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My Wife's Work [1]
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Date: 2023-09-25
We met 20 years ago. At a bar. On my birthday. Those were pretty dark times for both of us, each going through a divorce; mine involving children and hers with a big building she’d ended up owning.
She worked in the exhibits department at a major museum as a designer and chair of traveling exhibitions and I was a remodeling contractor, beholden to a single customer.
That building. She and her then-husband had bought it for a song in the early 90’s. It was an 1899 bank building, complete with a vault on the first floor and a dance hall on the top floor with 16’ ceilings. That was her apartment. Her mom lived on the second floor, her sister on the first. To say it was a fixer-upper...
On our second date, I offered to make pizza at her place. Not familiar with the janky oven, I managed to burn her eyebrows off. I told her I loved her. Red flags everywhere. We were off and running.
When she realized that I had OK hands and could fix things decently for cheap, I ended up working relentlessly on that building along with my electrician partner, who was equally gullible. Eventually she thought I could handle work at the museum, too. Thus began some great years installing exhibits at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Most were travelers, like “Horse”, from AMNH, and “Whales, Tohora”, from New Zealand— really big rented shows from other museums. There were countless other smaller exhibits, too.
My favorite, though, was “Stuffed Animals”, probably because my sweetheart designed it from the ground up. It was a taxidermy exhibit, and she pulled shit out of all the closets and storage spaces to do it. She’d built relationships with all the curators and collection managers and found the dioramas, and the ibexes, and the foxes and the doves and the rhinos and the most giant moose head to put it together, and it was magnificent, and I got to work on it.
Stuffed Animals! 2006 Carnegie Museum of Natural History
In the old days, museums generally plodded along with a well-established staff that turned over slowly. Today, especially as it remains a low paying-occupation, turnover is rapid, even at the top positions. So it was for my honey, who saw directors come and go. She survived many such changes until one new director came along who decided that her museum no longer needed an exhibits department. Imagine that. Suddenly out of a job, her mom ailing, she sold the damned building and bought a cabin, and went back to school to get a science degree while looking for work. A position opened at a small natural history museum in Utah, and that began the next chapter.
The Utah years had a bleak quality to them for just one reason: the museum director. He was genuinely bad news. He prompted official complaints. That’s all I’ll say. But, if you like the outdoors, if you like dinosaurs, if you like fresh air and living at 5,000 feet and among a population of about 8,000 people, if you like skiing and hiking, Carbon County Utah is totally your jam. Just take some lotion, because, man, it is dry.
My love was there for 3 ½ years while I was back east. She made some important friends. First, she met Rob Gaston, who is a remarkable artist and collector who will feature shortly in this diary. He is out of Fruita, CO, with his partner Allysia, and they produce amazing casts of dinosaurs and shows. Secondly, she designed and produced a show for a local man, Charlie Johnston, as her final exhibit there. You wouldn’t know Charlie; he’d lost his voice by the time I met him in his 80’s, but he’d been a trail guide throughout the north on horseback, and he had a fine hand with pencil and brush, and a good sense with small sculpture, too. Her show for Charlie was just about the most touching and loving thing I’ve ever seen. He LOVED it, of course! Still tears when I remember it.
With Charlie and Eileen in 2020
So, after 18 years together, we get married at 9,000’ with a small group of Canyoneers friends in Utah, in a county not properly recorded on the marriage certificate, pack up the U-haul and drive back through the infected country so sweetheart can start her new museum job as assistant director and curator at what will become the Latin American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As it happens, she is recruited to this position by the years-ago director of the Carnegie MNH under whom she worked. Yes, she is that good, that memorable.
This week will feature the media day for the new show at the Cultural Center: “Masks of Mexico”. Previously the director hasn’t allowed me to work at the center due to a perceived conflict, but Ms.doll insisted this time and I’ve been on this show since driving down to pick up the lion’s share of the masks in Knoxville a month ago.
Most of the masks come from Rob Gaston’s personal collection. Highly intelligent, quirky, thorny, I’ve encountered Rob before, at his studio and in a museum setting. But at the curb outside his mom’s house in Knoxville, as I’m loading all these bins with his masks in them in the truck, he’s saying, “ I saw a show here in town as a kid, and I knew that it was important for people to see these things that they might not get to see otherwise”. That little story started his own career.
And here’s the point: this show has been in the works for over a year. Ms.doll has been designing and coordinating it all this time. I’ve been helping to install it the last month. In all the years that she’s been doing this work, this is another important show. It’s a genuine cultural exhibition the likes of which Pittsburgh hasn’t seen before. It’s important. A handful of people understand this now. I hope more will come to see the significance while the show is up, because it’s a wonderful showcase of Mexico’s creepy and wonderful masks. And that’s what my wife does, for you.
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