6 Lesser Known Museums We Love

24:50Kiernan:Yeah, it's I'll even say even growing up in Connecticut, I did not you know, we didn't do like field trips to the Athenaeum, which is very strange. It's a really terrific collection. I remember they you know, I'm not usually one who's too interested in furniture in museums, but they have really cool, unique furniture. And something that completely sticks in my mind is one of the pieces of furniture I have most coveted in my life is at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, they have a 1936 Frank Lloyd Wright designed desk. And it's this beautiful kind of flat, rounded desk that has like several layers and it has like a trash can that's connected to the desk and it's very arty and horizontal in his sort of way.

25:38Kiernan:and oh my gosh, I remember I looked like, were there replicas of this desk available? I wanted to work at that desk so much. Did you find one? No, I never found it, but we should link to it in the show notes because it's really, it's very strange for a piece of furniture to hook onto me like that. But yeah, the building of the Athenaeum itself is beautiful. I feel like it is representative and this is sort of a theme. I covered this in the Detroit episode a bit with the Detroit Institute of Art. all of these cities that have had, and, you know, they're kind of the second, third cities around the U.S.

26:12that have - I mean, Hartford was rich at one point, right? Exactly.

26:15Kiernan:And they were all rich at some point. Like, you know, there's a reason they are major cities in their area. And that's why, you know, you have Detroit with the auto industry, Hartford with the insurance industry, Cleveland has great, beautiful museums of art, because when all this wealth comes into the community, you know, the philanthropy dials up and they start to amass these collections. And then inevitably they found a cultural institution and those continue on even past those boom years. Yeah. And it's so important if you live in these towns or around these towns to support these institutions so they can, they can keep thriving.

26:51Yeah.

26:51Kiernan:It's interesting. You, you talk about the Athenad. So Hartford is not a city that I love, but it does between that and they have the Harriet Beecher Stowe house and the Mark Twain house. I mean, the Mark Twain house is amazing. I mean, the Mark Twain house is amazing. I'm wondering maybe this is deserving of a little bit of a Hartford spotlight sometime. Yeah, well, I've suggested it. And, you know, there's a huge new Twain bio out that's just getting raised. Yeah, it's mixed. I would say mixed. I was anxious. I actually really like - It's Ron, right? Is it Ron? Yeah. No, it's John Meacham. it's meachem no no no it's wrong it's ron churnoff churnoff thank you okay cut that i like ron churnoff i've read his uh washington biography obviously we all know the hamilton musical drawn from his hamilton and uh i don't know there's some some uh i've heard that there there's a lot of time spent on uh twain's sort of business failures which is interesting those are so fun though.

27:54He's a kooky guy.

27:56Kiernan:Maybe we can get Ron on the show. I would do that. Yeah. Can we get Ron on the show? I'd love to. There's a few Twain sites for sure to visit. We could do a travel for Twain episode with Ron Chernow. That's a great, great, great. Very good. I love that. So, Kiernan, did you bring a museum located here in the USA? I did. This is, you went for a bit more of a serious one. I mean, you know, the Athenaeum is kind of like a mini-met feel. I went for a sillier one. So this one is called the Button Museum. And the Button Museum is in Chicago, Illinois. And it is not buttons like on your shirt. Well, you might have one of these buttons on your shirt, but it's not the buttons that claps your shirt and pants shut.

28:40Kiernan:This is pin back buttons. So this is like political buttons, buttons that they sell at coffee shops, buttons that they have to promote bands. And it is the history of the pin back button. And it comes from this sibling pair that started a company that's called the Busy Beaver Button Company. And it is a functioning button company in this museum, as they call it, which is really more of a gallery with a bunch of sliding shelves that you can pull out and explore. They sort of have this hallway where they present their historic collection of buttons. And I was drawn to it mostly. I love obscure museums, but I was drawn to it primarily because I really like historic political buttons.

