A strange and smoky setback for MJT

The Los Angeles Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) is in shock after a nighttime fire caused significant damage to the building earlier this month. The fire, which occurred late on July 8, destroyed the museum’s gift shop and caused widespread smoke damage to the rest of the museum. Smoke damage throughout the museum has caused extensive loss to several exhibits. The estimated loss in revenue during the closure of the museum is $75,000, with an expected reopening sometime next month.

Culturally, one of LA’s most unique sites, the MJT has for years held a small but dedicated spot in LA’s cultural and art scene. Founded in 1988 by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson, the museum has drawn visitors with its intentionally confusing and often dubious exhibits. Promoting itself as “dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic,” the museum has very little to do with that 18-million-year period in geologic time. It does, however, take inspiration from early “wunderkammers” or cabinets of curiosity from the Renaissance that helped serve as predecessors to the modern museum.

Despite its strange nomenclature and advertising, the MJT has a long history of layering storytelling in a way that separates it from other art or natural history museums. Some of its exhibits use actual historical artifacts, while others are written in such a way as to blur the line between reality and fiction for many visitors. One of the museum’s permanent exhibits pays homage to the work of Athanasius Kircher, a real-life 17th-century polymath and Jesuit priest known for his broad, encyclopedic interests. A second room focuses on the ultra-miniature sculptures of Hagop Sandaldjian, an Armenian artist whose works can be found inside the eye of a needle and are so small that they are sculpted from a single human hair.

Other exhibits go even further into the strange and unusual. One room is dedicated to decomposing dice that belonged to magician Ricky Jay. Another, “The Garden of Eden on Wheels,” is a visual examination of trailer parks in and around Los Angeles. Some of the more out-there exhibits include stereographic radiographs of flowers, microscopic mosaics made from butterfly wing scales, and a collection of letters written by amateur astronomers to the Mount Wilson Observatory from 1915 to 1935. In 2005, the museum even added a Russian tea room modeled after the study of Tsar Nicholas II in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Firefight and Aftermath

In a detailed article published this week by writer Lawrence Weschler, who also wrote the 1996 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, in which the provenance of several MJT pieces is explored, the fire was first seen by none other than David Wilson. Wilson, who is the founder of the museum, lives in a home directly behind the museum building. Upon seeing flames in the museum, Wilson went to the building armed with two fire extinguishers. “I saw a ferocious column of flame,” Wilson said in a later interview. In that same interview, he described the blaze as having “started on the ground, erupted into the air and was charging, roaring up the corner wall that faces the street.”

The two extinguishers that Wilson had with him were no match for the fire, however. Luckily, his daughter and son-in-law arrived moments later with a larger extinguisher and were able to douse the fire just moments before firefighters arrived on the scene. Firefighters later told Wilson that the whole building would have been lost if they had arrived just one minute later.

Though the gift shop and part of the exterior sustained most of the structural damage, smoke had seeped throughout the museum. Wilson described the damage as akin to “a thin creamy brown liquid, evenly poured over all the surfaces—the walls, the vitrines, the ceiling, the carpets, and eyepieces, everything.” Smoke damage like that described by Wilson poses a serious challenge for a museum that prides itself on presentation and accuracy. Museum staff and volunteers have since been working nonstop to clean and repair the damage, which has been slow and tedious.

In the interim, Weschler has also put out a call for donors to contribute to the museum’s general fund to help stave off financial loss and support the cleanup process. Weschler described the MJT as “one of the most truly sublime institutions in the country,” a museum unlike any other in the world that falls outside the traditional confines of science, art, history, and storytelling.

While an exact reopening date is unknown, there is optimism that the museum will return to its strange state of satire, scholarship, and surrealism.