Finding a New Obsession

Over the past few months the snow has kept us in our design studio and away from our monthly Creative Day visits to museums and cultural venues, which to be honest is driving us creative types a bit CRAZY! So to get our “museum fix,” we found a new obsession in watching the Travel Channel’s show, Mysteries at the Museum.

The show’s premise:
“Museums are where America displays its wondrous treasures of the past — often strange and curious remnants of the momentous events that have shaped our history. Behind each artifact is yet another story to be told and secrets to be revealed — tales brimming with scandal, mystery, murder and intrigue...”

The show introduces you to curators, historians, archaeologists and scientists whose job and passion it is to preserve these artifacts and stories. We were surprised and delighted to discover that the show explored a number of museum mysteries right in our own backyard!

- The Mead Art Museum in Amherst, MA, was featured in the show’s first episode, where we discover a “freakish little mutant” called the “Fiji Mermaid.”  

- In episode three, the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, MA, is the setting for a murder mystery surrounding their Mastodon, a unique skeleton collected in 1844.

- Boston’s famous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Art in episode five tells a story of four empty picture frames and the unsolved art heist of 1990.

Who doesn’t love a good mystery?
On wintery days that keep you indoors, get your “museum fix” and escape to the Travel Channel’s website for clips from past episodes and their  “Top 10 Museum Mysteries” slideshows. Maybe this post will inspire you to explore your museum archives for a mystery of your own.