The Museum of Old and New Art
(Hobart, Tasmania)

Photo of Sidney Nolan's "Snake" by jeffowenphotos via Flickr.

A relatively new gem on the world’s museum stage–it reopened in January 2011–MONA was quickly added to my list after I saw a picture of Sidney Nolan’s “Snake” that they have on display. Intrigued, I decided to learn more about the museum. The result? About a hundred other reasons for me to save up for a trip to Tasmania.

MONA’s collection ranges from contemporary art to Egyptian antiquities, with all sorts of odds and ends in between. According to discovertasmania.com, “MONA takes a different approach to interpretation: there are no labels or wall texts. Instead, visitors are given a touch-screen device, which is sensitive to their location in the museum–showing them works in their proximity. Called the ‘O’, it allows visitors to select the level of information they need and to vote for works they ‘hate’ or ‘love’.” While that’s all very interesting, I am also intrigued by what MONA has going on around the art collection.

Photo by jeffowenphotos via Flickr.

David Walsh, a professional gambler, art collector, and founder of the museum, has described MONA as a “subversive adult Disneyland,” and I can see what he means. The museum is beautifully situated in the cliffs rising from the banks of the River Derwent on the grounds of the Moorilla Winery, and MONA’s truly modern architecture manages to fit in with its rather breathtaking natural surroundings. Given its proximity to viticulture, it should come as no surprise that visitors can sample offerings from the winery. However, they can also play in the hotel pool, dine in the museum’s world-class restaurant, or even enjoy a pint at the on-site brewery.

Photo from coffey.com

"Yves Saint Laurent: 'Mondrian' day dress (C.I.69.23)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/C.I.69.23 (October 2006)

1. If you thought you were the only one who thought “Denver? Really?” when you heard the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition would be popping up in the Mile High City, don’t worry, you’re not alone. The Denver Post tackles “How the Denver Art Museum Got the Yves Saint Laurent Exhibit.”

2. Over in Barcelona, the CaixaForum art gallery just opened a major Goya exhibition.

3. Thanks to “a shot-in-the-dark blog-post query, a little luck and a donor with a romantic streak” a 30-year mystery has been solved at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library.

4. Art museums tend to dominate travel itineraries, but check out these 10 Best Non-Art Museums for your next trip.

5. Speaking of itineraries, Tired of London, Tired of Life recommends checking out the British Museum at twilight.

Screen Shot from the Wellcome Collection's High Tea game

I’ve always been a big fan of history. Therefore, back in 8th grade when my class began studying Chinese history, my teacher had no trouble catching my interest. However, a few of my classmates probably would have appreciated this little gem from the Wellcome Collection to help set the scene and bring the words in our textbook to life.

As part of last year’s exhibit, High Society, London’s Wellcome Collection produced a video game that allowed visitors to their website to dive headfirst into the lucrative and risky world of the tea and opium trade that took place in the Pearl River Delta in the years leading up to the First Opium War. The game, High Tea, is still available on the Wellcome’s website, and is about as addictive as the opium you are smuggling (fictionally, of course).

High Tea is just one of the many ways that the Wellcome Collection has succeeded in fulfilling their motto: “A Free Destination for the Incurably Curious.” The museum does an excellent job of using their website and new media to allow visitors to experience exhibitions well beyond the walls of the galleries. Other examples include the Magic in Modern London iPhone app that leads you on a treasure hunt in Edwardian London (a tie in with the Charmed Life exhibit that just closed), a Tiredness Test to coincide with an exhibit about sleeping and dreaming, and during their Heart exhibition, visitors were invited to watch a live open heart surgery and ask questions of the doctor and patient.

What other museums do you think are doing particularly noteworthy events, apps, programs, and tools to tie in with their exhibitions and collections?

Photo credit: Batiment - L. Erlich © Henriette Desjonquères & Paul Fargues.

Found out about this Leandro Erlich exhibit currently on display at Paris’ Le 104 gallery over at My Modern Met. Check out her post, visit Le 104′s website, or check out this video of the installation.

See the larger image here.

Want to know more about the museum? You can visit their website or read more here.

