Established | October 21, 2020 |
---|---|
Location | 925 13th St, NW Washington, DC, US |
Coordinates | 38°54′04″N77°01′48″W / 38.90103°N 77.03001°W |
Type | Language museum |
Executive director | Patty Isacson Sabee |
Website | https://planetwordmuseum.org/ |
Planet Word is a language arts museum that opened in Washington, DC, in October 2020. [1] The museum is described as "The museum where language comes to life" and features interactive exhibits dedicated to topics such as the history of the English Language, how children learn words, languages around the world, humor, poetry, and how music and advertising use words. [1] It is located in the historic Franklin School building, designed by Adolf Cluss, located on Franklin Square at 13th and K Street. [2]
The museum was created by Ann B. Friedman, a philanthropist and former reading teacher who is married to New York Times opinion columnist Tom Friedman. [3]
Initial building renovation began in 2017. In 2018, work on the project was stopped after it was discovered that DC and US federal preservation rules were violated in the demolition of the building's interior. [4] A "minimal" fine was paid, work on the project continued, and the museum opened on October 22, 2020. [5] [6] [7]
Each exhibit focuses on a different aspect of spoken and/or signed language, with an emphasis on allowing visitors to speak or sign, manipulate, and interact with concepts. [8] This ranges from an elaborate interactive room-sized globe to playful poetry written on bathroom walls. [9] [10]
Speaking Willow, an interactive, motion-detecting tree sculpture, is an exhibit created by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that whispers to visitors in hundreds of different languages as they enter the museum. [11] This interactive sculpture was delivered by Public Art Fund in collaboration of art foundry, UAP. [12]
Other notable exhibits within the museum include First Words, Where Do Words Come From?, and The Spoken Word. [13] In March 2022, Planet Word opened Lexicon Lane, a permanent exhibit where visitors can solve language-related “cases”. [14] Located on the third floor of the museum, the exhibit is set up to look like a small village, within which visitors have an hour to solve a mystery by figuring out the answers to language-related puzzles and riddles. [15]
Cintas Corporation selected Planet Word as a finalist for the 2021 America’s Best Restroom Contest. [16] [17]
In May 2022, the North American School Scrabble Championship was held live at Planet Word. Walden Giezentanner, a seventh grader, and sixth grader Nathaniel Campos were winners. [18]
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly called Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with Maryland to its north and east. Washington, D.C., was named for George Washington, a Founding Father and the first president of the United States. The district is named for Columbia, the female personification of the nation.
The Newseum was an American museum at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW dedicated to news and journalism that promoted free expression and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, while tracing the evolution of communication.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist who works with ideas from architecture, technological theater and performance. Lozano-Hemmer lives and works in Montreal and Madrid.
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The Franklin School is a building designed by Adolf Cluss in the German round-arch style, located on Franklin Square at 13th and K Street in Washington, D.C. It was constructed in 1869 and initially served as a flagship school building. It later took on various other educational roles, and became a homeless shelter in the 2000s. In 2020, it became the location of the Planet Word museum after its interior was largely gutted.
Franklin Square, or Franklin Park, is a square in downtown Washington, D.C. Purportedly named after Benjamin Franklin, it is bounded by K Street NW to the north, 13th Street NW on the east, I Street NW on the south, and 14th Street NW on the west. It is served by the McPherson Square station of the Washington Metro, which is located just southwest of the park.
The National Law Enforcement Museum is a museum located in Washington, D.C. It opened on October 13, 2018, and covers American law enforcement through interactive exhibits, historical and contemporary artifact collections, with a dedicated space for research and educational programming. It is a mostly-underground facility located adjacent to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C.'s Judiciary Square near several district and federal courthouses.
Meow Wolf is an American arts and entertainment company that creates large-scale interactive and immersive art installations. Founded in 2008, its flagship attraction, House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m2) facility, which includes a concert venue in addition to the main immersive art installation. In 2021 their second installation, Omega Mart, opened in Area15 in Las Vegas. A third location in Denver, Convergence Station, opened to the public on September 17, 2021. Their CEO is Jose Tolosa, who took the place of co-CEOs Carl Christensen and Ali Rubinstein in 2022. Meow Wolf is the entertainment industry's sole certified B corporation. In 2022, Meow Wolf announced the formation of the Meow Wolf Foundation, which will focus on giving to the communities of new and existing Meow Wolf Locations. Julie Heinrich was named as the foundation's executive director.
The Museum of the Bible is a museum in Washington D.C., owned by Museum of the Bible, Inc., a non-profit organization established in 2010 by the Green family. The museum documents the narrative, history, and impact of the Bible. It opened on November 17, 2017, and has 1,150 items in its permanent collection and 2,000 items on loan from other institutions and collections.
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Titus Kaphar is an American contemporary painter whose work reconfigures and regenerates art history to include the African-American subject. His paintings are held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, New Britain Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Immigrant Food is a fast-casual restaurant located at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. It was founded by chef Enrique Limardo, Peter Schechter, and Ezequiel Vázquez-Ger, and opened on November 12, 2019. Located near the White House, the restaurant combines its food offerings with pro-immigrant activism.
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Ann B. Friedman is a former teacher and founder of Planet Word, a museum devoted to language arts that opened in Washington, D.C. in October 2020.