Greenwich’s Leslie Mueller shares the wonders of her “open sesame” Museum Access TV series
By Anne W. Semmes
Surely, Greenwich’s entrepreneuring Leslie Mueller has been providing a wondrous window on the world’s heritage throughout this pandemic with her television series, “MUSEUM ACCESS,” ongoing since she launched it nationwide in 2018 on Public Television and PBS stations. Coming up is Season 4, with 10 half-hour episodes featuring such museums as the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, West Point Museum, the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, that favorite American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and less known American Heritage Museum in Stow, MA where Mueller, in a behind-the-scenes moment drives an original WWII M4 Sherman Tank.
Mueller paused in her producing and hosting duties to share moments of her extraordinary creative life with this reporter. It was in Season 2 that aired in 2019 that Mueller flew aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress on the Collings Foundation traveling aviation museum’s “Wings of Freedom” tour. “I was squealing,” she recalls of that flight. “We were up front because the videographer was next to me…we were literally right behind the pilot.” Also featured in the episode is Mueller’s now late father retired Air Force Major Robert H. Mueller who shares flying those WWII planes.
Leslie Mueller learned more about WWII from her Season 2 visit to the CIA’s private museum within its headquarters. “We mainly were focusing on Islamabad and bin Laden,” she tells, “But the intelligence in World War II was incredible. We go into a lot of the clothing that was being used…They had a clothing designer that they literally brought in from Hollywood.”
But fast forward to the present as its Mark Twain who is on Mueller’s mind. This past weekend she was presenting a special screening to donors and special members of the Mark Twain Museum of her Season 4 episode on the Museum. She describes what she captures of Mark Twain: “He’s got three daughters and a wife, so the house is full of estrogen. So, he would escape up into his man cave, which was the top floor which had this beautiful billiards table, which he was very good at, and there’s this gorgeous desk in the corner, and he didn’t even want a window that you could see through because he was afraid to be distracted. He was quite a character. I would love to have known him.”
Mueller kindly shares that episode and I see her modus operandi of how she engages the director of the Museum for the first few minutes of the episode, “about their museum in general; what’s their mission; what all do they have there; what are they doing with their outreach.” And then she “zeroes in on one aspect of the museum.
“And that’s what makes it different because we’re going behind the scenes in some way.” Like with the “Terra Cotta Warriors” exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago (Season 1) brought over from China from where more than 8,000 figures were buried 2000 years ago around the First Emperor of the China – a site that’s been described as the 8th Wonder of the World. “And it might be just as simple as seeing how do they [Museum workers] set up the Terra Cotta Warriors, chariot and horses. Sometimes they can provide me with footage.” Then she literally draws out an astonishing tidbit she learned of the pit those Warriors were taken from. “Let’s say this is the whole area that the Emperor’s buried in – that pit is maybe this much of it. Like my hand over here. They haven’t even touched the rest of it. They know there’s more. But they’ve only opened that one pit which is really amazing.”
So, how did Mueller arrive to be entering such fascinating worlds? She attributes it to her art background. She is a noted artist having exhibited herself, and then been recruited by Cablevision to do an art show interviewing artists. “It was a good launching pad,” she says, “I felt comfortable talking with artists and going into their studios and going to their openings.” So why not expand the show to art museums? But then producer friends suggested she consider “a broader topic,” and soon she learned that “there is not one topic you can think of that somebody doesn’t have a museum for it, whether its pinochle or pinball.”
So, look across Mueller’s seasons online at museumaccess.com and you’ll find the Harley Davidson Museum in Season 2 along with the Illinois Railway Museum, outside of Chicago. “It has 20 miles of railroad tracks, a historical collection of trains, and big steam engines, and the things they have on the front of the steam engines to push the cows off.” This reporter might wish instead to visit “The DaVinci Machines Exhibit “in Season 1 with its behind the scenes look at DaVinci’s workshop in Florence, Italy, or perhaps those grand portraits of dogs in New York City’s “AKC Museum of the Dog” in Season 3.
With the pandemic Mueller found her online MUSEUM ACCESS shows being picked up by educational groups, like Scholastic and Safari Montage. “School systems and teachers download the episodes. We have some lesson plans and activity sheets and coloring books and things like that if they want to download that too.” But the most extraordinary outreach MUSEUM ACCESS has had is with those who are partially blind or partially deaf who are able to watch her episodes. With a grant from the U.S. Department of Education Mueller’s episodes have the necessary video description addition. “So anytime there’s silence in our program, a voice comes in and narrates what they will be seeing. Isn’t that amazing?”
What else amazes Mueller is the research she’s learning of how museum going, “increases your wellness. Just going to a museum, when you leave the museum, you just feel better, you feel like you’ve educated yourself, you’ve enlightened yourself, particularly in these times when people are feeling a little down.”
But what saddens Mueller is, “people will go to the museums when they’re kids, and then they don’t go again. Museums are for lifelong learners, for people that are curious. Every time you go in and share with someone, with a family member, or go on a date, you are learning something new.” “Have you done The Cloisters,” she asks. “We did it in Season 1 with those unicorn tapestries, and we got behind the scenes into the gardening shed where they take care of the medieval garden. It’s so pretty. The museum director told me they have more [marriage] proposals at the Cloisters each year than they can count.”
The latest Season 4 of Leslie Mueller’s MUSEUM ACCESS TV series is beginning to air on Public Television nationwide, but check listings on WNET, WLIW and CPTV. And on Amazon Prime Video this summer.