29:30Kiernan:So I have a small collection of my own of just real favorites. I have like a beautiful golden peanut that was a Carter button. I have an Adelaide Stevenson button. I don't know if you know this story. He was sort of lampooned as this egghead, like a professorial can't like put his shoes on the right feet kind of guy. And he did this interview up on a stage once where he was chatting and chatting and he had his legs crossed and his shoe was face. The bottom of his shoe was facing the crowd and he had a big hole in the bottom of his shoe. and he was torn apart by the crowd and newspapers saying, oh, God, this guy wants to run the country as president.

30:15Kiernan:He can't even keep holes out of his shoes. And his campaign turned it around and it was like, no, no, he's an everyman. He's wearing those shoes for every bit of their life. He's parsimonious. He's who we should trust with our taxpayer money. And they put out these buttons of a shoe with a little hole in it. Brilliant. So there's tons of great art. And I love this sort of, I wouldn't quite call it folk art. Actually, one of my next museums is more focused on folk art. But just the creativity that goes when you have this little canvas that you can create something memorable on. And they do a great job of organizing it if you're interested in political, if you're interested in commercial, if you're interested in music.

30:58Kiernan:They're all organized. They've got kind of their best of in frames on the wall. And then you can just sit there and explore these pullouts. And they even give you a little souvenir busy beaver button that's labeled souvenir that is just for museum visitors. That is so cute. You know, it's so funny when I was Googling button museum to find this. There are multiple button museums across the United States. But one that stands out is a in Lee County, South Carolina. It's called the button museum. and it honors the button king, a man who created folk art all out of buttons. And he's got cars and cars and he's got a bathroom, a toilet, all covered in buttons.

31:44I mean, it's absolutely hilarious.

31:45Kiernan:Okay, we're going to have to add that to next list, I guess. I got to head out there to recount it. Also, if you're in the Chicago area and you need a pinback buttons created, Busy Beaver Company, they do that. They do stickers, they do buttons, and the office is just kind of humming next to you while you visit this little gallery. Love it. I love functioning factories, tours like that. And now you're heading back to South America because you need to kind of get your feet back under yourself. So I'm guessing that you have at least one, maybe both of your next ones are in that area. Yeah, so my next one is in Bogota.

32:25And it's a museum.

32:26Kiernan:So you can visit right when you get home. I haven't been in a while, actually. I was just thinking I need to go see what what's new. But this is a museum of contemporary art. And it's often overshadowed by, you know, people go to Bogota usually for 24, 48 hours, like on the way to Medellin or Cartagena. So they go to the National Museum or they go to the Botero Gold Museum. These are all terrific places you should go. um but this is if you're into contemporary art and you want to see sort of what's up in the contemporary art scene in bogota in the last 20 years i really recommend um the museum it's and what i think is really adorable about it the collection is all over the map like depending on when you go there might be some great stuff or there might be some cringe stuff you know it's like contemporary art can always be um but what's really cool is that they built it as sort of a mini Guggenheim.

33:16And so it looks like, it looks like a Guggenheim you would see in a video game, you know, cause it's like, it's much, much smaller than the actual Guggenheim, but it has the same exact setup where you walk up in the circle around the, uh, the, the main space. So it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a stunner. It's a, it's a real looker. Uh, it's, it's, uh, really cute. and the collection can be mixed. But I think if you've been to Bogota and you've already done, you're tied to Baltero and you've seen all the gold, then this is something that I would definitely recommend. It's a little off the beaten path.

33:55Kiernan:That sounds very cool. And I love anything that, when the building itself is the attraction and like the artwork is, it happens to be a nice addition. Yeah, totally. And I, you know, there's some, I've been twice in there. I've liked some things and I've taken pictures of some things to make fun of. So I'll post on the Instagram, I'll post some photos of some of my favorite pieces from all the museums I'm talking about today. And I know, as you say, like Bogota can be seen as kind of a through city, but if people are doing tourism in Bogota, is this one of the kind of, you know, major museums of Bogota or is it even scared to like locals?