Have you ever been to the Center of the Universe? Nestled in a valley amid the rising pine-tree blanketed peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains of Northern Idaho lies the town of Wallace. It’s a small town — in the 2000 census, 960 people called it home — that has made a disproportionately large mark on history. If you find yourself at the point where 6th Street meets Bank Street in the southwest portion of town, look down. That’s the Center of the Universe, or at least it has been since 2004 when the Mayor of Wallace declared it to be so and put in a manhole cover to commemorate the occasion. Now look up, you’re standing in the middle of a street and you should probably move before you get hit by a car.

Once safely back on the sidewalk, you can take in your surroundings. Wallace is an old mining town, a central player in the Silver Valley, which got its name from the over 1 billion ounces of the metal unearthed from the 40 miles of rugged hills over the last 130 years or so. This outpost of the Wild West got its start back in the 1880s and was the center of national interest when tensions between miners and owners boiled over to such an extreme that lives were lost and the Army was called in to keep the peace in both 1892 and 1899. The Great Burn of 1910 wiped out most of the town, but it was quick to rebuild. Many of the buildings you see today are part of that reconstruction effort and are all listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a ploy by the town to force the federal government to build Interstate 90 over Wallace rather than through it. As a result, there is still much of that turn of the century charm about Wallace.

Photo by amanderson2 via Flickr.

Wallace is less than a square mile in area, but there are actually a fair amount of venues for drinking in the history of this western gem. To get a feel for the mining life, visit the Wallace District Mining Museum just east of the Center of the Universe or take a mine tour in one of the surrounding caves. Of course, the railroad was integral to the town’s survival, so a trip to the Northern Pacific Railroad Depot Museum is recommended. But, to really get a taste for life in a rugged western mining town, look no further than the Oasis Bordello Museum.

The Oasis was a fully function brothel up until 1988 (just shy of it’s 100th birthday), when the madame — known as Ginger — got word of an FBI raid. The ladies grabbed what they could and ran out the door just ahead of the lawmen. The G-Men ended up using Wallace as their center of operations for three years as they cracked down on lawlessness in the region, which meant the Oasis remained shuttered. However, this house of ill repute got a second lease on life when it reopened as a museum in 1993.

Enter through the gift shop, where paintings of idyllic mining life share space with seductively posed mannequins (well, as seductively posed as mannequins can be). This is also a perfect opportunity to pick up that “Good-Time Girls Cookbook” you’ve been meaning to add to your collection or my personal favorite memento: the menu mug. The menu of services as they stood on the 1988 closing date has been printed to make your morning coffee just a little more racy. “Straight, no frills” would cost you $15 and last 8 minutes, while an hour long bubble bath would run you $80. The “Half & Half Deluxe” seems like a bargain at $25.

Sign up for the Bordello Tour and head upstairs for a look at the rooms, which have been preserved exactly as they were left (even the dirty dishes in the sink) in 1988. It lasts about 20 minutes, and provides a worthwhile glimpse into the lives of the women who worked in the world’s oldest profession in this small mining town. You also get to find out the story behind the one-shoed men of Wallace. It just might be one of the more memorable museum experiences you’ll ever have.

Photo by JD Hancock via Flickr.

My name is Rusty Baker, and I’m a Museum Person.

Tell us a little about yourself.

Like I always tell people who ask how I got into this, I had just graduated with a B.A. in English and a Pennsylvania Teaching Certificate in 1990, so naturally I was unemployed looking for work when I got a job offer from a friend’s dad to come work for his art gallery. That would be the beginning of a what has been a great journey from a commercial gallery to an art auction company outside of Philadelphia, to a job as a small art museum’s Director of Operations. A huge door opened for me when I moved from that position to Acting Director, spent a year convincing a sometimes insane board of directors I might be Director material, then was named Executive Director. After that position, I spent a small stint with one of the nation’s largest art shipping and handling companies, and then I relocated and joined Pennsylvania’s statewide museum association as the Marketing and Membership Guy. I was invited to become the Executive Director back in April when our organization restructured.

Why do museums matter to you?

