Charlotte County Florida Weekly

The Dime Museum exhibit is as entertaining as it is unusual




Steven Hutchins. BOB MASSEY / FLORIDA WEEKLY

Steven Hutchins. BOB MASSEY / FLORIDA WEEKLY

“I hope you are amazed, puzzled and amused by what you are about to see,” opens the brochure available to visitors of the Dime Museum exhibit, currently housed in the halls of Florida Gulf Coast University’s Renaissance Academy in Punta Gorda. “The world was examined from pole to pole, and expense was not considered when we prepared these exhibits for your infotainment.”

The official name of the exhibit — Aristotle Zenobia Sunshine’s Museum of Natural, Technological and Sociological Wonders — might give you an inkling as what you might be heading into. This eclectic offering of the curious, the comical and the bizarre is the brainchild of local artist Steven Hutchins, who has devoted many years and much effort to its collection.

“My museum is a concept I’m dealing with,” he said. “I am an artist. There are historical, sociological and anthropological aspects to the artwork that I’m doing. Basically, this is an art project.”

A good deal of the individual elements of the exhibit are historical, and many are presented in three-dimensional shadowboxes. You’ll find such curiosities as a pineapple preserved by the volcanic ashes of Pompeii, the evolution of golf balls through the years, a novelty musical instrument called the rolmonica, a historical display of clothespins, macabrely distorted dolls that may or may not have been sabotaged in their creation by disgruntled workers at the doll factory, post card collections (which is noted to be, after stamps and coins, the third-most popular hobby on the planet) and much more.

A display of various types of hammers. STEVEN HUTCHINS / COURTESY PHOTO

A display of various types of hammers. STEVEN HUTCHINS / COURTESY PHOTO

One of the benefits of displaying these pieces as part of a museum, is that it allows Mr. Hutchins to present items that don’t necessarily fit into the shadowbox format, such as copies of old magazines, or an exceptional intriguing map-based display of the world’s shortest-lived country, Rondel, which lasted a scant four days in 1949.

“The underlying theme is infotainment,” Mr. Hutchins said. “We’re presenting information in an entertaining way. We’re also dealing in this borderline area between truth and facts. The way I explain that to most people is that if you presented a group of facts to a Democrat, a Republican and a Tea Party member, they would interpret and give you a (different) truth coming from that same set of facts. So often when you hear people say, ‘That’s the truth,’ they’re assuming that ‘true’ and ‘truth’ are synonymous with one another, and they are not — certainly not in our political system of the United States today.

Left: Chopstick collection. STEVEN HUTCHINS / COURTESY PHOTOS

Left: Chopstick collection. STEVEN HUTCHINS / COURTESY PHOTOS

“What do you want to know — the truth or the facts? I have a couple of explanations out there that specifically say the ‘truth’ and the ‘facts.’ And I get to play with that.”

Even as a child growing up in Southern California, Mr. Hutchins admitted he has always taken a shine to objects, museums and collections.

“I’ve always been a collector, not a hoarder,” he explained. “A collector learns something about what he hoards. A hoarder just hoards.”

Below left: Post card collecting is the thirdmost popular hobby on the planet.

Below left: Post card collecting is the third-most popular hobby on the planet.

Although the idea for his Dime Museum didn’t start to foment in his mind until about 2010, he had always been fascinated with picking up unique items from flea markets and antique shops. He will often excavate information about the curiosities he finds and turn it into booklets.

“One of my publications is called ‘A Future in Frogs,’ about a guy, around 1936, who was the world’s largest purchaser of frogs and frog legs in New Orleans. This guy even looks like a frog — it’s really wild. He had, I believe, 16 volumes of saddle-stitched pamphlets with pictures of processing plants and ‘How to get started in frogs — the ideal home income; but make sure to read volume 4 before you dig your pond.’ I picked it up for a buck. It costs two bucks for coffee.”

Mr. Hutchins spent most of his career in construction. A meditative, thoughtful soul, he also spent a “significant period” of his life as a hermit in the woods of West Virginia, not seeing another human being for months at a time.

Below: Part of a harmonica display.

