JE owns a vintage Vaughn Claw hammer, a “California Framer,” circa 1940. She used it this January for a very specific reason. This Christmas she received a handmade wooden birdhouse from her husband, who began the New Year with another woman. The hammer knocked down the birdhouse, no birds harmed! JE feels better. JE wants to donate the hammer to a museum now that it “did its work.”
Likely the strangest request I’ve received
However, JE, I found a museum that will gladly accept the twenty inch hammer: The Museum of Broken Relationships. With both a physical place, and a touring exhibition, the museum curates objects that spurred personal narratives of break-ups, losses, divorce, and heartbreak. Although its permanent home is in Zagreb Croatia, JE may offer the hammer to this museum as it regularly tours the large cities of the world: Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, London, and Shanghai. In Berlin heartbroken people donated many items as the show opened. In total the museum contains 3,500 items donated by individuals from around the world. These objects must include a memento or a story to receive acceptance into the collection.
The museum’s brilliant premise came out of a broken relationship: two Croatian lovers, Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic. The two artists fell in love over twenty years ago and broke up in 2003. She gave away all the trinkets he’d given her to friends. When Drazen suggested they form a museum of their gifts to each other, all friends sent back the objects. Thinking it a fun lark, the two friends, no longer lovers, toured the collection through the coffeehouses of Zagreb. Surprisingly, other brokenhearted people offered to donate objects and stories to the tour. Friends lobbied the cultural council for a permanents museum space, but councilmembers laughed them off. So the non-couple bought a space for a private museum of their own in Zagreb in 2010. The museum opened a second permanent location in Chiang Mai Thailand in 2024.
Museum Gains Great Success
Now JE may donate the Vaughn hammer with her story. The museum offers two ways to donate. One is to actually send the item, called a “donation of material remains,” and this method must come with locations, details, and stories. The other way to donate and immortalize one’s pain is to upload images and documents, including pieces of the personal collection around the object.
The mission of the Museum is to document the fragility of human relationships, to think about it, our relationships carry political, cultural, and social mores and customs; our stories and woes tell of our identities and our catharsis.
Details of the hammer?
JE wants to know if she’s giving away a valuable piece of Americana. The hammer is worth $50. Made by Vaughn Bushnell Manufacturing Co., founded in 1869. Bushnell prides itself on using only American labor. The logo on the hammer doesn’t tell us its age because the company used the same one for years.
If The Museum of Broken Relationships doesn’t accept the hammer or it’s too far to send it to Zagreb, JE might consider donating to a museum closer to home—in Culver City. I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology years ago with my mother, a very logical mathematician/musician. She didn’t understand why a museum showed unreal displays like Pronged Ants, or photos of horned humans, and a culinary display of Mice On Toast. In fact, mom thought museums should represent facts not fiction.
The museum, run by David Wilson, is a work of genius for the very reason Mom felt insulted. The place makes you question the role of museums, and indeed the role of TRUTH, and how TRUTH is presented. Before you visit read Lawrence Weschler’s Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder\ (1995) riffing on the foundation of our modern museum as a cabinet of curiosities, a rich man’s passion born in the 15th century. I love this material: it makes me question illusion, bias, the reason for collecting, and the desire to display.
JE will let me know which museum she chooses for her hammer, a great memento.