We often travel to Arizona in the springtime to sell our mixed metal jewels at the Scottsdale Arts Festival and while we are down there in the usually wonderful warm weather we look for fun and interesting things to do after the art fair. At other California fairs in the summer and fall of 2012 we had several visitors to our booth tell us about a new museum in the Phoenix area called the Musical Instrument Museum that was started by a former CEO of Target stores and had opened in 2010. Everyone who mentioned it to us gave it a variety of rave revues so we decided to check it out on the Monday after the fair. We now have our own rave review to share with you and we recommend that if you are ever in the Phoenix area you take the time to visit it. It's in north Phoenix just off the Pima Freeway (Highway 101) and is easy to find and get to. The website for the museum is
http://mim.org/
The base guitar pictured at the left is the biggest I've ever seen and the player has to stand on a platform in order to play.
The wonderful building that houses the museum has a series of large rooms upstairs, each of which is devoted to a continent of the world and features instruments and exhibits for a multitude of areas and cultures of each continent and the peoples that inhabit it. Visitors wear headphones that sync with a video player that is located in each of the small exhibit sections showing the instruments being played and broadcasting the sound of them. Some of the actual instruments displayed are featured in the videos. There were some really interesting and creative use of recycled and found objects used in some of the instrument construction such as these guitars at the right.
One of the first rooms one walks into when first entering the museum has an entire wall of guitars some of which are amazingly fascinating. This double necked one was on the wall. I took a lot of guitar pictures to show my teenage grandson who is becoming a collector of them.
Here, to the right is a shot of the guitar wall from halfway up the stairs to the 2nd floor.
I took a great many pictures on my journey through the museum and have made a couple of collages. Drums are featured in this one. The rattlesnake rattles were really cool, I hadn't seen many of those rattles since my early days in Texas as a kid where there were many around. I still have a couple that different uncles gave to me when I visited their farms on summer vacations.
This is a collage to give you an idea of the variety of stringed instruments on display. I think I read that they have somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 instruments, some thousands of years old. There is also a room where you can play some instruments and that was fun to explore. There are also some gallery spaces that have ever changing displays.
And there is a restaurant where the food we had was really delicious.
Our visit was fun and inspirational although we are planning to go back on our next trip south because it got a little overwhelming after being there for 6 or 7 hours with so much input. Let us now if you get a chance to visit and what your favorite part was.
