Historic oddities survive fire at the MJT—just barely

If there’s one thing to know about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, it’s that it’s difficult to know just what the Museum of Jurassic Technology is. The downtown Culver City museum has a history of earning a place in LA’s cultural scene that’s as singular and odd as its approach to curatorial narratives and displays. Last week, the MJT suffered a significant fire that resulted in extensive smoke damage to much of the museum’s collection. The fire was first reported on July 8 and caused significant damage to the museum’s gift shop. Smoke also permeated most of the exhibits. The museum has yet to provide an official update or reopening date, though it is hoping to reopen in late August or early September.

MJT is filled with museums within museums

MJT was founded in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson. The museum has always aspired to cultivate a sense of genuine confusion among visitors to its galleries and exhibits. Its website names its areas of study to be “the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” Don’t let the name fool you, though; MJT does not house the bones of pterodactyls or saber-toothed tigers from the Jurassic period. Instead, MJT takes its main inspiration from the wunderkammer (German for “chamber of wonders”), Renaissance-era collections of bizarre and unusual items and oddities. These were some of the world’s earliest museums and were used to provoke awe and wonder in visitors.

MJT has two floors full of these collections, some more genuine than others. Authentic objects can be found at the museum, but much of what visitors see has confounded and enthralled in equal measure. To wit: one exhibit is a museum-within-a-museum to the works of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century philosopher, astronomer, and Jesuit priest. Visitors to MJT can see an exhaustive display of Kircher’s original instruments and artifacts, all collected in a way that’s almost certainly how he had them. On display in the same gallery is a collection of the work of Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian-American artist and sculptor. Sandaldjian’s art comprises sculpted faces and animals, each made of a single human hair and small enough to be placed inside the eye of a sewing needle. Authenticity and fiction are held together in a haze of wonder at MJT.

To those accustomed to the current state of museum displays and exhibitions, the museum’s showcases may be familiar. Cabinets of curiosities display traditional items from the history of science and culture in collections separated by discipline. MJT has many similar displays but sometimes pushes much further, past satire and into social commentary. One gallery is dedicated to decomposing dice from famed magician Ricky Jay’s collection, while another is a visual guide to Los Angeles-area trailer parks named “The Garden of Eden on Wheels.” There are radiographic flower images, kaleidoscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and mysterious letters sent from amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935. The museum has also included a Russian tea room, designed to mimic the study of Russian Czar Nicholas II in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, since 2005.

Firefighters tackle the blaze.

In the fire that began on July 8, the gift shop was destroyed, and smoke has marred much of the rest of the museum’s display cases and walls. Writer Lawrence Weschler, who published a 1996 investigative account of many of MJT’s collections, first in New Yorker and then as the book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, detailed the fire on Facebook. David Wilson, one of MJT’s founders and co-directors, lives in a house behind the museum. The first to notice the fire, he watched it from his house before quickly grabbing two fire extinguishers and dashing to the building. It was only after he arrived that he and others understood the extent of the fire; as Wilson put it, “when I arrived, there was a ferocious column of flame which had jumped the corner wall which faces the street.”

Weschler notes that the two extinguishers Wilson had were a start, but not nearly sufficient. Thankfully, his daughter and son-in-law had come to the house at the time and had a larger extinguisher that they brought to help douse the fire, arriving just in time before the Culver City Fire Department. As Weschler reports, they had told Wilson that had they arrived just a minute later, the entire building would have gone up. The MJT has provided no update on damages yet, but the bulk of it was in the gift shop. Smoke had permeated most of the museum, though, and was nearly ubiquitous in the museum’s galleries. Wilson’s account details the smoke damage as “a thin creamy brown liquid… evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke seepage is an insidious and stubborn form of damage that poses unique problems in restoration and remediation. The team has been scrubbing down and sanitizing the entire museum by hand, which is slow and hard work.

MJT volunteers scrub down and sanitize the museum by hand

Until the museum can reopen, Weschler has been making calls for donations to MJT’s general fund to help ameliorate some of its losses. “One of the most truly sublime institutions in the country,” Weschler wrote. MJT is a different kind of museum, operating well outside of what would be accepted as either science or art, and many of its collections are neither. MJT is something in between, something unique, and important to LA’s cultural community.

MJT is working to reopen as quickly as possible. Weschler hopes that as soon as the smoke damage has been dealt with, the museum will be open. For a place that so successfully seems to defy categorization, it’s no surprise to think that it will return, disheveled but no less absurd or intellectually challenging than ever.