The following videos are all that is recorded online via YouTube of Elizabeth Tashjian. Elizabeth was a frequent guest on night shows like Johnny Carson and David Letterman. She was, what I consider, an outsider artist and founder of the first museum dedicated to nuts in the world. Admission to her museum, in its humble beginnings, was free (given you brought a nut to donate to the collection).

I find her passion so authentic and enthusiam so genuine. The overwhelming joy she experiences from nuts is contageous. A documentary film, and at least one book, have been made about her life. Had it not been for a prominant art historian, her rare and unique collection of nuts would have been lost forever once she lost control of her estate in her old age (a tragedy mentioned many times in biographies made about her).

Many of these documentaries and biographies wonder and argue about Elizabeths relationship with the media. While some suggest she was tokenized as an eccentric crazy woman, I find her to be much smarter than that. I think she used television subversively, fully knowing why she was there, to share her passion in life with as many people as possible.

To my surprise, Wikipedia had no entry whatsoever about Elizabeth Tashjian. If you have any great facts, lore, or photos of Elizabeth Tashjian, feel free to leave me a comment! I will do my best to incorporate them in my first Wikipedia article I've ever written.







To read more about Elizabeth you can follow these links:

• The New Yorker - "The Nut Lady Returns"


• "In a Nutshell: A Portrait of Elizabeth Tashjian" -- full-length documentary premiered April 2004.


• Re-Staging the Nut Museum - 2004 exhibit