34:38It's like the seventh. I mean, Bogota has. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the major museums of Bogota would be like the National, the Botero and the Gold Museum. Those are the big three that like every tourist does. And then there's a modern art museum. There's a contemporary art museum. There's a bunch of history, smaller history museums. Um, I, I, I have been telling people for now for years in Bogota that they need like a Met. They don't have that. They need, but they need like a more general art museum. That's not just dedicated to one of these specific periods. All right.

35:10Kiernan:So that's what the Davis museum and Bogota, the future Davis museum can, uh, can be that. Yeah. What's your next one? So, uh, my next one, I'm going to, uh, uh, take us to, uh, uh, further afield. also maybe not like a major tourism city, is Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. So when I was in business school, there's one week of the year that you go and do a consulting project internationally, okay? And Harvard will send you to, they basically find companies in cities all over the world, and it's part of your tuition that you like pay for this trip. Okay. And you get to rank the destinations that you want.

35:56Kiernan:I think you get to choose 10 and it can be as close as Finland and it can be as far as Kuala Lumpur. And when I was looking at the list, I ranked solely based on distance. Cause I was like, listen, everybody's paying the same tuition. I might as well get the furthest, most expensive plane ticket covered by that same tuition. And so I put Kuala Lumpur. I remember Cape Town was very high up. The Cape Town consulting, I heard, was very fun. Because you're going to be there. You're going to do a project. You get graded. You have to do a big presentation to the client, customer research, all this stuff.

36:36Kiernan:But you do also have some time to go do some tourism. And so Kuala Lumpur was a city I did not know much about. I super enjoyed getting to learn about it. There's some great architectural treasures there. And I remember there was one morning where class wasn't going to start till like afternoon. And I thought, this is like my one window to get in museums. And so I ended up going to the Islamic Arts Museum in Kuala Lumpur. And it blew me away. I think about it regularly as one of the better museum experiences I've had because it's a global collection of Islamic art. And I love Islamic art. As you know, it's not typically super figurative art, mostly because of the prohibitions within Islam of showing the prophet.

37:29Kiernan:And so it's a lot of beautiful design, beautiful textiles, beautiful color, a lot of calligraphy of Arabic letters. And it does a great job of if you if you didn't grow up Muslim and you didn't grow up necessarily knowing many Muslims as I didn't growing up, it'll teach you about the religion in the context of the art and show you this global collection and also contrast, you know, what art in Saudi Arabia looks like versus Muslim populations in China. And the gallery that I became obsessed with and was just in there for hours, and you would love it, Ryan, because it touches on miniatures, is they have scale models of famous mosques all around the world.

38:17Kiernan:And the different architectural styles of mosques, I had no idea the range. You and I have talked about when you go to Europe and you're trying to tour all these cathedrals, you get a little bit of cathedral fatigue, you know, and they all start to blend together because, you know, churches, especially in certain areas, they kind of follow the same footprint. You know, you got the cross, you got the nave, you got the altar, et cetera. And with mosques, much more variety, variety in building materials, variety in art, variety in how kind of approachable and workaday they are. I remember there were some African mosques that were built from simple mud bricks that were represented.

39:00Kiernan:And then there are these gorgeous artworks that are just amazing tile work that are meant to impress, that are meant to draw you, that are meant to be the key, the focus of an entire city. And you can take this little world tour of these mosques through this miniature gallery. And I just went back and back and back and became quite obsessed with it. So this is Islamic Arts Museum. I've never come across that take on Islamic art at a single museum. And it is a must visit in Kuala Lumpur. I love when they do scale models of different types of buildings like that. So you can see the differences. It reminds me of in Monterey when they did the same thing with all the Mayan architecture and you got to really see the difference between all the different places that you'd been.

39:50I think that's a really cool value add. And wow, it reminds me, Kieran, I was just in Mexico City for two days and I found out that there was a museum of miniatures dedicated to Mexican history that I'd never heard of. And I know, I know.

