Crowning Glory

Past Exhibition - Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, California

Spring 2017

frank m. doyle arts pavilion

Crowning Glory displays the sculptural folk art of the Birthday Crown Society, a group of creative individuals that celebrates their decade birthdays with a unique ritual. In 1993, Kathleen McMurray asked a friend to make her a crown and present it to her in a ceremony for her birthday. McMurray was turning 40, and was uncomfortable with society’s notion that she should feel a loss of personal power as she entered middle age. Instead, McMurray wanted to embrace a new coming of age, and celebrate a new, mature phase of her life, symbolized by the elaborate hat and the happy ritual associated with it.

The joyful empowerment of the decade-birthday hat caught on among her friends and family. Over the past three decades, an impromptu Birthday Crown Society has evolved to include elaborate hat-making parties, coronation ceremonies and parades.

Photographer Erin Nomura captures the vibrancy of these mad hatters in stunning portraits. Her images reveal people of many ages celebrating the joy of donning a personal crown and embracing their place in life’s journey. Also on display are the hats themselves, in all their sculptural glory.  Reminiscent of Mardi Gras and Carnival masks, the materials used for these crowns are non-traditional and personal to the recipient, and can include kinetics, lights and interactive components. The resulting objects, including giant decoder rings, canoes, and rocket ships, are flamboyant, whimsical, stately and often ridiculous.

sneak peek

excerpt from

The Art of The Birthday Crown Society:
Tradition, Performance, Ritual and Rebellion

Kim Garrison, Curator

"The Crowning Glory exhibition provides a special opportunity to reflect on the broader functions of art that we are rarely exposed to in the setting of the gallery. The phenomenon of the Birthday Crown Society is one part contemporary performance, one part folk tradition, one part societal ritual and one part act of social rebellion, all wrapped up with a bow and a side of cake. And it is a worthy example of what art historians term “outsider art,” that is, art made outside of the establishment of the art world2, without its motives of public display or purchase, and often made by artists without formal training." 

A LETTER FROM OUR FOUNDER: 

In our culture, birthdays that end in a “0” seem to be given outsized importance. We are encouraged to meet our next decade of life with a measure of dread, and for me, entering my forties had extra foreboding as my father died at age 42. Discovering a book of feminist rituals, I decided to adapt a “crone ritual” for my 40th birthday. The ritual celebrated a woman’s passage into wisdom and power in her life. That sounded pretty good to me.

I asked a friend to make a crown for me with only the specification that “silver” be represented. We did the ceremony as written in the book that first year, with much seriousness (and great tolerance from my husband and friends who sometimes seem philosophically opposed to following the directions). The birthday crown ritual quickly transformed into our own, and has since been part of over thirty decade birthdays, each a joyful rite-of-passage with friends and family that celebrates the years lived and the years to come.

Each birthday crown is constructed in secret by an informal committee, and is their representation of the recipient. It is presented at a party to the birthday person, following a parade of all society members in attendance wearing their current hats.  The most recent recipient of a crown performs the actual coronation. This involves a speech to explain the features of the hat and how they relate to the wearer, the physical crowning, and an acceptance speech by the recipient amid much hooping and hollering. Another parade (or conga line) follows, this time with the birthday person leading the charge. And then cake and more wine.

Some of us now have multiple crowns, which become treasured storage problems. A few of us have gone from this life and their crowns have been recycled into new ones. There have been parades in backyards and restaurants, and I love looking out at an uninitiated crowd and seeing faces that say, “this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” and other faces that say, “I want one of those so bad!”

I hope you want one. Bad. Ask your friends to make one for you.