There’s a time machine in downtown Baltimore on Holliday Street. A time machine that will take you back to the origin of public collections of art, history, and science…and then zip you through the present and into the future of museums. The Peale Center, the oldest purpose-built museum space in the US, is starting its…
Prince George’s County, Maryland is one of the wealthiest African American communities in the US, a suburban enclave of Black excellence just outside Washington, D.C. But it wasn’t always that way. At the small (but mighty) Prince George’s African American Museum and Cultural Center, the passionate young Executive Director, Maleke Glee, tells me about the…
Tucked among other Maryland suburbs outside Washington, D.C., the cute little town of Greenbelt has a surprisingly radical history. It was one of three “green towns” built under the New Deal Era Resettlement Administration, and it was supposed to be a new way of living, a utopia. Was it really a utopia? And how did…
The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, is monument to outsider art, the creative spirit, and the search for truth. Step inside this glittering temple to intuition and inspiration to experience the museum’s marvelous “shows,” each of which comes from the singular mind of the museum’s founder and envisioner, Rebecca Alban Hoffberger. DOWNLOAD EPISODE…
I’ve got a lot of exciting projects in the works related to podcasting for museums, historic sites, and cultural nonprofits…including a forthcoming handbook on podcasting! To make sure you get this news first, sign up for my email list to get occasional messages about topics that you care about and opportunities to improve your institution’s…
What would it look like if Indiana Jones was into volcanoes and created a museum in a small Icelandic village? The Volcano Museum in Stykkishólmur displays the art and geological specimens collected by volcanologist HaralðurSigurðsson from around the world during his many decades of exploration and research. I speak to museum manager, Filip Polách—a Czech photographer who…
No matter what happens on the Westman Islands off Iceland’s south coast–invading pirates, mass Mormon exoduses, months-long volcanic eruptions, mysterious diseases, perilous fishing waters–the island people, Eyjamenn, always come back to rebuild and repopulate. That’s what makes their home island, Heimaey, so unique. In this episode, I visit the local history museum to hear the…
Tucked away in a narrow valley just below the town of Akureyri in North Iceland, Sverrir Hermansson’s Museum of Sundry Objects is one eccentric man’s spectacular collection of ordinary things. The moment you walk into the main gallery, there are rows and rows of beautiful displays filled with meticulously arranged nails, saws, doorknobs, keys, matchboxes, lightbulbs,…
The Icelandic Aviation Museum in Akureyri is filled with great stories: locals crashing a Nazi glider into an open grave, the president’s plane enlisted to beat the British in the Cod Wars, and a nineteen year search to find a missing WWII plane that crash landed in a glacier. The museum’s chairman of the board,…
How does a contemporary art institution– places that are notoriously elitist–provide a thriving cultural center in a town’s that on the periphery of Iceland and the world? The Hafnarborg Centre of Culture and Fine Art is a contemporary art gallery and collection in the heart of downtown Hafnarfjörður, an old port town ten kilometers south…