As museum acquisitions go, this one was bittersweet.
More than 11,000 bunny items of every shape and size boosted the decimated collection of Altadena’s iconic The Bunny Museum Tuesday, when the museum, which lost its building in the Eaton fire, acquired the treasure trove of bunny miscellanea from the estate of Faye Clair Minaker Curtis.
Curtis was 92 when she died on Dec. 7, 2024. She had earmarked her cherished collection of bunny-themed things to The Bunny Museum in Altadena, which she visited when the museum in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when it was still housed in founders’ Steve Lubanski and Candace Frazee’s Pasadena home.
That visit sparked a collecting mania in Curtis, who began her bunny obsession in the 1970s, her family said. A pet rabbit’s unfortunate demise when it was chased with a vacuum wielded by her children so saddened Curtis her friends gave her bunny figurines to cheer her up. In the tradition of real rabbits, the collection multiplied through the decades. To her family, which in 2024 included 10 children, 28 grandchildren, 37 great-grandchildren, and 9 great-great-grandchildren, Curtis was “Grandma Bunny.”
In informing The Bunny Museum of Curtis’ bequest, her sister Marie Head told Frazee she is grateful the museum exists.
“We feel deeply that this is where her collection belongs,” Head, of Inman, South Carolina, said.
The bunny collection, in several black and yellow bins, was scheduled to be delivered to The Bunny Museum the first week of January. The Eaton Fire burned it to the ground on Jan. 7, along with more than 9000 structures. The blaze killed 18 people and caused damage estimated at $7 to $10 billion.
This week, Curtis’ treasures were finally delivered to the museum by her niece, Hannah Romeri-Head and her boyfriend, Sam Salameh.
Steve Lubanski, Frazee’s husband, stored the donations in a rented storage container, to wait for the museum reopening, “who knows how many years from now,” Frazee said.
In the meantime, the couple have tried to reinvigorate the museum’s burned-to-ashes, rubble-strewn frontage. They placed new bunny items in slats in a concrete wall that survived the blaze. On April 5, Frazee reported 12 small bunnies missing.
“We’ve been working diligently to make the front of The Bunny Museum look like nothing happened,” she said. “This will not deter us, but it is still sad.”
The mural artist Bandit helped the couple mark the three-month anniversary of the wildfire by completing a mural along the low wall of the what remains of the museum at the corner of North Lake Avenue and Altadena Drive. The artist painted the artwork this week, featuring a multicolored homage with long-eared white rabbits in different poses and a spray-painted carrot standing in for the letter “Y.”
Recovering from the loss of their life’s work is day-to-day. Before the fire, The Bunny Museum boasted more than 60,000 items in its popular collection, earning it a Guinness World Record for largest bunny collection in the world.
It is a designation Frazee and Lubanski are determined to regain. People from all over the country, and the world, have already started mailing them bunny stuff.
Frazee said they’ve received a bunny that was once in the museum, and it was “like seeing an old friend. And exciting to see a bunny we didn’t have in the museum come in as a donation.”
“Steve and I are surviving,” Frazee said. “We are emboldened and held up by the generosity of strangers.”
The Bunny Museum started as a love story in 1998, when Lubanski gifted Frazee with a stuffed plush rabbit. This origin-story bunny was saved from the fire. Their quirky collection grew until they decided to share it with the public, hosting tours in their home from 1998 until 2016. The Bunny Museum opened in a 7,000-square-foot building in Altadena in 2017.
It is where they will rebuild, the couple said. And the bequest from a fellow bunny enthusiast is a much-needed boost.
“It got the bunny collection started in a big way,” Frazee said.