Museum Hop

Glass to guitars on inaugural

With stops to see trains, guitars and a glass collection amassed by a woman with nine husbands, you might think Chattanooga’s inaugural Museum Hop was inspired by a country song.

Nope, laughs the event’s organizer, Amy Autenreith, director of the Houston Museum of Decorative Arts.

The combination of sites, she says, is “just kind of how it fell together.”

The inaugural event, scheduled all day Friday, will guide visitors to six of the city’s museums: the Houston, Songbirds Guitar Museum, Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum, Bessie Smith Cultural Center, Charles H. Coolidge Medal of Honor Museum and the 6th Cavalry Museum.

Autenreith says she modeled the idea after a Free Museum Day sponsored annually by Smithsonian Magazine.

“I didn’t really get much in return for my effort for doing that for the day, so it got me thinking about other ideas,” she says. “I liked the thought of us working together.”

Admission to all six museums that day is $10, a savings of more than $50, but you must be registered to pay that price. You’ll get a passport to stamp at each stop and a T-shirt boasting “I Hopped Them All” with the last stamp.

With eight hours for six tours and the drive time around town, there may not be time for deep exploration of any one place, but Autenreith says the idea is to stoke interest in the museums among local residents. If this year’s event is a success, she expects next year will expand to other museums and an extra day to tour.

“One of the biggest issues our museums have — and almost every museum on this list will tell you — is that we get people from Atlanta and Nashville and Knoxville, we get people from all over the world, but what we keep working on is what do we need to do to get local visitation in our museums. … Basically, we’re looking at driving local visitorship.”

Anyone who associates museums with art depositories may be surprised by the variety of unexpected masterpieces in store at the museums, each of which carves out its own slice of history.

“If we can open the doors to the museums and and let everybody see the depth and the breadth and the diversity of history enclosed in these museums, I think we’ll have done our job,” she says.

Contact Lisa Denton at ldenton@ timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6281.

A fully restored M-47 Patton tank is among the many artifacts on display at the 6th Cavalry Museum.

Visitors to the Songbirds Guitar Museum check out one of the many instruments on display.

A medal that once belonged to Pfc. Desmond Doss, the heroic subject of the film “Hacksaw Ridge,” is on display at the Medal of Honor Museum.

The Bessie Smith Cultural Center has a performance hall dedicated to its namesake, “The Empress of the Blues.”