40:09Kiernan:How is that not on this list? Well, because I haven't been yet. Oh, you didn't go. No, it was closed. I found that it existed on the day it was closed and I was leaving. So I was like, crap, I got to come back. So I'll be You're probably so drunk, they wouldn't even let you pass the door. Yeah, they won't let me into that ministry museum. But no, that sounds really awesome. And, you know, a part of the world that I would really love to get to explore more. Oh, I'm so proud that I took that approach. It was like so the right approach. Because, you know, when was I going to get to Kuala Lumpur? It wasn't going to be soon.

40:41Kiernan:But also, there's something, you know, there's some names that just to me say adventure. And the name, I love saying Kuala Lumpur. And, you know, I actually have a lot of good things to do there. So I think we might want to do an episode. Yeah, I think that might totally might make sense. Well, look, let me tell you about my next museum. This is one I've been to more recently in my trip in the spring. I went around Europe and I went to Bulgaria and I spent a long time in Sofia. Not a long time, but it felt, you know, time moves slower there in Sofia. that's nice sometimes it is nice um no i i really like these museums in in in former communist countries where they take all the stuff that they can no longer display as like uh patriot patriot patriotic you know sculpture and they put it all in one place and so i really vivid memories going to moscow in 2003 and going to this old overgrown park that just was full of these like basically fallen fallen sculptures um of all these different like you know russian uh communist leaders and there's a similar but but much better up kept uh museum in sofia called the museum of socialist art and there are two uh sections there's a big outside sculpture park where you've got like you know your massive uh statues of like lenin and stalin and you know all that all the stuff you would expect uh but it's you know they've kept it up really nice and it's sort of all really contained so it almost feels like you're in a graveyard where all these people are buried um uh and then inside they they have a smaller sort of fine art collection of of art from the era um and then one of the cool things they have is they actually have the sickle the hammer and sickle that sat on the top of the uh bulgarian communist party headquarters oh my gosh wow that you can see.

42:46So it's super cool. It's not huge. Like this, you can knock the whole thing out in an hour. Um, and I would recommend going on a day that it's not raining because you know, the most in my mind, most of the fun is in that outdoor sculpture park. And you, you know, you want to be able to like, uh, spend some time there.

43:04Kiernan:That's a fun one. I, I socialists are, you know, it actually kind of, it's not a totally divorced from the, uh, the, like the, the sense of Islamic art where if you grew up in the Western art tradition only, I feel like these collections that focus in on non-Western styles can be really eye-opening. And so it sounds like that. I mean, obviously socialism, I mean, you're still in the West, but a lot of the influence comes from Russia. In socialist art, you know, the painters, you know, they had good taste in men. I'll give them that. You're very propaganda heavy. I think socialist art is very interesting looking.

43:41Kiernan:I do find it very strong, young and very strong workers. All right. All right. Are we looking at a second tattoo of a young communist worker? I don't think so. What's your your last pick for the for the app? All right. This one's obscure. Are you ready? Yeah. So Catherine and I went on a trip to Croatia and Slovenia. and in Slovenia, I was using Rick Steves as my guidebook at that point. And we went to Lake Blade, which is spelled B-L-E-D, but it's pronounced blade, Lake Blade, which is a major place to go in Slovenia. It's extremely picturesque, really fun. Slovenia is a beautiful country, I think undervisited, probably better for it because it doesn't have, it hasn't been over-touristed yet.

44:34Kiernan:Super traditional kind of wooden houses that have these beautiful gardens and especially flower boxes. I remember the houses have gorgeous flower boxes. And there's another part of the Slovenian culture that I learned about through Rick and kind of, as I tend to do, dug into probably more than Catherine would have liked, which was beekeeping. okay beekeeping i have a prediction you're going to get into beekeeping in your in your do you you would not be wrong if you guessed that i have looked into somerville massachusetts rules around if i'm allowed to keep bees and sadly i am not uh you have to you have to have because somerville's that's for the vineyard house that's for the vineyard uh they're they're very I'm a man of the people.

