One of her favorite pieces in the museum was a plastic model of Elsie the Cow, the character used to sell dairy products in advertisements for the Borden Dairy Company, which later branched out into chemical products, including glue. Elsie then acquired a husband, Elmer, who sold the well-known white glue named after him. Their domestic squabbles formed the background of 20th-century ad campaigns selling Borden products. Mr. Whiting compared their dynamic to that of Hera and Zeus in Greek mythology, the archetypical contentious marriage.
“We’re not saying they’re deities,” Ms. Weis said of the collection in a 1988 interview with The New York Times. “But the same relationship holds. They will live beyond their generation because people revere their character by buying the product.”
The Museum of Modern Mythology was unusual in both its premise and the contents of its collection. Mr. Whiting said of the objects themselves: “They weren’t made for museums. They were made to sell stuff and then be tossed. They are literally ephemera, stuff that is temporal — here and then gone.” But Ms. Weis took that ephemera, and its effects, seriously.
The film critic Leonard Maltin, who sat on the museum’s board, said in an interview that Ms. Weis and the museum imbued the practice of collecting and archiving these objects with a unique academic focus. The museum, Mr. Maltin said, focused on putting advertising characters “on a pedestal in a way that no one else had even thought of.”
The board also included Joseph Campbell, the prominent scholar of mythology.
Ellen Havre Weis was born May 14, 1957, in Levittown, Pa., and grew up in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia. Her mother, Aimee (LeVita) Weis, was a librarian for a community college, and her father, Henry Kraus Weis, was a product engineer.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/arts/ellen-havre-weis-dead.html
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