Museum of Jurassic Technology

Museum of Jurassic Technology
Museum of Jurassic Technology (photo credit: Jennifer Bastian) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Name	Museum of Jurassic Technology
Established	1988
Location	Los Angeles, California
Type	Private museum
Founder	David Hildebrand Wilson

Contents

Museum of Jurassic Technology The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a private institution in Los Angeles known for its eccentric displays and enigmatic narrative style, blending elements of wonder, historiography, and curated fiction. It occupies a niche alongside institutions such as Smithsonian Institution, Tate Modern, Getty Center, Museum of Modern Art, and Louvre in public imagination while evoking parallels with cabinets of curiosity like those associated with Hans Sloane, Ole Worm, Athanasius Kircher, John Tradescant, and Sir Hans Sloane. The museum was founded by figures linked to Southern California cultural scenes and has been discussed in contexts involving Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, and CalArts.

History

The museum opened in 1988 amid a Los Angeles arts ecosystem that included Watts Towers Arts Center, The Music Center (Los Angeles), Frank Gehry projects, Ed Ruscha, Mike Kelley, and the downtown revitalization that involved Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and Broad Museum initiatives. Its founders, including individuals connected to experimental exhibition practices and artists who referenced Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Surrealism, Dada, and Fluxus, positioned the institution as part of a lineage stretching to Cabinet of Curiosities traditions and the renaissance of micro-museums like Micromuseum projects. Over time the museum intersected with scholarship from ICOM, debates in Museum of Modern Art symposia, coverage in publications such as The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and commentary by critics associated with Jerry Saltz, Peter Schjeldahl, and John Russell.

The collection presents objects and narratives referencing historical figures and phenomena such as Mesozoic Era paleontology debates involving names like Barnum, Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, Mary Anning, and Othniel Charles Marsh, while simultaneously invoking folk traditions linked to Paul Bunyan, P.T. Barnum, Rip Van Winkle, Jorge Luis Borges, and Thomas Ligotti. Exhibits juxtapose scientific artifacts reminiscent of collections at Natural History Museum, London, American Museum of Natural History, Field Museum of Natural History, and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History with art objects in the manner of Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, John Cage, Yayoi Kusama, and Doris Salcedo. Display techniques call to mind curatorial interventions by Hans Haacke, Theaster Gates, Andrea Fraser, Nathalie Heinich, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, while media references include writings by Seymour Papert, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault. Thematic vignettes have referenced institutions such as Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Paley Center for Media, Cooper-Hewitt, and Royal Society in playful, provocative ways.

The museum occupies a storefront-style building in an urban block near Venice Boulevard, amidst architectural contexts including works by R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, and municipal planning led by City of Los Angeles. Interior design blends period-room sensibilities seen at Victoria and Albert Museum with laboratory aesthetics reminiscent of facilities at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and private study spaces invoked by Henry Wellcome collections. The facility has been the subject of preservation conversations alongside Los Angeles Conservancy initiatives and urban cultural policy discussions involving California Cultural and Historical Endowment and local arts organizations like MOCA, LA Biennial, and Otis College of Art and Design.

Curatorial practice at the museum intersects with theoretical frameworks associated with Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, George P. Landow, Nelson Goodman, and E. H. Gombrich, using narrative ambiguity, fabricated provenance, and mixed-authorship to probe claims of authority familiar from British Museum, Vatican Museums, Rijksmuseum, Hermitage Museum, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The approach provokes comparisons to pedagogical experiments at Museum of Jurassic Technology-adjacent discourses—evoking debates referenced in ICOM Code of Ethics, curatorial texts by Stephen Weil, exhibition theory from Nick Pearce, and museum studies scholarship at institutions like Smithsonian Institution Archives and Columbia University. Interpretive strategy deliberately engages with historiography exemplified by Edward Gibbon, Leopold von Ranke, E. P. Thompson, and writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, placing artifacts in contexts that question conventional lines drawn by museums such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Gallery.

Reception has ranged from praise in venues like The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Harper's Magazine, and The Atlantic to critical scrutiny in forums associated with American Alliance of Museums, reviews by commentators linked to The New York Times Book Review, and academic critique in journals such as Museum Anthropology Review and Curator: The Museum Journal. Critics have compared the museum’s epistemic playfulness to literary strategies by Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Umberto Eco while other commentators have raised ethical questions resonant with debates involving Museums and the Holocaust, repatriation cases like those involving Benin Bronzes, and provenance controversies seen at British Museum and Getty Museum. The institution remains a recurrent subject in cultural criticism, coursework at UCLA Department of Art History, curatorial workshops at Cooper Union, and symposiums hosted by New York University and University of Southern California.