Going into a museum to take pictures of yourself? People do that? Yes, it’s part of a new trend: the selfie museum. Where you come in, sit down, surround yourself with a backdrop, click away, and then post the pictures on social media.
This weekend, the Museum for Black Girls – a hybrid of a traditional museum and a selfie museum – celebrates its fifth anniversary as part of a trend that’s less than a decade old.
“The Museum for Black Girls is a combination of what we know as a traditional museum and selfie museum, kind of married together,” said Von Ross, co-owner and founder of the museum, which spent short stints in Washington, D.C. and Houston, with Ross and her co-owner/niece traveling back and forth.
In the past few years, they’ve called a 7,000-square-foot second-story space on Denver’s 16th Street Mall home after starting out in a more modest 1,200-square-foot boutique five years ago.
Besides seeing exhibit images of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Michelle Obama and others, guests can show up at the museum and find vignettes to pose in. “We’ve taken little props and placed them in the museum where you can sit and take a photo, maybe with a neon sign that says, ‘Hello, Gorgeous,’” said Ross, an educator and artist who works in oils and pen and ink, during a recent visit to the museum.
“Or we have an exhibit in the museum that celebrates Blue Magic, which is a hairdressing cream that many black women use on their hair. There’s actually a hair dryer that you can sit in … put [on] the hair dryer – it’s a hooded dryer – so you can put it over your head and there’s a neon sign and it says, ‘This is where the magic happens.’ And we know that that hairdressing oil would do magic in your hair.”
Selfie museums began cropping up in Europe around 2017, and then leaped across the ocean to the U.S. a few years later, according to Garrett Dosher, general manager of the Denver Selfie Museum. His family purchased the location, also on the 16th Street Mall, from an owner who had opened similar selfie museums in large U.S. cities.
“‘The Original Selfie Museum,’ which is what we used to be a branch under, started museums in Texas and Atlanta, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Miami, but they branched out and they had a whole selfie network,” Dosher said. “And then that kind of started this trend of selfie museums,” he said.
Working for the past few years at the museum, he’s noticed people at first being surprised by the concept, then warming up to it.
“It may take people a couple minutes to get used to the idea of like ‘Oh, what is this selfie museum? I’m taking pictures of myself?’ It’s a new concept for a lot of people, but they have a lot of fun and a lot of laughing goes on,” Dosher said. He added that a few dozen people come in every day, many of them between 15 and 30 years old.
Inside, they will find two dozen different backdrops, including a wall of donuts, a western scene, and ones people can physically interact with. “We have a bathtub exhibit, we have a laundry machine with a laundry sign,” he said. “We have a flower background as well, like a room with blue flowers in it. It’s abstract art, but it’s meant to make you look really great in your photos.”
He said guests sometimes ask him to take pictures while they pose; other guests will use the ring light set up and do it themselves. One of his future goals is to create a new backdrop that would have an optical illusion for a background, a feature common in selfie museums.
Ross, not far away at the Museum for Black Girls, said people are recognizing what the museum has to offer.
“We’ve been invited all over the country to do installations where we take small bits and pieces of the museum and we put them at conferences and things like that,” she said. “We have had offers to come to Africa, to Europe.” One of her longer-term goals: ‘We’d love to travel with the museum and be able to do small pop-ups all over the United States.”
On Saturday, she and her co-founder, who is also her niece, will celebrate five years with a gala at The Broadway venue in Denver so people can recognize what they’ve been doing, “just sharing some of the wonderful contributions,” she said, “that Black women have made over the years.”
