For those with a taste for the peculiar, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is an imaginary museum that explores the strange place between art and curiosities.
The museum celebrates the odd, the creative, the spooky and the eccentric. It values the special magic that draws people toward weird and wonderful things, and believe it can be used to foster more creativity, compassion and curiosity in the world.
The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things started out in 2011 as the personal blog of Chelsea Nichols. After a period of outrageous neglect and decay, it was relaunched in 2019 as an umbrella site for a series of digital, curatorial and writing projects dedicated to making the world a weirder and more interesting place. These days, she posts most often on Instagram @ridiculously_interesting.
In 2020, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things also entered the real-world for the first time, in the form of an acclaimed pop-up exhibition called ‘Lost Heads & Hobgoblins‘ at The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.
The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is written by curator and art historian, Dr Chelsea Nichols. She is a curator whose expertise is in the strange and dark corners of art history, where monstrous things lurk.
Chelsea has a DPhil from the University of Oxford (2014), where her doctoral thesis examined so-called human curiosities in contemporary art. She is currently the Senior Curator at The Dowse Art Museum (2020-present), where her bonkers exhibition history have included Candy Coated, The Truth Is Out There, and Steamed Hams.
She is also one half of the duo Curator of Screams, a collaboration with curator Aaron Lister exploring the relationship between contemporary art and horror movies. Their exhibition projects have included artist-as-vampire Josh Azzarella: Triple Feature, an exploration of the witch archetype in Sisterly, and an ode to folk horror with Eerie Pagentry.
Previously she was the Curator of Modern Art at Te Papa in Wellington, New Zealand from 2013-2019, where some of her favorite projects included Tony Fomison: Lost In The Dark, an interactive art exhibition called Curious Creatures and Marvellous Monsters and gallery tours with a paranormal investigator.
Her mission in life is to get more people into art, through a very weird-shaped door probably hidden somewhere in a haunted house.
You can read guest posts by some of our honorary curators here.
The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things 