The Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition at Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture has shut down after 14 years.
The popular exhibition, which opened in what was then called the Experience Music Project in April 2011, spanned the years from 1988 to 1994, and featured items such as Kurt Cobain's guitars, Krist Novoselic's basses, Dave Grohl's drum kit, Nirvana setlists, clothing, photographs, and a heart-warming hand-written letter from Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne to a young Krist Novoselic, telling him that his friend Kurt "might have some kind of future in music".
The exhibition also featured items from Mudhoney, Melvins, Screaming Trees, Tad and more, telling the story of the Pacific NorthWest music community.
"It wasn’t really one thing, it was a number of things," curator Jacob McMurray, who created the Nirvana exhibit, told Rolling Stone when asked why the popular attraction was closing up. "An exhibition is a living, evolving creature. I wanted it to be very community-oriented. I wanted the primary sources to be telling the tale and kind of providing those objects. So there’s 20 different lenders to that show who provided different objects. We also have objects in our permanent collection that are in that exhibition as well. So there’s a bit of that, where lenders want their stuff back because they miss it, or because they want to sell stuff at auction or they have other ideas for other projects."
On the afternoon of 19 July 19, 2013 former Nirvana drummer turned Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl took his young daughters to the exhibition, as he told this writer a few weeks after the fact, during an interview for Rolling Stone Australia.
‘I hadn’t seen it, so I took the kids in thinking they’d be so proud,’ he said with a laugh. ‘And they were just like, 'Daddy, can we go?' They could give a fuck, they didn’t care at all.
"But it’s funny,’ Grohl said, "as I was walking through the exhibit, I saw people slowly making their way through the hall, reading every card and looking at every piece: people were genuinely interested in, like, an old T-shirt of mine, or my dusty old drum set. There was so much interest in Nirvana and I couldn’t believe it.
"I was so blown away," he admitted, "like, Wow! I was looking at everyone really take this stuff in, like they were in the middle of our world, and it was the first time I ever thought of our – quote unquote – 'legacy'. I don’t have the same perspective, because I was there, and it was me, and it’s a real memory."
Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic turned up as a surprise guest at the exhibit's closing ceremony.
“I started to get involved with, it was EMP, Experience Music Project, then MoPop, and it was just a great place to keep my stuff,” Novoselic joked to those in attendance, Rolling Stone reports. “Like, ‘Why is this guitar under my bed? Or, ‘why am I playing this guitar at a gig when I’m going to lose it and it’s gonna get ripped off. These are basses I played with Nirvana.’ So I donated to the museum. ‘Here you go.’ And people enjoyed them.”
Those who never got a chance to visit the exhibition can take comfort in the fact that you can still purchase Jacob McMurray's brilliant book on its artefacts.
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