Harriett Baskas

The Harbor History Museum is excited to welcome Harriet Baskas to our program series.  Harriet is the author of nine books, including 111 Places in Seattle That You Must Not Miss and Hidden Treasures: What Museums Can’t or Won’t Show You. She writes about airports, museums, travel, and a variety of other topics for outlets such as NBC News, ABC News, MSN, USA Today, CNBC, The Points Guy, and her own site, StuckatTheAirport.com. She produced a radio series on hidden museum artifacts that aired on National Public Radio. Baskas has a master’s in communications from the University of Washington.

Baskas will be giving a talk on hidden museum treasures and collections and how most museums display no more than 10 percent of their holdings, often citing “not enough space” as the reason. But there are also a wide range of cultural, philosophical, political, environmental, historic, and even superstitious reasons why museums keep some objects from public view. 

In this talk, explore a wide range of hidden objects found in the back rooms of museums in our state and around the country. Examples include a Spokane institution that holds Bing Crosby’s toupées and a museum in Lynden that’s home to a 150-year-old pickle.

We’ll have our own collection manager, Jean, on hand to unbox a few hidden treasures in our own Harbor History Museum collection and discuss what they are and where they came from. You don’t want to miss this talk!

This talk will be IN PERSON at the museum. To save your space, please RSVP to Robin Harrison, Operations and Marketing Manager at Harbor History Museum at operations@harborhistorymuseum.org .

Members: $5
Non-Members: $10