The One-Bed room Museum

Thomas Lollar—ceramicist, teacher, and, most of all, collector— can always find space for something else in his home.

- WENDY GOODMAN

I’D NEVER EVEN HEARD of a strigil before my visit to the ceramicist Thomas Lollar’s apartment. But there I was, standing in his living room—an orderly jumble of all manner of curiosities, including Roman keys; a traveling sundial; silver Italian Futurist objects; a Georgian English Paul Storr tureen; and a pair of silver entrée dishes belonging to the Duke of Cumberland, brother of King George III—holding a 2,000-yearold bronze grooming device that looks like an archaic shoehorn. Lollar explained that strigils were used in ancient Greece and Rome to scrape off dirt, sweat, and the oil that was applied before bathing. “Some scholars think that perhaps physicians would pick up the dead skin cells and use them to repair wounds,” he tells me as I examine the curved blade he’d taken off a nearby wall.