Museums are magical places. We tend to feel forced to defend museums, to do research, to gather together ideas that somehow justify our existence. No one asks a car mechanic to do these things. The very word museum bears witness to the reason there are museums. Museums exist because they matter. It is wonderful that museums are an economic generator in communities. I am excited there are so many discoveries and stories that noodle out of art and objects and experiences with them. Real learning, whether you can test to it or not, comes in museums. Since I am a museum guy, the jobs created by this industry (and it is an industry) obviously determine whether there is food on my table. All of these reasons seem empty to me, just another Gen X whine I can bleat out. It is the magic of museums, the unspoken wonder of them, that really does it for me. I am certain I share this with other museum people. Museums are complex institutions, but once you get it, like tuberculosis, you can’t “unget” it.

What is your favorite museum memory?

(Editors note: Rusty really wanted to include two stories, but I liked his first one so much, I decided to let it stand on its own. If you want to hear more museum memories from Rusty, chat with him on Twitter at @rustybaker647.)

My first marriage was disintegrating, and I was working on an installation or just about anything else at work for twelve or fourteen hours a day. The curator had put together an amazing small exhibit of work that dealt with identity, and I was truly fighting a lot of demons at the time. We installed a small light bulb piece, two spooned bulbs by Felix Gonzalez Torres. We talked about what we would do if one of the bulbs burnt out.

“We leave it that way,” the curator said.

“We leave it that way?” I echoed.

“Sometimes love dies,” he said.

What museum would you love to visit?

This is a tough one. There are so many museums! Pennsylvania has something like 1,000 of them, and I haven’t seen them all. If the sky is the limit, I’d love to visit the Imperial War Museum, LA MOCA, and the Harley Davidson Museum.

Photo by mediafury via Flickr.

What is your dream museum job?

Being a curator is the dream museum job. Everyone wants to be a curator, don’t they? I’ve done it, and when it goes well, it is like hitting home runs one after another. You just hope someone in the stands cheers, too.

When you think of the perfect exhibit, what is in it?

I’ve seen a few exhibits that were almost perfect, and I was completely blown away by the Carnegie International in 1999, still think about it all the time. I talk about it when I have captive listeners.

The perfect exhibit, no matter what is in it, art or historical objects, is an organic thing. It should appear effortless, and it shouldn’t make a visitor work too hard for the payoff. Great exhibitions look like they grew from seed in a space. They were always there, and they will always be there.

What is the most random item you have bought in a museum gift shop?

I lack the shopping gene, but I am sort of compulsive about Peanut M & M’s. I’ve bought those in gift shops.

What museum would you move into for a month if you could?

I’d do that at any motorcycle museum that let me ride the bikes to make sure they were all in good working condition.

I used to work crazy long hours, and I feel like I already spent a month straight in a museum. I don’t mean that to sound as if I am some kind of silver back gorilla beating his chest. From my point of view, the more time you spend with museums or museum objects, the deeper the impact they have on you. You might listen to a popular song you like over and over again. You re-read a book you liked while you are at the beach on vacation. You saw Star Wars seven times in 1979. You don’t need to go to extremes, but it will be better the second time around.

Tom Sokolowski once spoke about a survey of visitors to the Andy Warhol Museum. They answered they had definitely liked the museum. They answered no to “Do you plan to return?” Tom was outraged by this, and he asked. “Did you have sex? Yes. Did you like it? Yes!! Are you going to do it again? NO!!!!” This was funny as hell to hear, put this way, in a more common denominator.

My feelings about A Month at the Museum are fairly complicated, but museums are, too. A thirty day stay, as a stunt or a job, only brushes the surface of what these places are.

Out of all the museums you have visited so far, which one is your favorite?

The Philadelphia Museum of Art stands out for me. I have been there a lot of times, and I think that accounts for something.  I now have my favorite things to go see at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, so my time is focused on the seven or eight works I really want to spend time with. They are old friends, these things. Ghost, that big Calder right in the entrance, that’s one of them. I love that Calder. I sometimes blow really hard and hope it moves. It never does.

Photo by joyosity via Flickr.

What is the most bizarre museum you have visited?

I visited The Barnes Foundation maybe eight years ago, and that will be the story I tell my grand children. What a strange place! What a strange story! What strange stuff!

There seem to be a million books and movies set in museums. Do you have a favorite?

The first Night At The Museum probably captured what I have referred to as “the magic” about museums better than most. I am also an Indiana Jones fan, and having delivered crates to the Smithsonian’s vast storage site, I have a special appreciation for The Lost Ark. I would tell you I saw it, but that wouldn’t be true.