This story first appeared in the Midcoast Update, a newsletter published every Tuesday and Friday. Sign up here to receive stories about the midcoast delivered to your inbox each week, along with our other newsletters.
After eight months of planning, designing, researching and building, a Belfast native is getting ready to open a new museum for Maine’s most famous crustacean.
The Maine Lobster Museum will feature colorful, wide-ranging exhibits on everything from how lobsters have been caught over the years, to their biology, to their role in American pop culture.
And it will be open to visitors anywhere in the world, at any time. That’s because the museum isn’t a brick-and-mortar space, but rather, a virtual resource available to anyone online. According to its founder, digital media artist Sebastian Crissey, it’ll be the first web-based museum devoted to lobsters.
Crissey — who developed the museum with his spouse, Coral Crissey — described it as “a playful, interactive way to celebrate … and explore lobsters through the lenses of science, history, pop culture and design.”
When the digital museum opens May 8, visitors can pay $10 for a day pass, $20 for three-day, $40 for a monthly pass or $80 for a year. However, SNAP recipients will be able to visit it for free through an initiative called Museums for All.
The project has combined various parts of Crissey’s experience.
He spent lots of time in museums while growing up, as two of his grandparents were docents at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland and the Olson House in Cushing. He himself worked last summer as a visitor services associate at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor.
Crissey also has worked in the worlds of winemaking and organic farming in different parts of the world, which he said helped him appreciate “traditional harvesting practices.”
He went on, “When I turned my attention back home to Maine, I couldn’t help but look at our most iconic creature. This background helped me see beyond the tourist-friendly image of lobsters to recognize them as part of a complex ecosystem of relationships between people, marine environments, and local economies.”
Now, Crissey is completing a degree in digital media at Champlain College in Vermont, where the museum began as a student project.
The museum will initially offer seven digital exhibits. Other features include a virtual museum docent — a lobster named Laurance, after Crissey’s great-grandfather — as well as an online arcade where visitors can, for example, design a virtual lobster buoy.
Crissey hopes the resource delivers a different kind of museum experience in which visitors can interact with their surroundings, rather than following a “look, don’t touch” protocol generally practiced in museums.
Crissey aims to expand the museum over time.
