Oaxaca’s Museo de la Filatelia is not, to be clear, a postal museum, celebrating the history and role of mail delivery. It’s all about the stamps, and what they tell us about life, history, art and more.
Wandering its rooms and courtyard takes you to a variety of themed exhibitions, art made with stamps, and a room full of pullout panels holding a carefully-cataloged collection of over 200,000 stamps, with the largest portion coming from the collection of one of Mexico’s richest businessmen, Alfredo Harp Helú, who donated most of his holdings.
There’s even a few fittings from an old post office, including a wooden drop box or buzon, that once was entirely for correo but now serves to collect bsura—trash.
A few historical buzons and sculptural interpretations of fantasy mailboxes by several artists, commissioned by the museum.
Harp, who owns minor league professional baseball teams in Mexico City and Oaxaca, collected quite a few baseball-related stamps, and more came from other collectors. They have a room of their own, aside from their section in the pullouts.
Aside from the U.S. and Mexico, there are quite a few others, including (below), Cuba, Japan and even North Korea.
Stamps as art materials have a place here, too, with a number of works made by pasting vast numbers of stamps in patterns, including the stamp-covered chess set on its stamp-covered board and a Mexican stamp featuring Benito Juarez, made entirely of stamps and a map of Mexico with each state represented in a different color pattern of, yes, stamps.
Speaking of patterns, there’s also an exhibit of traditional textiles, a number of them from Oaxaca, that were used as the design basis for stamps.
Not all of the museum’s space is given over to exhibits; there are a pair of courtyards as well as a classroom and a library of philatelic books.
The pull-out vault area contains a seemingly endless choice of categories; among those in this image are ones for stamps issued to honor Nobel Prize winners, Cervantes, postal workers and more.
Prominent in that area is a slide containing two copies of one of the world’s rarest stamps, the so-called ‘Penny Black,’ the first postage stamp ever. Issued in Great Britain in 1840, it was replaced a few months later with a similar stamp, printed in red; the black didn’t show the cancellation postmark well, and many were simply re-used!
Honoring the Museum’s 20th anniversary…
One of my favorite exhibits at the Museum: A Volkswagen Beetle, entirely covered in postage stamps, and with specially-made stamp-patterned upholstery. It’s officially Vocho MuFi, the Beetle of the MUseoFIlatelica.
Hard at work, pasting stamps… For more on the Beetle, click HERE
Two other rooms house related exhibits that are not directly stamp-related: a collection of coins, and an exhibit focusing on the wax seals that used to guarantee the identify of the sender, and the security of the contents.
And time for a moment of whimsy: the stamp-themed doorway to the museum’s restroom area.
