Week 28: O Street Mansion

Foundation mission: O Street Museum Foundation is dedicated to serving cultural, scientific and educational needs, with a focus on the creative process. We believe that creative expression through all forms of art and scientific discovery is the definition of hope.

There comes a time in the course of Weekly Museum Visits when you have 90 fewer museum choices than you when you first started. Some folks might object to my inclusion of O Street Mansion as a museum, but as I exhaust many of the widely-agreed-upon options, I have to branch out and get creative. Also, I was celebrating my birthday, and I wanted something fun to do with friends.

O Street Mansion

OSM was certainly a good place to get creative. The eccentric hotel and event venue also bills itself as a one-of-a-kind museum “dedicated to exploring the creative process.”

Three friends and I took the self-guided tour, which consisted of exploring as many of the 100 rooms and 70 secret doors as we could find. (I am pretty sure there was a lot that we did not find.) These rooms include spaces for eating, sitting, sleeping, bathing, playing games, and cooking. Some rooms serve multiple functions (you mean not everyone has a chess table in their bathroom?).

Secret door at O Street Mansion

Most of the rooms are themed and filled to the brim with clutter. The majority of the clutter is donated, and all but the guitars are available for purchase.

Afterward, we discussed whether this place is a museum. I said that it was not put together with the intentionality of museum exhibits, and one of my friends commented that when she goes to a museum, she expects to be able to read about the history of the objects and where they came from.

For me, the experience felt less like visiting a museum and more like wandering through one enormous, interactive work of art. We made sense of what we saw not by reading exhibit labels or listening to a tour guide, but instead, by trying on hats and touching bookcases to see if they were secret doors.

Art at O Street Mansion

Since we didn’t know the names of the things we saw, we had to come up with our own identifying words. “This is what you’ve been calling the cat book room? But it’s the bunny room!” It turned out, on closer examination, that the decor of the room had more to do with teddy bears than anything else.

One other person in the group and I recently took a Knowledge Commons DC class on Dada. Yesterday, we walked through OSM exclaiming, “Look, it’s Dada! It doesn’t make sense! Hey, there’s a photo montage on the wall!” The fact that people donate individual pieces of art and novelties to the whole makes the entire endeavor seem like an Exquisite Corpse.

O Street Mansion

OSM served as our adulthood realization of that childhood dream of having a house of endless rooms to explore and secret passages to find. It’s the thrill of Dawn’s secret passageway from the Baby-Sitters Club books, the bizarreness of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and a harmless version of House of Leaves.

I now have one more Weekly Museum Visit. You can vote on what museum I visit here.

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May’s blog theme is Preserving and Interpreting Creativity.

YOU get to decide my last Weekly Museum Visit!

Vote on where I should go for my very last museum visit!

I have so far visited 90 new sites for the Weekly Museum Visits project. I will be starting an intensive paralegal certificate program in 2 weeks – meaning that my 91st and 92nd Weekly Museum Visits, the last two, are imminent. Though I will always love museums, my career path is taking a new focus, and WMV is coming to an end.

This week’s visit will be a fun excursion with friends to celebrate my birthday. For next week’s visit – the final one – I am putting the destination up to a vote. Though I am running out of places to visit after going to so many already, there are still some left to choose from!

Please vote by leaving a comment.

The choices:

• Alexandria Archaeology Museum
• Alexandria Black History Museum
• Athenaeum
• Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Center
• Library of Congress (Madison Building)
• Madame Tussauds

Thank you for voting!

PLOS Sci-Ed Blog Post

Science education blogger Cristina Russo wrote about social objects in science museums – and interviewed me for the article. You can read it here. Thanks!

Week 27: Octagon

American Institute of Architects goal: With nearly 300 state and local chapters, the AIA serves as the voice of the architecture profession and the resource for our members in service to society.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) maintains the Octagon Museum, a historic house with a misnomer: it is actually shaped like a hexagon, with a circle added to the front. Built in 1801, the Octagon was occupied by the Tayloe family, and then by James and Dolley Madison after the White House was burned by the British in 1814.

Octagon

Visitors can take self-guided tours that focus on how the house would have been furnished and used by the wealthy residents (on the first floor) and by the slaves and servants (in the basement), with the second floor currently exhibiting posters and books from the Parks for the People: A Student Competition to Re-imagine America’s National Parks contest.

