University adopts largest plastics museum in nation
The cream-colored body of the Maccaferri guitar acted as a weight, holding down the instrument’s rusting steel strings. The guitar is one of thousands of plastic artifacts preserved by the National Plastics Center & Museum, formerly of Leominster, Mass., recently obtained by Syracuse University.
The guitar lay on the desk of Sean Quimby, director of the Special Collections Research Center, where many of the artifacts will be stored and displayed.
‘There are a lot of steps to taking on this kind of collection,’ Quimby said. ‘There is a lot of information about the artifacts and we are trying to move that data from one place to another so it can easily be accessed.’
The collection contains plastic artifacts and 3,000 journals from inventors who used plastic, some of which date back to the 1700s. One of these books is by Union Products, the inventors of the pink lawn flamingo. The flamingo was a highlight of the museum, which was founded in 1982 and closed in 2008 after financial difficulties.
The plastics come from the museum, and also from SU alumnus Harry Greenwald, who made his career in the plastic industry. Greenwald became interested in donating his artifacts to SU 14 months ago. Talks of the museum acquisition began six months ago, Quimby said.
Quimby said he hopes the artifacts will be used in a variety of classroom contexts and has already received numerous requests for access to the collection.
‘My goal is to encourage the most creative use of the collection and in as wide a use as possible,’ he said, holding an emerald Bakelite that dates back to the 1930s.
Among those who expressed interest is professor Chris McCray – a self-titled ‘Mad Scientist’ and a founder of COLAB, a group of students and faculty focused on solving real-world problems. McCray said the goal of COLAB is to bring students from various disciplines together to form creative solutions, such as how to display the plastics in The Warehouse.
‘We had the idea that COLAB would bring in students from museum studies, industrial design and interior design to design the fixtures that display the plastics.’
McCray said he hopes that the fixtures themselves will be environmentally friendly, as well as innovatively designed.
‘They could also be transformed to be the crates that the plastics could travel in to other cities and museums,’ McCray said. ‘We are trying to get students to design the last piece in the exhibit. It may be that we can put the piece into production and it would be able to be sold as the exhibit travels around. I want everyone to come together on this exhibit and then be able to explain it and take it on the road.’
McCray hopes that the exhibit of plastics will be able to travel nationally so students at other universities can learn about the importance of plastics.
‘I think it’s important to look at where we have been to further develop where we are going,’ McCray said. ‘Countless classes are taught on history and this needs to be, yet again, another example of what we’ve done in terms of what works and what doesn’t work.’
Though he keeps the guitar displayed in his office, it is a small Bakelite clock that Quimby said is his favorite. ‘The guitar is pretty neat, but there is an Art Deco Bakelite clock radio that is in the collection and it is probably one of my favorite pieces.’
The clock, dated to the late 1930s, is made of Phenolic, one of the first synthetic man-made plastics, discovered in 1907. The plastic of the clock is dyed amber, and is an example of one of the first uses of color in plastics.
‘It’s not just us taking these iconic objects, like Tupperware, putting them on a pedestal,’ McCray said. ‘It’s being able to put it in context and be able to let students hear what actually went into the process of making these objects.’
‘Plastic is so ubiquitous – it’s in so much of our daily lives that it’s not something we even think about, like the telephone,’ Quimby said. ‘Is the plastic telephone an important plastic artifact? It takes a certain body of knowledge to know what phone is an artifact and which isn’t.’
