Kensey Neely's Creative Passion At The Austin Art Museum

An Austin Art teacher is bringing her creative passion into her own home in east Austin.
She turned it into a museum, the only home in Austin and one of the few remaining in the country.

"I run the Museum of Emphemerata," Jen Webels said.

So what is emphemerata?
Anything that's been thrown away, only to find it has cultural value later on.

"We have Marilyn Monroe's last smoked cigarette," Webels said. "Even Willy Nelson's hair"

And there's also oddities like a flamingo found dumpster diving at the Museum of Natural History.

"It was treated with mercury about 100 years ago," Webels said. "We have a lot of curious objects."

Webels and her husband show them to the public though their guided tours.
Kensey Neely is taking one today to celebrate her 30th birthday.
Webels said she gets a kick out of people's reactions, especially the ones coming from her art students at St. Gabriel's Catholic School.

"When they walk in they say wow because they don't know that a place like this exists," Webels said.

Her hope is that more people get to experience the museum for themselves.
She said one of the best parts about this is the more people that come to our museum, the more they donate interesting objects which have unique stories of their