45:27Kiernan:We're going to have a block island. We're very close together here, and you have to have a clearance so that your bees aren't attacking other people's properties. So we don't have it. I don't have beekeeping, but I would get into beekeeping. And a big part of that goes back to the Slovenian trip because Slovenian beekeeping is its own subculture, And it is core to how many Slovenians view themselves. Even UNESCO recognizes it as like an intangible cultural treasure that Slovenian beekeeping is extremely important to the culture. And the reason is because they only raise this one type of bee that is specific to Slovenia.

46:16Kiernan:It's called the Carniolan bee, C-A-R-N-I-O-L-A-N bee. And it has these certain characteristics. They're considered sort of more approachable, gentler bees. And there's a lot of Slovenian pride wrapped up in these bees. And they estimate that home beekeepers, so not big bee operations, but home beekeepers, there's probably 200 ,000 colonies in Slovenia of bees, which is impressive. And it ties to their art because the bees are kept in these hives that basically have these drawers. And the front of the drawer is an area that for going back hundreds of years, Slovenians have painted with folk art.

47:07Kiernan:And so it'll show local customs, it'll show history, It'll just be whimsical. There can be religious themes. And there is a museum that collects these, and it's called the Museum of Apiculture. The Museum of Apiculture in Radov... I'm going to attempt it. I believe this is the pronunciation. Forgive me if it's wrong. Radovlijak, Slovenia, which is close to Lake Blade, but you'll need a car or an Uber to get you there. And they do teach you about beekeeping. They have beekeeping gear and costumes that you can look. But the real treasure chest is this folk art of these drawers that they've collected back a long, long time.

47:52Kiernan:And nowhere else in the world are you going to see a collection like that. And they even, you can buy as a souvenir one of these. But to me, they weren't, they felt like they were manufactured for the souvenir. And I wanted a real, you know, honey stained sort of sort of piece that they didn't have. Well, reason to go back. Reason to go back. And I, by the way, if you decide to do this, I would pair it with a visit to a local beekeeper. And this is where the Rick Steves guides are second to none, where he actually gives you a phone number to call to try to arrange a visit with a beekeeper. who's a bit outside Lake Blade.

48:37Kiernan:And Catherine and I did that. We drove there. We could not, it's so rural. And we didn't have cell service. We couldn't find the beekeeper. We ended up like wandering this neighborhood. We were an hour late. He thought we were not coming. We thought he wasn't there. And he was kind enough to open it up. And I remember he was very big on the fact that different types of honey can cure anything that ails you, including, according to this beekeeper, the Slovenian beekeeper, cancer. Which I don't, I, I, I, it might be something that the CDC wants to look into. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, there's some evidence that local allergies, if you're, if you're eating.

49:15Sure. That's, then that's true. That's true.

49:17Kiernan:Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, and, and of course you can pick up some really spectacular honey. Oh yeah. Honey, whether or not it's going to cure you, it's going to be delicious. So yeah. The museum of apiculture, pretty obscure, but well worth it. If you're as interested in the subculture of beekeeping as I am. Well, I think with that, it's time for The Last Stop. The last stop. That's a bee saying The Last Stop. Ladies and gentlemen, this is The Last Stop on this train. Everyone, please leave the train. All right, Ryan, well, we're here in The Last Stop. This is the final segment of the show, the last segment of the show.

49:57Kiernan:That's why we call it The Last Stop. And it's my favorite segment. It's your favorite segment. It's popularly known as the people segment, because this is a time where we come together and we share. It's more communal than the nuts and bolts of takeoff. Here in this segment, we kind of calm down. We take a step back. It's more meditative. And we share. We share one thing each week. You bring something. I bring something. It can be anything. It could be a toy. It could be a tale. It could be an article. It could be a song. Anything. But it has to meet one criterion. and it must inspire the spirit of wanderlust within us, even during the work a day week.