The contest, sponsored by the National Park Service and the Van Alen Institute, asks student teams from universities to create proposals re-envisioning a national park in response to 21^st-century challenges. (One of these parks is DC’s network of Civil War Defenses of Washington.) Specifically, the contest inquires:

• “How can design enhance the park experience?”
• “How can parks become more accessible?”
• “What is ‘preservation’ and how can it evolve?”
• “What new ventures or partnerships can help connect parks to people?”
• “What is ‘sustainability’ and what is its future role?”
• “What part can technology play in parks?”

NPS, like so many of the rest of us, is struggling to get by right now. Recent news articles have been reporting the effects of sequestration on what is known as “America’s best idea.” These effects include everything from dirtier restrooms, to weddings that have to be relocated, to furloughs of staff, to reduced visitor center hours or permanent closures of visitor centers. Education programs are being cut, parades cancelled, trash picked up less often. Here in DC, there will be fewer events and interpretive programs at local NPS sites (along with the sequester’s impact on other cultural destinations such as the Smithsonian museums, the National Archives, the White House, and the National Arboretum). In short, sequestration is making it hard for the Department of the Interior (which oversees NPS) to fulfill its mission.

While these developments do not bode well for those who want to visit national parks (let alone those who are trying to make a living by working at one), it was refreshing to see the posters at the Octagon that take a longer, more hopeful view of what the parks can be and become in this century.  Here are just a few of the phrases I read on the posters:

• “move interpretation out of the visitor center and into the landscape” (University of Washington)
• “serve as catalysts for change by engaging users, reconfiguring perceptions, and revealing landscapes” (Cornell University)
• “enhance the interconnectedness of places and people, past and future” (University of Pennsylvania)

These projects reflect the potential for national parks to be relevant to people in a variety of ways (and dogs, too, as can be seen in a couple of posters that show dogs walking with humans and fellow canines). The posters describe new kinds of visitor centers as well as interpretive opportunities outside the visitor center altogether, the importance of meeting community needs, and the idea of sustainability as applied to environment, culture, and the integration of the two.

So, what do these posters have to do with the Octagon? Well, as the AIA headquarters, the Octagon is a museum about the built environment and architecture, not just about its own storied history as a house. The Octagon can appropriately show exhibits on the many sides of architecture and design. Also, the exhibit touches upon questions that concern a great many historic sites: How can we preserve and sustain an environment (historical or natural, built or wild) while also being innovative in how we interpret it? And how do we honor (or judge) historic figures in a way that is relevant and interesting to people of the present and future?

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May’s blog theme is Preserving and Interpreting Creativity.

Week 26: Congressional Cemetery

Organization mission: The mission of the Association for the Preservation of Historic Congressional Cemetery is to serve the community as an active burial ground and conserve the physical artifacts, buildings, and infrastructure of the cemetery; to celebrate the American heritage represented by those interred here; restore and sustain the landscape, protect the Anacostia River watershed, and manage the grounds as accessible community resource.

Partners in Preservation, an initiative by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is currently underway in the DC area. Twenty-four sites are competing for $1 million in grant funding, and individuals can vote daily as well as participate on social media.

The 24 sites include art museums and parks. There are Unitarian Universalist, Christian, and Jewish meeting places. There are houses that are, or would like to become, historic house museums. The list includes theaters, an observatory, and national monuments. There’s a cemetery where dogs are buried and humans will hang out (at the future education center for the Montgomery County Humane Society), and a cemetery where humans are buried and dogs hang out.

Congressional Cemetery – Mausoleum Row

Four of these sites have previously been Weekly Museum Visits: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Arlington House, Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, and Mount Vernon. This weekend, I added another place to my list: Congressional Cemetery (where humans are buried and dogs hang out). Congressional Cemetery is competing for preservation funds for the restoration of the mausoleum row.

I visited on the day of Sousa Palooza, an all-day event honoring John Philip Sousa, who spent part of his life in DC and who is buried in the cemetery. Some of the activities for the day included music performances, a lecture by John Philip Sousa IV, docent-led tours, scavenger hunts, and a wine and cheese reception.

