Todd Lerew is curious. He likes lists. And he doesn’t like doing issues midway.
For this reason he collects pictorial maps, why he has visited 248 public libraries in Los Angeles County and 401 of the 483 municipalities in California. It’s why he lately joined the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Elks, Moose Worldwide, Oddfellows and about 50 different golf equipment — so many who he needed to get a separate pockets for membership playing cards.
This will look like lots of initiatives for one 37-year-old, who calls them “acts of compulsive nerdiness.” However these pursuits pale subsequent to Lerew’s ardour for unsung museums and collections.
That’s the topic of his new e book, “Also on View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles,” revealed this week by Angel Metropolis Press at Los Angeles Public Library.
The amount, an illustrated exploration of 64 museums whose names you’re unlikely to know, attracts on a decade of analysis and stands as a problem to all Angelenos who assume they’ve a deal with on the native cultural panorama.
Skid Row Historical past Museum & Archive, from high; Skateboarding Corridor of Fame Skateboard Museum in Simi Valley; and Finnish Folks Artwork Museum in Pasadena. (Ryan Schude)
These are ventures — usually one-person crusades — that remember quick meals, Finnish folks artwork, Skid Row, skateboarding, vertebrate zoology and extra. Sure, the Museum of Jurassic Expertise in Culver Metropolis is right here. Sure, the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum in Port Hueneme and the Cucamonga Service Station Museum too.
The Museum of the Republic of Vietnam in Westminster? The Parsonage of Aimee Semple McPherson in Echo Park? The Historic Glass Museum in Redlands? Lerew and photographer Ryan Schude visited all of them.
“There’s nothing you can say about museums that’s true of all of them,” Lerew mentioned one current morning. “And you can find them everywhere you look.”
Certainly, he spoke close to the Lengthy Seaside waterfront, surrounded by unremarkable skyscrapers and nil foot visitors. However a block away stands the Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum, opened in 1927.
This was the primary of two stops the place Lerew deliberate to ship copies of the brand new e book to people who find themselves in it.
The oldest working tattoo store within the U.S. 
Clockwise from high left, at Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum in Lengthy Seaside: veteran tattoo artist Kari Barba, tattoo designs on show, a jacket from Bert Grimm’s Well-known Tattoo Studio and a show case of flash and instruments. (Ryan Schude)
Inside Outer Limits, founder and tattoo artist Kari Barba, 64, eagerly unwrapped a replica of the e book. Barba, a celebrated tattoo artist and business pioneer who runs a second tattoo location in Costa Mesa, mentioned she purchased the Lengthy Seaside area 20 years in the past as a result of “I was really hurt by the idea that the history of the building would be lost.”
Barba led Lerew and a customer by means of the restored rooms; the tables and fashionable instruments now in use; the vintage instruments; the stencils of anchors, hearts and dragons; the previous pictures of inked sailors on the long-gone Pike amusement park; a hand-painted window that staff discovered hidden in a wall; and, in a single nook, a mysterious coated vat.
“You’ve got to see the vaseline before we go,” Lerew mentioned.
So Barba and Lerew stepped to the vat and uncovered it, revealing a glutinous stew of rags and vaseline, as soon as integral to the tattoo course of; the stew’s age and exact contents are unsure.
“I don’t know what’s in there. I’m not reaching in to find out,” Barba mentioned.
“Distinctive smell, also,” mentioned Lerew, leaning to smell.
What shapes a compulsive collector?
Lerew, who lives together with his spouse in Lincoln Heights, grew up in rural South Dakota. His household made common journeys to roadside points of interest such because the fake cowboy city at Buffalo Ridge and the Corn Palace in Mitchell, the place one thing about “the curious, the unique and the obscure” received beneath Lerew’s pores and skin.
After graduating from Hampshire School in Massachusetts, he got here west in 2009 and went to grad faculty at CalArts, specializing in experimental music composition. However his consideration strayed, a trait that turned knowledgeable asset when the Library Basis of Los Angeles employed Lerew as program supervisor in 2015.
