The Curation For The Common Collection – An archive of Art, Music and items of high interest in Downtown Panama City
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you see beauty in the unusual and repurposed, then a must-see is The Archive on 7th Street. Matty Jankowski, proprietor and mastermind, has curated “Escape the Ordinary” at The Archive, a manifesto of a lifetime dedicated to design, art, music and curiosities. Matty’s ability to recognize the artfulness of an object that other people doomed to the scrap heap or deemed unfit for everyday practical use is unusual and thought- provoking and can be seen on neat display at The Archive Saturday – Tuesday from Noon to 6:00PM and by appointment by calling 850-832-9853 or emailing nuovaarte@aol.com. Visitors may be baffled at first but fascination and foraging are sure to follow. The Archive isn’t terribly large in terms of square footage. And though you may retrace your steps several times over in one visit, it’s never the same path. Kind of like your small intestines; a lot longer than you’d imagine, but there’s a lot to digest. My last two visits to The Archive were three and two hours each and I still think I need to go back and do a little virtual curating.
One of the great influences in Matty’s life is text – not just books, but the distillation of text; typeface, font and illustrative writing – like that of E. E. Cummings. Discussion on literary tattoos, books written in concentration camps and recollection of punitive writing assignments like “I will not (your offense here)” written 100 times on a chalkboard. Text, graphic art and fonts are placed and used throughout The Archive and are like a red thread.
I ended up walking out with antique wooden shoe forms (called lasts) and a mid-century department store shoe mirror, but not before posting a picture of two cans of Shinola as a public service on my Facebook page.
Only about 25% of Matty’s collection of literature, music, popular culture artifacts, visual and accidental art is on display. There is art in three more storage units waiting to be extracted. The collection is awe-inspiring and, to many, it might be sensory overload to enter The Archive. But it is rather well organized, considering you can find anything from a book about the work of Man Ray to a rare Chet Atkins vinyl jazz album while listening to the oddly soothing sounds of an opera by Tom Waitts.
You can only visit when Matty is there, which is how you’d want it to be anyway. He has an intimate familiarity with almost every piece in the space and nearly every piece has a story he can tell you. During my last visit, Matty pointed out an original portrait by contemporary artist Fabio Coruzzi, of Vincenzo Peruggia, the man who tried to repatriate the Mona Lisa in 1911. He stole the painting from his place of employ, the Louvre, and brought it to his home in Italy where he kept it under his bed. As Matty tells it; Peruggia returned the Mona Lisa with little more than a “mea culpa”. The response by the French authorities lent itself more to “Oh non, vous n’avez pas!” and he was promptly incarcerated. The conversation moved on to the recent George Clooney movie, Monument Men and rights of ownership.
A visit to the Archive is like mental freebasing. There is no predicting what part of yourself you’ll leave or what new thing you’ll leave with, but I will make you a money back guarantee; you will have an experience that is the Curation for the Common Collection.
By Jennifer Jones