Congressional Cemetery – John Philip Sousa’s grave

Although these offerings focused primarily on interpreting the monument to Sousa, Congressional Cemetery has almost endless objects for possible interpretation. I realized as I walked around that every grave marking is its own work of art. Though not much art history information is available, the obelisks and statues and tombstones would lend themselves well to visual thinking strategies, in which visitors could look closely at one object in detail and really notice what makes it unique.

Additionally, every object has a history – indeed, a whole life story – behind it. The self-guide brochure points out some highlights, such as the chapel and the burial sites of prominent historical figures. There is also a newer section memorializing 9/11.

During funerals and certain daytime hours on weekends, dogs are not allowed in the cemetery, but otherwise, pooches are welcome as long as their people are members of the Congressional Cemetery Dogwalkers. After the Sousa Palooza events wound down, the four-legged visitors began showing up. It seemed appropriate – after all, I had learned from the lecture earlier that John Philip Sousa was a pretty big dog lover himself.

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May’s blog theme is Preserving and Interpreting Creativity.

Favorite Museum Photos: Cherry Blossoms

During Weekly Museum Visits Part II, I visited the United States National Arboretum and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. I recently revisited both and saw them in their cherry blossom glory.

United States National Arboretum

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

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April’s blog theme is Local History.

Week 25: Ellicott City Fire Station, Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park, and Isaac Log Cabin

Howard County Recreation and Parks mission: To responsibly manage natural resources; provide excellent parks, facilities, and recreation opportunities for the community; and ensure the highest quality of life for current and future generations.

Today in 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution. Yesterday was Spring Heritage Day in Ellicott City, Maryland.  My Maryland friend and I participated by visiting three small Maryland historic sites in Ellicott City.

Having grown up in Columbia, a city that’s only 15 years older than I am, I’m not accustomed to associating history with my hometown. But neighboring Ellicott City has been around a bit longer, with a charming, hilly, historic main street and a half-dozen small museums within walking distance of each other.

Ellicott City Fire Station museum

We first visited the Ellicott City Fire Station, also known as the Ellicott City Firehouse Museum, not to be confused with the current Ellicott City Volunteer Fire Department (which is not a museum, but which does have a holiday train garden on display every December).  This one-room museum was once a firehouse, built in 1889; the fire department would later outgrow the space.

Today, the museum packs a lot of artifacts into a small space, including old fire-fighting vehicles and bells, shelves of model fire engines, historical photographs and documents relating to the fire department of Ellicott City, and a “fireman ashtray” that was “won as a door prize at Maryland State Firemen’s Association Convention in Ocean City, Maryland in the early 1960s.” A museum staff person explained the multi-step process of getting a fire put out in the 1890s, which included knocking on a door across the street, coming back to the fire station to get equipment, and hitching up whatever horses were available in a nearby stable.

Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park

Our next stop was the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park, a women’s college from the 1800s that is now in ruins. I have been to ruins in Italy and Mexico, but how often do I get to see ruins in the county where I grew up? Diana and I got a guided tour of the ruins of a stone building where young women used to live and learn. The students were encouraged to keep busy by walking the grounds (walking, I recently learned, is Maryland’s official state exercise) and working in the gardens, but they were also to stay isolated from the rest of the town and never have visitors.

Natural causes brought the building into disrepair; there was no disaster or deliberate demolition. Researchers have learned a bit from archaeology at the site, and our tour guide hopes there will be a lot more archaeological digging in the future, once funds allow for it.

Thomas Isaac Log Cabin

Last, we visited the Thomas Isaac Log Cabin, a one-room cabin that could house a family of 8-10. The cabin was built in the late 18^th century and named after its owner in the late 19^th century.

The objects in the museum are replicas of period objects, allowing visitors to touch them. Children can sit at the small table and play a non-electronic game of checkers. There is a deck of cards on which all 52 cards contain animal rhymes, each ending with a rhyming moral. A fireplace for cooking and warmth, a bed in the corner, sewing materials, and shelves full of dishes show the many functions this small cabin served.

I may not get much history in my hometown, where a shopping mall is listed as the main attraction. But three museums in one day in the next town over are the next best thing.

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April’s blog theme is Local History.