After twenty years of making immaterial things with my mind — ideas sculpted of words, questions woven of sentences, translucent vessels for thought and feeling in the shape of poems — I found myself overcome by the urge to make things with my hands out of matter: clay, thread, stone, resin, wood, lichen.
They now live in the Museum of Delight.
Housed in a decommissioned airstream from the 1950s that took a year to transform, the Museum of Delight is a collaboration with my friend and neighbor Ryan Vahey — a multidisciplinary artist who lost his entire life’s work and all of his equipment as he watched his studio burn to the ground in the ferocious fire that lit up our neighborhood with the glaring reminder that anything can change for any one of us at any given moment.
Like a museum, the Museum of Delight constellates objects into an experience; unlike a museum, and more like an art gallery, you can have what is in it; unlike a gallery, you can’t buy anything, but you can have some things if chance smiles upon you: Each time the Museum of Delight is open, eleven objects in it will be given away in a pay-what-you-wish raffle. You can enter it in person or remotely by making a donation in any amount commensurate with your ability and level of delight, so long as it ends with the decimal .11. (The loveliness of a lottery is the antipode to the rich-getting-richer ugliness of art world auctions: Whether you enter with $1.11 or $10,000.11, your odds are the same — the only difference is by how much you support this labor of love, all the thousands of hours and thousands of dollars poured into making these constellations of matter, into turning waste to wonder.)
Proceeds from the raffle will also help Ryan rebuild his life: delight as the counterforce to destruction.
The Museum of Delight, which opens its space-age door at the twentieth anniversary celebration of The Marginalian tomorrow, will be touring New York City and Upstate New York in the coming months, making its next stop at Woodstock’s beloved Japanese restaurant Medo on Sunday, October 25, 1PM-4PM. More stops will be announced on this page. (If you have a dining establishment in New York City, which apparently is the only place this felictious colossus can be parked without a special permit, and you would like to host the Museum of Delight for an afternoon or evening, please contact Ryan.) Meanwhile, here is a taste of some of the objects in it.
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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