This weekend, I visited a local museum.
Not a huge crowd for a Saturday. And pretty much all the cars in the parking lot belonged to the various volunteers and gift shop staff on duty.
When does the page turn for me? When do I become the one in the pull-on pants? The flowered sweatshirt and the brillo pad haircut? Orthopedic shoes? It's going to happen.
The museum building is relatively new. Empty, as it was, I marveled at the size of it (for this small town) and the energy that went into the design and construction of the site. You have to wonder how something like this gets built - way out here, with only 25,000 people to go see it.
In my career, I've visited countless museums and I've been spoiled by private tours with access to objects the ordnary visitor could never dream of touching. All the same, I've come to prefer the small ones in small places.I've fallen in love with the devotion of small museum staff to their collections. The charming lack of concern (or availability of financial support for) around conservation that allows you, the average viewer, to get really, really, really close to the stuff. And then take pictures of it.
I didn't find that here. I'm not sure I found much of anything here. I so wanted to fall in love with this museum but instead, found it collection-bare but (perhaps the greater sin) remarkably uninformative. I learned about a few families that shaped the town, but not as much as I learned about the family, who built the historic home on the museum property. A grandson (now deceased) funded the museum's new building for its ultimate purpose - to house his personal collection of art and furniture. It's not like that's never been done before. It just wasn't...very...interesting.
On the right is an antique ladies sewing table. The silk bag that hangs underneath would have been used to store works-in-progress. On the left is a gentleman's chest once used by the founder; its silk bag used to store his socks.
And a whole lot of rather uninteresting portraiture and a gallery of rather engaging miniatures put together over fifty years by a second gentleman who spent many years working on to transform the property into a museum. Here is a miniature library, as best as I could capture it through the glass.
Maybe my gay-dar is overactive from working in the arts, but 50 years of living together, collecting furniture, art, and making dollhouses (with no mention of any wives) says "more than friends" to me.
And then I wasn't allowed to photograph the quilts. The only gallery where photography was prohibited.
I was totally underwhelmed.
Sometimes I wonder if my the underlying message in my cynicism is a push toward another career. If I don't believe in what people are doing, perhaps I should stop and do something else. But then I think...no...I still believe in it, my expectation is just more carefully defined than when I was younger. Now I allow myself to admit that I am bored by what I see. That said exhibits are thin, or poorly conceived or (more common) written by committee instead of by the heart. It sounds cruel to some that travel with me, but I believe that it doesn't have to be big to be done well; and that it should change you in some way. Either mind or heart.
If you go to a community museum tabula rasa and come away disappointed, why would you ever return?
I enjoyed reading about your trip to the museum. Once removed, I wasn't bored. And, I was given the gift of never-before-seen silk for socks.
Posted by: Debra | December 08, 2011 at 05:11 PM
First, if this is the Museum of the Shenandoah Mountains, it's one of just two things that Wikipedia says about Winchester. Next, it looks like an expensive endeavor to be built without someone's passion and a chunk of government or private funding, so which was it? I'm guessing if it's lacking focus it's a pork project from the Feds. Lastly, maybe they need a grant for an outreach program!
Posted by: Robertson Adams | December 13, 2011 at 02:39 AM
Stuff, stripped of context, can be interesting. If you are the Antiques Roadshow sort of docent. But there's an awful lot of dead negative space in that place. I don't know. I think I'd rather go to the Muppets movie.
Posted by: Kristen | December 28, 2011 at 01:53 PM