The Story behind The Odditorium

Massillon Museum staff members and guest curator Dan Kane will present a special look at the Museum’s summer exhibition, The Odditorium, on Wednesday evening, June 27, at 6:00.The event is free and open to everyone; no reservations are required.

The Odditorium brings together hundreds of the Museum’s most unusual permanent collection objects in a bizarre house setting occupied by the fictional Wunderkammer family.Curated by the Museum’s executive director, Alexandra Nicholis Coon, and Dan Kane, arts and entertainment editor of The Repository, the exhibition juxtaposes unique items, many of which have not been previously displayed.During the gallery program, the curators will describe how the exhibition was envisioned and planned.

Contributing staff will talk about the imaginative rooms they created and detail the most interesting objects within them.

Chris Craft, Cristina Savu Teeters, and Jill Malusky assembled the grandfather’s room, which has also been called “The Explorer’s Room.”It contains a stuffed owl, a Native American headdress, a 1917 typewriter, a whale rib, and other memorabilia of long-ago adventuring days.

Mandy Altimus Pond configured a room to reveal the mother’s former glamour days with a baby alligator purse, a 1928 permanent wave machine, and a model of Massillon’s opera house.Among the teenaged boy’s accumulated stash, Scot Phillips included a locally distilled bottle of whiskey, vintage cameras, beer bottles produced in Massillon, and human skulls.

Next to it, Kane created a room for a little girl obsessed with the circus.Within its boldly striped walls are Tom Thumb’s boots, a clown statue, and a 1941 photograph of a trapese artist.

The father’s space, a doctor’s office compiled by Coon, is full of arcane instruments, a wicker wheelchair, an early 1900s boxing poster, a shoe-fitting fluoroscope, a 1909 Tiger football photograph, and a skeleton.In the maid’s pantry, Coon included a Frieg’s Restaurant turtle soup sign painted on a turtle shell, a Sugar Bowl menu, a Chris Speilman Wheaties box, and an Enterprise Aluminum Fresh-O-Lator.Time will be allowed to view the entire exhibition and to ask questions of those who installed it.

The exhibition, which will continue through August 26, may be seen during regular Museum hours:Tuesday through Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.The Museum will be closed on Wednesday, July 4, to commemorate Independence Day.

The Massillon Museum is located at 121 Lincoln Way, East, in downtown Massillon.Call the Massillon Museum at 330-833-4061 or visit www.massillonmuseum.org for details.A visit to the Masillon Museum is always free.

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Categories: Art

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