50:33Kiernan:So Ryan, you've been having a tough, highly work a day week. So I'm going to ask you, as I ask you every episode, do you have a last stop this week? I do, Kiernan. And this is a New York last stop that I was reading an article in Untap New York. And I love the Untap series, always a lot of fun stuff in there. And they were talking about why there are a handful of New York City public school buildings that are beautiful, while the rest are less than beautiful. And it all comes down to this dude named CBJ Snyder, who was the, he was both an architect and the superintendent of school buildings in the 1800s.

51:15And he thought that public schools should be cathedrals of learning. And so he designed these these really beautiful schools that all look like they could, you know, they would be well at home and like a college, a college campus. And, you know, he, he designed them out throughout, throughout the 1800s and he retired in 1923 after, you know, a couple, after almost a hundred schools that he had designed and a bunch of them are still standing including one in Flatbush. That seems to be the best preserved example. And if you can imagine, like it looks like half church, half, you know, it looks like something you might see in one of the schools you went to, Kiernan, you know, beautiful, beautiful brick, beautiful stone.

52:05And it's just interesting because the article then goes through to show some schools that were constructed in the in the 70s and the 80s. And they look like prisons.

52:15Kiernan:And I really I mean, even even schools that have the beautiful parts, they were still building buildings in that time. There are a few eyesores on many of these campuses. Yeah, yeah, I have no doubt. I have no doubt. It's just, you know, I think this is a fun little article because they give you like the five best examples and there's one in every borough. So anybody listening who lives in New York, I'll link in the show notes to this piece and you can go out and you can, you know, find the beautiful school that still remains in your bureau. Did you bring a last stop, Kieran? I did bring last stop in a way this would almost fit better in our a block where we catch up because I think it's going to promote some discussion.

52:57Kiernan:We won't go into the full discussion here, but I've just it's the trend that I'm seeing of these celebrity travel shows. And I don't partake in most of them. I will say I'm interested in a few of them. They're all, I think, were founded on top of Anthony Bourdain's travel show success. And everybody's trying to recapture that, get a new take on it. But man, is this like a genre that's proliferating. Conan just won some Emmys for Conan Must Go. You have Eugene Levy, who's coming back with the Reluctant Traveler show. Uh, you, you of course have been talking about the Stanley Tucci, uh, shows, uh, searching for Italy, uh, is the name of the kind of, uh, bigger Italian travel show.

53:46Kiernan:He does. CNN has a show that's built on, uh, it's called happy places where they get a celebrity to like return to a place that they love. Alan Cumming has an episode on that. If you, if you didn't, weren't aware of that.

54:03Kiernan:Still got it. I just am interested in what, and I'd love for anybody to write into us. If you're super passionate about these shows, or if you have found one of these shows, there's so many networks, so many streamers at this point, that they're just trying to create so much content that I'm fearful that there is some great travel show out there that isn't being seen. So if you have a take on these travel shows, if you love them, if you hate them, if there's one that you want us to get somebody from the show on the podcast, write us at outofofficepod at gmail .com. Outofofficepod at gmail.com and let us know.

54:46Kiernan:Do you watch any of these, Rai? I've seen clips of Conan. obviously i've seen all of anthony bourdain's but i just love anthony bourdain so much same so um but yeah i haven't watched a ton of them i'm interested in in the tucci one i i don't eugene levy one seems weird to me but you know hey he should come with a pod um you know i think i am working on that yeah i think if i were a streamer i'd be like hey who is some hip podcast host who could like bring their pod to our streamer and you know that's what i would be looking at yeah i mean there could be an out of office travel show easily an idea that i'm throwing out there i mean you want to dive deep into slovenian beekeeping with me that's easy that's easily a three-hour miniseries and we'll be back in uh two weeks uh until then i'm ryan davis and i that's if you if you can get off the couch right all that gin uh and i'm kiernan schmidt and this is out of office a travel podcast this seat taken you book your ticket to St.

55:49Louis yet?

55:50Kiernan:I had. Last chance. It had stopped following me right now. That's a deep cut.