Contemplation of the Commonplace Is Exhibit’s Point

You can stick pins in Dixie Browne’s collection all you want, but you can’t puncture its meaning.

That’s because the meaning resides not in the objects themselves--mere pincushions, after all--but in the people who used them regularly over the past 100 years.

Whatever value you might automatically ascribe to a collection of pincushions, you can’t argue with the fact that Browne’s has achieved the status of museum exhibit.

Of course, the museum in question is Culver City’s irony-willed Museum of Jurassic Technology, where nothing is what it seems, except when it is exactly what it seems.

Browne’s pincushions would seem to fall into the latter category. They’re part of an ongoing exhibit titled “Garden of Eden on Wheels: Selected Collections From Los Angeles Area Mobile Home and Trailer Parks,” which also includes subexhibits of linens, flatware, framed jewelry trees and odd little bottles, all gathered over the years by local mobile home dwellers.

Like the others, Dixie Browne’s pincushions are displayed under glass with reverent lighting and formal signage identifying “Salt Cellar Pincushion, flashed ruby glass, Prussian, ca. 1880”; and “Globe Pincushion, velvet globe on glass stand, American, ca. 1930”; and “Conical Folk Pincushion, beaded cotton, Czechoslovakia, ca. 1938,” to name a few.

Like much else at Jurassic, the exhibit has a dual impact. It satirizes a conventional museum’s devotion to rare and expensive things, while making the commonplace something worthy of contemplation.

“It’s not just the privileged who have the urge to collect and display,” says David Wilson, Jurassic’s enigmatic founder. “But you go to a typical museum, and the only collections on display are those of the privileged, which seemed inequitable to us.”

So, in search of collectors who don’t reside in Brentwood or Bel-Air, Jurassic sent fliers to trailer parks throughout the Los Angeles area. When Dixie Browne saw one posted in the community laundry room of Pacoima’s Glenoaks Mobile Manor, where she lives in a blue-and-white 1972 Champion single-wide, she stopped in her tracks.

“I thought, ‘That’s got my name on it.’ I mean, how many people live in trailer parks and are collectors?”

After contacting Jurassic, she was visited by Tina Marrin, who curated “Garden of Eden on Wheels,” and Marrin’s sister, Bridget, who was assistant curator. The women spent most of an afternoon evaluating Browne’s 45 pincushions and other sewing-related items.

“The Marrin sisters were just charming,” Browne says. “They just loved every pincushion. I mean, how many people are you going to meet who’ll come and look at your pincushions?”

Browne is a large-eyed, loquacious woman of self-described “baby boomer age” who has worked as a librarian and editor. She is a collector, too, of milk glass and things with bumblebee motifs.

“The bee is a symbol of industriousness and also a spiritual symbol,” she says, “although I’m not sure how.”

Like countless others, Browne doesn’t collect things because they might, in the manner of coins or stamps or baseball cards, accrue in monetary value. Her collecting is driven instead by a reverence for the past and those who populated it.

“This all started with my mother,” she says. “She saved everything. She saved her mother’s shoe buckle, which is from the 1920s. She loved her family and the things in her life. She was buried in her wedding dress. But she wasn’t sentimental or mawkish. She was just very aware, and liked to remember and reflect.”

Browne’s collection began with a pincushion that belonged to her grandmother. Once she started collecting, friends began contributing items.

All are meant for, and have seen, ordinary use, but reflect the irrepressible human urge to qualify, prettify, signify.

Browne is clued in to the nature of the Jurassic museum, which she visited for the first time when the trailer park exhibit opened.

“Is that the funniest museum?” she said. “You don’t know whether to take things seriously.”

But before anyone gets carried away with irony and hard-to-pin-down put-ons, Browne would remind others about the intimate importance that sewing has held in the lives of millions of women through the ages. About the incalculable moments when needle and thread induced meditation and musing in women whose lot otherwise was the ceaseless demands of housewifery.

“You have to remember that most women sewed, up to fairly recently, so these sewing accouterments were part of their lives,” she says.

Their integration into the daily existence of ordinary people imparts a curiously evocative power to such ordinary items when they’re set aside and spotlighted. They mark the existence of the unheralded--the us of yesteryear--far more clearly than do the wars, politics, economics and high art that are the usual preoccupations of formal history.

For Browne they also commemorate a kind of womanhood that is disappearing from American society, but to which just about everyone owes a profound debt.

“My generation, we weren’t raised to be homemakers like our mothers,” she says. “That wasn’t the role I was going to be assigned. I was going to be the romantic adventurer. But now sometimes I go to church sales just to see the sweet faces of the little old ladies who did live that life.”