“My Favorite Museum Exhibit” is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. I’ll be featuring posts in this series all week. Want to see them all? Check out the archive post. I’ll update the full list there every morning.
Spend enough time in a museum and the space starts to take on a personality. From knowing the exhibits—and thinking about what is included and what isn’t—you start to feel like you have some insight into “who” the museum is supposed to be, and, perhaps, a peek into the minds that shaped the place.
And sometimes, what you learn is kind of funny.
Andy Tanguay lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, not far from the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. Here’s his take on what you’ll learn about Henry Ford if you visit the museum often enough.
When you go through The Henry Ford as many times as I have, you start to assemble a portrait of a borderline-creepy affection for Thomas Edison by Henry Ford. There’s industrialist BFFs … and then there’s Ford and Edison. I’ve never seen any notebooks with Edison’s name and little hearts around it, but whole thing feels rather odd.
So I think it’s very telling that there’s just one tiny case related to Tesla — arguably Edison’s ‘Apollo Creed’ to Tesla’s ‘Rocky’ — and it mainly houses his death mask almost like a trophy.