Ellen Havre Weis, Whose Museum Put Pop Into Mythology
Ms. Weis’s intent was to link our conceptions of these pop-culture figures to the human need to mythologize; she asserted that our Fates, Furies and giants were not left behind in Greece or Egypt, but rather transposed to our own culture. The Jolly Green Giant was her selling point when describing the museum to its leadership and the public — he was, she said, a character straight out of “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
Ms. Weis took inspiration from “Mythologies” (1957), a collection of essays by the French intellectual Ronald Barthes, which asserted that social values reflected archetypes and tropes from ancient myths.