Troll Museum

When I heard that performance artist Reverend Jen Miller was being evicted from her LES apartment—home to what she claimed to be "the world's only" Troll Museum since 2000—I immediately regretted that I had never made it there. But luckily for me (and Rev Jen), an art gallery in Chinatown donated its gallery space to exhibit (most of) the Troll Museum for the next few weeks in an effort to raise donations for Rev Jen. The suggested donation is $3,000, but the Troll Museum Board of Directors is also The Backstreet Boys, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I didn't want to miss out on this temporary second chance, so my mom—the apple doesn't fall too far from the lover-of-all-things-weird tree—and I went to Chinatown Soup recently to check it out. The gallery space is one small room, but there are a deceptively large number of trolls crammed onto shelves, tacked on walls and propped in corners. 

The Troll Museum is obviously not a museum in the traditional sense—you don't come here to learn about trolls, or see pristine examples of their evolution from 60s fad to resurgences in the 70s, 80s and 90s. You go to the Troll Museum for the same reason you go to an art exhibit or watch an episode of Hoarders. The Troll Museum has what might be called more "traditional" art—paintings and drawings of trolls, of course, but the best piece is of Jesus knocking on the door to the Troll Museum. And then there's the collection of objects itself—greater than the sum of its (dirty and broken) parts and wonderful in its scope and fragmented vision.

I'm so glad that I got a second chance to see the Troll Museum, and its initial demise taught me the important New York lesson that nothing is forever, and that I should go immediately to all of the places that I say I'll get to "someday." It was the perfect rainy Sunday activity for my mom and me—she collected trolls during their original run, and I collected them when they made their 90s comeback. It's mildly depressing to realize that I've reached the point in my life where my childhood toys are now collector's items, but I'm glad there are people around like Reverend Jen to look after them.