ONE BEACH PLASTIC MUSEUM is now an affiliate charter of the Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities, a world-wide network of little beach museums. Think small and you can start a museum too.
Scroll HERE to see our listing.
Judith writes:
As a child, I aspired to be a paleontologist. Every day after school with friends I would mine the white limestone cliffs in the woods near our house. We always hoped to find a dinosaur and spent untold hours excavating a mound where we were certain we would discover a skeleton. We were convinced that the bowl-shaped recess in a boulder was an impression left by a dinosaur egg. Yes, we had our grand imaginings but we did in fact unearth many small fragments of crustacean and clam shells.
The Natural History Museum of Dallas has an excellent display of fossils and ammonites from the surrounding area. So, I would go to look and identify what we were digging up. I would longingly gaze into the specimen vitrines and wish upon wish that someday one of my fossils would be on display with a label attribution that had details about the rarity of the find; the latitude and longitude of the site, notes about the Era, Period, Epoch and yes, across the vast expanse of geological time would be MY name as the collector.
Fast forward some 65 years, I now find myself to be an artist/archeologist mining the beach in search for remnants of plastic, future fossils from the Plasticene.
And now with the prospect of establishing our own Little Beach Museum, my dream will come true.
I am reminded of the common expression: “If you don’t like what’s on the TV, change the channel.” Or as Don Draper from Mad Men says, “If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation."
Richard and I are thrilled, thrilled to establish the first West Coast Little Beach Museum satellite as a place devoted to changing the conversation about art and about plastic. And speaking of little, we do believe in parameters. With all of the daunting facts about plastic pollution, we focus on just 1000 meters of one beach to create a graspable metric relative to the scope of the global problem. So we say, “two people, one beach, just one thousand meters of one beach.”
