living museum

Elsewhere’s living museum reimagines a former thrift store as a site for ongoing collaborative productions and creative explorations. Visitors encounter a 58-year collection of thrift and surplus amassed largely by one woman, Sylvia Gray, during her tenure of a series of businesses at the location from 1939-1997. That collection has been transformed by hundreds of creators. Now, the living museum presents a moment in the process of activating a circulating and transforming the collection through interactive artworks, object arrangements, process displays, and project presentations. Visitors participate in creative investigations combining historical, artistic, anthropological, archaeological, literary, philosophical, and community-based ideas through a variety museum programs, activities, and events.

blueprint

the collection

When the store reopened as a museum in 2003, Elsewhere began rearranging things. Meanwhile, Elsewhere has been evaluating the balance between preservation and transformation in acknowledging Sylvia’s ordering system. The collection is remarkably specific and simultaneously general—telling stories of multiples, capitalism, and offering a way to consider objects outside a system of value outside of monetary att. We are constantly discovering our inventory and its endless permeations.

museum as medium

Our living museum is solution-oriented. All around you you will see models for creative living and collaborative working. Elsewhere actively builds alternative museologies through an unfolding story about the process of excavation, territories, preservation and deterioration and transformation. Working and living in the museum becomes an ongoing aesthetic, ethical, and creative practice that proposes curation as a style of. Our layered contributions allow the museum to become an expression of collaborative imagining and expressions of purpose through environments. Our storefront provides the perfect venue for presenting projects and performances to transient audiences. We are excited to find one another by forming progressive, imaginative, inventive relationships with objects. Our museum is haunted. We present an encyclopedia of imagination driven by potential, but also the surplus of the past becoming realized for collaborative means.

access points

Our museum is an experience, event, playground, and library. Visitors tour our two storefronts and integrated installations. We request a $1 contribution to help keep our lights on. Events happen every Friday night at 8pm. There are participation opportunities such as book clubs, sewing circles, cooking events, and garden skill shares during daytimes throughout the week. We welcome kids of all ages, but Saturdays from 1-4pm are an especially good time to bring children in groups. We insist that you stay close to your children. Our museum is also an exploratory environment for group investigations, collaborative seminars and projects, and teaching experiences.

If you particularly like Elsewhere, there are lots of ways to get involved, including becoming a docent, volunteering, and interning. We always need more help.