Below: Part of a harmonica display.

“I don’t think that’s something everyone wants to do,” he conceded, “but if I were the emperor, everyone would be forced to do it because you think about things if you’ve been by yourself for two weeks without television or electronic communications. There’s a different place that you go to, but you can’t get there without simply getting away. There are things I’ve seen that I don’t tell people about because they wouldn’t believe some of the things that are out there.”

But Mr. Hutchins’ education (he has an undergraduate degree in art history, and a graduate degree in planning with a specialization in historic preservation) must certainly have come in handy when cobbling together his dime museum, the concept of which is not original but has its roots grounded in history — further back, in fact, than most people might realize.

 

 

A brief history of dime

According to Mr. Hutchins, the dime museum can trace its lineage back to 300 B.C. with the first museum we have knowledge about. It was a collection of things, usually religious in nature. The curator was a woman, and the display included objects her father had found while he was king, that he obtained from previous civilizations. These items were displayed in a building, and visitors came from long distances to examine them. There were tags on the wall in three different languages explaining what the items were.

In the United States, the first dime museum appeared around the 1790s. Charles Wilson Peale was an artist who painted a group of Revolutionary War figures. He had a gallery in Philadelphia, and people paid a good amount of money to go see pictures of George Washington and Lafayette and other famous Americans. Mr. Peale quickly realized he needed something with more drawing power, so he began adding natural history and ethnographics so that, if someone was coming from the west, they would bring Native American artifacts, clothing, etc. to add to the display.

“You’re living in Philadelphia in the 1790s and you’ve never seen a wolf,” Mr. Hutchins explained. “Well, he had a stuffed wolf. The natural history part started getting bigger and bigger. Mr. Peale was a friend of Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the Adams’. They came. Jefferson actually brought artifacts from Virginia to Mr. Peale. Mr. Peale actually financed the first excavation of a wooly mammoth in the United States. There’s a famous painting he did of this excavation. It was in a swamp, so they de-watered the swamp, got the bones up and this particular painting has about 300 people in front. Then he took the bones, brought them to Philadelphia, and you could pay your money to go into the museum to see the mammoth.”

Before the inimitable P.T. Barnum became associated with the circus that bears his name, he had a museum in New York City that was enormous, Mr. Hutchins said. Barnum had live animals and an aquarium. He also used the building to house some of his “acts,” such as the original Siamese twins, Eng and Cheng, and Tom Thumb. There was also a 3,000-seat auditorium.

Surprisingly, Mr. Barnum was a teetotaler and was also vehemently opposed to smoking. He would host presentations warning about the evils of alcohol and tobacco. He also introduced the concept of the matinee, so children could be educated by his displays but not at night when they should be in bed.

Mr. Hutchins has mined his wealth of information into not only his dime museum but also for a Renaissance Academy class where he acts as both curator and docent.

The unfound profound

The two-hour class includes about 15 minutes of interactive discussion. And the exhibit is almost guaranteed to raise questions.

It’s interesting to note that, as much material as is on display in this incarnation of the dime museum, it is only about half of Mr. Hutchins’ current collection.

“I have the ladder Jackson Pollock used for his action paintings,” he said. “Some of the three-dimensional freestanding objects I have I obviously can’t put into here. Not even all of it is here in Punta Gorda. I own a home in West Virginia.”

His hope is that, he said, “People can re-find some of their childlike joy and find things that are enjoyable or humorous. Not necessarily anything here is profound. I would rather have a good time and laugh than be bombarded with profound stuff. There is a place for profound information and situations. I think so often we’re bombarded with things that we don’t focus on the good stuff.”

Barnum — whom, Mr. Hutchins insists, did not really see people as “suckers born every minute” — called it “bunkum,” a term Mr. Hutchins defines as information that is based in fact, but the truth of it is twisted so that it’s different than what you would believe.

“Barnum believed that people wanted to have fantasy in their lives,” Mr. Hutchins said, “that they wanted to have something bigger than themselves — and I believe that’s true now.”

And that can certainly be found at Aristotle Zenobia Sunshine’s Museum of Natural, Technological and Sociological Wonders. ¦

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