Do-It-Yourself Museums

You may have seen or heard about the free lending libraries people have built in little glass houses on top of wooden bases and poles in their front yards. Stocked with use books for children and adults, anyone can take from, replace, or add to these collections. In some airports, museums also have mounted mini exhibits in glass cases. Combining these ideas has led to little free museums of art and museums of science and technology on private property.

     Using an international theme, museums could display art from foreign countries: paintings, sketches, sculpture, textiles, pottery (such as the Korean vase seen here), photography, and any other art form. For example, a hat or crane made out of Japanese paper-folding origami could be displayed in a glass case over a mailbox, labeled "Take One," that was filled with directions for making this object.

     Since simple scientific experiments work in any country, they would be perfect to display in little home made museums everywhere. Chemical reaction experiments could be shown in a mini museum. With three glasses, one would be filled with red grape juice, another would show how the same red grape juice would turn green when mixed with ammonia (an alkaline solution), and the third glass would show how the green/red grape juice and ammonia would return to red when acidic vinegar neutralized the alkaline solution. Experiments found at sciencefairadventure.com could lend themselves to demonstrations in little museum display cases.

     Those who have made little free museums say they have received enthusiastic help from professors at local colleges and universities. They also say freestanding unmanned museums have to be sturdy and able to withstand all kinds of weather conditions. Unfortunately, they report a certain amount of vandalism is to be expected. But the best part is daily exposure to art and science motivates artists and inventors.

 (The earlier blog posts, "I Made This Myself," "Robot Revolution," and "Robots for Good," suggest projects that might lend themselves to mini museum displays.)