House Cats: A Traveling Display of the Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata

Visitors to the Museum of Ephemerata in Austin, Texas, often tell us how meeting our cats is an important part of touring our in-home Dime Museum. The cats greet visitors, do tricks, and model displays. “House Cats” brings our furry co-curators out to meet the world.

The Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata was founded in 1921 by Madame Mercury Curie and Rolls Joyce Jr. The latter was born Rasputin Zaplatynska, great granduncle to Scott Webel, current curator with Jen Webel. This curiosity museum served as a “zoo for endangered species of collection” like collections of saintly relics, Wunderkammern, and dime museums. After being boxed up after the former curators’ deaths in the ‘40s, the Webels reopened the Museum in 1999 out of their house in Tucson, Arizona. Since moving to Austin, Texas, in 2001, the Museum has expanded beyond the original curators’ “impermanent collection” to include community thematic shows like “Machines,” “Animals,” and “Ghosts.” These temporary exhibitions are venues for Museum visitors to share cherished objects and their stories with a broader public. During weekly open hours, the costumed curators offer performative tours woven from the narratives of the loaned items and chance events like animal tricks, kombucha tea samples, and explorations of the garden. The project is documented at http://mnae.org.

Framed documents, animatronic stuffed cat, mop, ephemera

All rights reserved, Scott Webel and Jen Webel

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Projects

Ethnographic Terminalia: Philadelphia

Ethnographic Terminalia first exhibition was a group exhibition of installation works that showed at the Ice Box gallery (Crane Arts, Philadelphia)