George, a chicken, and a sign to turn out the lights at the entrance to the Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Vt.
I knew this Boston Globe article was for me as soon as I saw it was about celebrating the everyday. Most people have bucket lists of adventures they expect will be highlights of their lives. But after we check an item off our list, how do we feel when we get back home?
Maybe we should be enjoying what we do every day. A “museum” founder in Vermont thinks so.
Dana Gerber writes at the Boston Globe, ” ‘What would a museum look like if it was dedicated to ordinary objects of no monetary value, but immense everyday life consequences?’
“That’s the question Clare Dolan seeks to answer at the Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Vt. Dolan, who founded the museum in 2011, has no interest in celebrating the precious, the rare, the famous. She’d rather honor the stuff of junk drawers — toothpaste tubes, safety pins, old to-do lists — and present them with reverence.
“So, she set out to create a museum that would redefine what is valuable, and whose lives are worth putting on display.
‘We need a museum that’s about us, too — the ordinary people,’ said Dolan, 54, who has dubbed herself the Chief Operating Philosopher of the museum. ‘We’re here, and there’s something lovely about our lives.’
“In a remote corner of the bucolic Northeast Kingdom, the Museum of Everyday Life beckons from the side of the road. There is no admission fee or lock on the door; patrons let themselves in and turn the lights off when they’re done. Dolan, who lives in a house next door, works as an ICU nurse at Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital in nearby St. Johnsbury, so she’s often not home to greet visitors. The only security is a feisty chicken named George.
“The museum grew out of her childhood love of the material world. ‘I was the kind of kid that would talk to chairs,’ said Dolan, who’s originally from the Chicago area. After she bought her Vermont home in 2004, ‘I found the means to start making the thing that I wish I could come across.’
“The museum, now in its 10th year, champions the small to illuminate the universal. The front of the museum boasts the ‘greatest hits’ of exhibits past, like a trove of tone balls — dust that accumulates inside of instruments — and a violin made of matchsticks. Matchboxes from around the world rest on a wooden table, some from Dolan’s travels, others from outside contributions.
“Each of the exhibits, which run from one summer to the next, are communally curated. Dolan puts out a call for submissions in February when she announces that year’s object of focus. Throughout the 1990s, she worked as a puppeteer at the nearby Bread and Puppet Theater, a political troupe that has tackled a litany of social justice issues throughout its decades-long history — but she also enlists her ‘philosophers at large,’ or board of advisers, to assist her in creating each exhibit.
“This year’s exhibit highlighting notes and lists received the most submissions of any in the museum’s history, Dolan said. The selection is organized by category: love notes, bucket lists, and unfinished lists, like one that reads, ‘Things that have never happened: 1. I’ve never been asked to dance.’ There is a number two, but it is left blank.
“ ‘My heart just broke for that person,’ said Corina Orias, a California elementary school teacher visiting the museum with a local friend on a recent rainy Sunday. ‘I just hope that she did get asked to dance, sometime, someplace.’
“Why lists and notes? Dolan loves their inherent intimacy: the content, but also the way they bear the signs of human use; a pencil smudge here, a crinkle in the paper there. ‘They’re so connected to a person and a person’s story,’ she said. ‘They’re snapshots into how we make our way through the world.’ …
“ ‘It’s a lot of work, and it’s sort of thankless work in a way,’ Dolan said, ‘but it brings a lot of joy to me.’ ”
She brings joy to herself every day. Good idea. Could be at least as satisfying as checking off a bucket list. More at the Boston Globe, here.
Do you know other cool museum concepts? I’m remembering, for example, one man’s Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minneapolis and the Museum of Bad Art in Dedham, Mass. The blog has also covered the Mermaid Museums, the Museum of Aromas, the Covid Art Museum, a Museum for Gerbils, and more. Search on the word “museum” at the blog when you have time for joy.
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