MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos meaning home and algos meaning pain, has come to be understood as not simply homesickness, but as a longing for an imagined past in the face of contemporary pressures. Nestled on the city’s post-industrial harbor front in a rehabilitated canning factory, the Baltimore Museum of Industry is an ode to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when skilled and unskilled laborers interacted with the earliest machines. It captures the fleeting moment before machines automated most of the work, digitization and robotics made many of those machines obsolete, and globalization moved the few remaining manual jobs abroad. Adjacent to Camden Yards stadium, itself a nostalgic reconstruction, Geppi’s Entertainment Museum is less a museum than a modern-day cabinet of curiosities. Loosely arranged into rooms by 20th century decade, this popular culture collection builds minimal labeling text and interpretation into its floor-to-ceiling displays. Instead, it presents us with a haphazardly juxtaposed assortment of toys, comics, movie posters, and knickknacks, the accumulation of which offers a nostalgic vision of several generations of childhoods. In these two small museums, questions of material culture, nostalgia, and taste intersect. Both of these institutions offer a seductively visual and sensually tactile world of material culture, the luscious appeal of which differs from an art museum, whose objects weren’t necessarily created for the primary purpose of touch. They both elicit a feeling of nostalgia for the eras of their respective collections, as well as for a time in Baltimore’s history when local industry competed with local sports as a site of civic pride. And their potent combinations of nostalgia and material culture, ostensibly less elitist than a fine art museum in their presentations of working class life and everyday popular culture respectively, are nevertheless exhibited in ways that appeal to that audience.