Nothing really prepares you for the experience of entering the Huckleberry Explorers Club (HEC), a small museum in a duplex in Detroit’s up-and-coming Core City neighborhood whose ground floor houses a general store stocked with second-hand oddities for sale at ridiculous prices. The project is a collaboration between author and artist Stefany Anne Goldberg and her husband, Morgan Meis, who met nearly two decades ago at New York University. But the concept of the Huckleberry Explorer’s Club belongs to Golberg and predates the physical location, or even the couple’s move to Detroit in late 2015.
“It started with my lifelong habit of collecting things that aren’t collectible, including experiments and photographs and creating little writings, and also a kind of terror I have of throwing things away” , said Golberg during a tour of the museum with Hyperallergic.
Golberg designates a ring fixed to a cardboard support in a cardboard niche of a cardboard wall. The museum sits somewhere between a meerkat habitat and a cave: a cozy, dimly lit womb of custom exhibits for Golberg’s ephemera.
One of the items on display is a wedding ring Golberg discovered inside an office she found on a Brooklyn street. An inscription on the ring indicates, “Steven and Julie” with the date of February 12, 1988.
“I felt so moved by this object, thinking about all the different possible scenarios for how this ring ended up inside the office; it was like this object had so much aura around it,” Golberg said. “More and more, in the beginning, this stuff came into my life, and it wasn’t just about the things themselves or the image [she took], but the relationship between the two of us. It was a bit like I was getting married at that time.
Golberg began marking his objects with small tags that offer context, dates, or adjacent experiences.
“That’s when we lived at the Detroit Zen Center in Hamtramck,” she said, pointing to a cardboard tray containing a collection of dried flowers.
In a way, the museum’s aesthetic was inspired by a cave outside a monastery in Bulgaria that the couple once visited.
“People put small objects in the right corners of things; that experience has informed that space,” Golberg said. She points to a drop of wax, presented on a cardboard column in a cardboard jewelry box.
“That’s when Rabbi Alana borrowed my car. When she gave it back to me, there was this piece of wax that was obviously from a Shabbat candle,” Golberg said. “It’s definitely a Huckleberry Club article.”
Golberg and Meis are anachronistic, living a modern existence without the use of phones (a Google Maps search for the club somehow has its hoursand their “websiteis basically a holding page with Golberg’s email). We can talk about one without the other, but their lives and HEC are generally linked. Days are filled with reading, writing and working in the adjacent Huckleberry Club Garden, a community garden built by volunteers on a set of city-granted land that includes a meditation garden, a series of stick walkways that look like the cardboard museum and an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven.
In addition to developing the museum and staffing the adjacent general store, Golberg is an essayist and book author, currently combing through a salvo of writing in three volumes, including the first, My mornings without a morning (Unnamed Press) was published in 2020.
“I had a book in mind that would be much more essayistic, about the different ways people thought about the morning or how the morning appeared in poetry or paintings, and so I started writing some of those things,” Golberg said. “But I realized that first of all, I didn’t really want to write essays anymore, and what I really wanted to do was try as much as I could, with words, just capture that morning experience, the felt experience of it.”
Paradoxically, Golberg ended up writing about dropping out of high school in her hometown of Las Vegas to care for her father — a bounded time, for her, of staying up all night and sleeping all morning. Much like the museum, Golberg’s diverse creative endeavors are devoted to the monumentalization of bits of existence that linger beneath the everyday.
“I guess it’s a way of capturing what would otherwise be the disposable moments of my life,” she said. “But actually, those are the times, often times, that I feel the most enlightened and those are the ones that happen all the time.”
“How often do we really have a big party or a big event?” she asked. “Those are the things that mark our lives, but what about all that time? All those other times?
