑month-old brothers Pandoro and Tiramisù—are very much alive, as Tiramisù proved when he gnawed the unseen gallery assistant’s painstakingly assembled cardboard stool to bits under the watchful eye of the tiny Girl with a Pearl Earringfacsimile Marianna crafted for his cultural enrichment.
A video the couple published on Reddit, above, shows the furry museum goers scampering under the benches to the tune of “The Blue Danube” and placing their paws on the artwork, including an expert, gerbil-themed forgery of Gustav Klimt’s gold-flecked Symbolist masterpiece, The Kiss.
Not to be vulgar, but if this museum has a restroom, Pandoro and Tiramisù seem to have given it a miss, an impropriety surpassing any waged by the titular characters of Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Two Bad Mice.
Filippo and Marianna accepted the destruction of their exquisitely staged set with a cheer that suggests they’re not shut up for the duration with a small child… just gerbils, who can be deposited back into their Habitrail when the fun’s over.
The attention to detail—the gallery tags! The laminated cards in multiple languages in a wall-mounted holder!—captured the imagination of Reddit. Users jumped Marianna’s original post—(Quarantine, day 14. Me and my boyfriend spent the whole day setting up an art gallery for our gerbil)—with suggestions of other famous works to recreate in miniature and add to the collection. Rest assured no groan-worthy, pun-based, gerbil-centric title was left unexpressed.
With cultural institutions temporarily shuttered for the good of public health, many viewers also shared their yearning to get back inside favorite museums. (Marianna reports that Filippo is a museum worker.)
For now, we must be patient, and live vicariously through gerbils ’til the long wait is over.
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