Museum of Modern Mythology

The Museum of Modern Mythology was a San Francisco-based museum dedicated to advertising characters and their effects on our society. The central concept of the museum was that advertising characters—thanks to mass advertising, and especially television advertising—have become an integral part of our modern mythology. Many of them have grown past the products they endorse and entered the collective unconscious. The museum never made any judgments as to whether this was good or bad. It simply observed and reported on the phenomenon.

The museum was started by Ellen Weis, Matthew Cohen, and Jeff Errick in the live-work space at 275 Capp Street that now houses Steve Parr’s Oddball Films. The museum quickly attracted the attention of several leading authorities, including Joseph Campbell, who was a member of the museum advisory board until his death in 1987.

As the museum became popular it quickly outgrew the Capp Street location and moved to a new building at Third and Mission. There they held several events that explored various aspects of modern culture. The Third and Mission location was on the way to becoming one of the more popular tourist destinations in San Francisco when catastrophe struck: The Loma Prieta earthquake of October 1989 rendered the space unsafe and the museum had to find a new location. Several attempts were made, but the high cost of real estate in the Bay Area made finding a new location especially difficult. The museum contents were put into storage, where they remained until 2022, when they were accessioned into the collection of Valley Relics Museum of Los Angeles.