Todd Lerew, writer of the e book “Also on View,” about small and stunning museum in Higher Los Angeles, exhibits the map filled with museum places that he retains on his cellphone.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
In his off hours, he’d try different libraries and museums — usually six or seven in a day, all logged on a spreadsheet. To seek out all of them, he’d test Boris Stanic’s guidebook, “Museum Companion to Los Angeles,” in addition to scanning the online and speaking to mates and strangers.
In 2016, after months of listening to from Lerew about his weekend explorations of obscure collections and archives round Southern California, the inspiration’s president, Ken Brecher, assigned Lerew to curate an exhibition on native collectors that turned “21 Collections: Every Object Has a Story.”
“I’ve always collected experiences of one kind or another,” Lerew mentioned. “I was just exploring because I had a private interest and obsession in finding new and unique places and people. It kind of got formalized when i started working on that exhibition.”
What makes a museum?
Lerew mentioned he’s wanting to see nearly anywhere that calls itself a museum, whether or not or not it has nonprofit standing or tutorial credentials or a everlasting house. He’s additionally drawn to areas which may not name themselves museums however usually behave like them, together with park customer facilities or faculty artwork galleries.
In terms of selfie-driven workout routines just like the nationwide Museum of Ice Cream chain (which had an L.A. pop-up location in 2017), he’s not so .
And in each museum, he considers the supply rigorously. At most historic museums within the U.S., he mentioned, “It’s the white people’s history of that area,” omitting a lot and maybe whitewashing a lot else.
“You just have to be aware, when you’re going to these places, of who is telling the story,” he mentioned. “There are more stories out there, always.”
By hand, she re-creates key moments in Black historical past 
A “Black Lives Matter” diorama created by Karen Collins.
(Ryan Schude)
“Oh, big pictures!” Karen Collins mentioned when Lerew arrived at her house in Compton and handed her the e book. “I don’t know why, but I was picturing something small.”
Small, in any case, is Collins’ specialty. Round her lounge, miniature dioramas of essential moments in Black American historical past took up a lot of the horizontal area. A “Black Lives Matter” triptych, made for the Central Library’s “21 Collections” exhibition, sat above the hearth.
Collins, 73, a retired preschool instructor, creates the dioramas, making and arranging miniatures inside shadow bins made by her husband, Eddie Lewis. She began about 30 years in the past, after her son was despatched to jail as a Twelfth-grader and he or she felt “ready to die.”
She pushed grief again by resolving to painting key figures and moments in Black historical past, to encourage and educate grade-school kids, “and let them know, you can get over anything. … The art saved my life.”
Karen Collins and her African American Miniature Museum, a group of Black historical past dioramas she made and retains in her Compton house, are featured in “Also on View,” Todd Lerew’s e book about small and stunning museums in Higher Los Angeles.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
There have been dozens of dioramas since then, depicting scenes from the Center Passage to Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Colin Powell, the Obama inauguration, Compton Cowboys and Kendrick Lamar.
For years, Collins and her husband introduced shadow bins — their cellular museum — to colleges and neighborhood occasions. Lerew noticed her work on show in Leimert Park.
Lerew: “How many of these have you made over the years?”
Collins: “A lot. Because I give them away.”
Past Lerew’s Central Library exhibition and e book, Collins has been commissioned by the Autry Museum (the place a number of dioramas are a part of the everlasting exhibition “Imagined Wests”), profiled by nationwide media retailers and chosen to offer a Google doodle for the sixtieth anniversary of the Greensboro, N.C., civil rights sit-ins. Her son, nonetheless incarcerated, “is proud of me,” she mentioned.
Now she’s engaged on a coloring e book and hoping to search out “a stable place for this museum to be … for our children to see their worth,” she informed Lerew.
“It’s a really tricky thing,” Lerew mentioned later, “when it’s one person’s passion project. … I can’t say what might happen for Karen’s collection. I have hopes. Time will tell.”
Is Lerew completed with little museums now? Completely not.
Past these within the e book, he’s put one other 700-plus giant and small Southern California museums onto an everymuseum.la web site, now reside.
Then there’s the opposite record on his cellphone, the place he has keyed in all of the unseen museums he desires to go to. Worldwide. There are 3,231 of them.