Mark Your Calendar! Post, Parcels, and Paper

The Mendocino County Museum will open a new winter exhibit featuring unique vintage promotional calendars issued by small businesses throughout the county. This exhibition will include a beautiful collection of holiday stationery, family and community generated recipes, and mail order gifts from bygone years. Experience typewriters from yesteryear or pen a letter of your own at our writing station.

 

Museum Exhibit: Telling Our Story: Timber Industry in Early Mendocino County

Telling Our Story: The Timber Industry in Early Mendocino County explores the challenges inherent to the early timber industry and the innovations and advancements that supported its rapid growth.

The exhibit introduces the Frolic Shipwreck as a catalyst of the timber industry connecting aspirational lumberman with the untouched redwood forests. Introductory text for the exhibit authored by Archaeologist Dr. Thomas Layton, provides insight to the cultural interactions taking place during this time period.

Artifacts from the Museum’s collections of Mark Walker, Jim and Ruth McNamee, and Emery Escola, convey the array of timber products extracted and exported, and illustrate evolving techniques for falling, hauling, milling and transporting lumber from 1850 -1925. 

 

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Past Exhibits

Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific: From June 3rd-August 8th

Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific reveals the deep and historic connection between people of African descent and the Pacific Ocean.

Most accounts of the United States’ maritime enterprises are disproportionately populated by white seafarers. Yet, from the 16th to the 20th century, Black whalers, commercial mariners, fishers, explorers, soldiers, and sailors traveled along the Pacific Coast and traversed the high seas. The stories of these mariners, their impact in shaping the American Pacific, and their legacy in the context of development of society and identity, are all explored in Take Me to the Water: Histories of the Black Pacific.

  

Third Annual Printmaking Exhibit ImPRESSED: Turning the Page

 The third Annual ImPRESSED printmaking exhibit; Turning the Page, opens August 17 at the Mendocino County Museum.
This year the Museum will exhibit prints on loan from the San Francisco Center of the Book. These prints were created during the SFCB’s annual Roadworks Steamroller Printing Festival and were printed by the Roots of Motive Power using their 7-ton 1924 Buffalo Springfield steamroller. The SFCB hosted Roadworks for the final time after a vibrant twenty-year run in 2023.The exhibit will be a celebration of collaboration and creativity.
The Museum will also feature an incredible body of bright and bold new artwork from the progressive Art Explorers studio located in Fort Bragg. Art Explorers have contributed to this annual exhibit from its beginning. The artists generously share carved linoleum blocks to also display, which help convey the printing process and inspire visitors to try their own hand at printmaking.
This year’s exhibit, ImPRESSED: Turning the Page, is aptly named as the Museum and the Roots of Motive Power are fueling up to bring the same energy of the Roadworks Festival to the local annual ROMP Steam Festival. Which will be held on September 7 and 8 in Willits, CA.

In the Field: Exploring Botany in Mendocino County, January 17 - July 17, 2024