The World’s Most Important Archtop Guitar Collection
The Blue Guitar Collection was displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History from November 11th 1997 through October 1998. It is also worth noting that the Blue D’Aquisto Centura Deluxe was featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the museum’s “Guitar Heroes” exhibit in 2011. After Scott Chinery’s passing in 2000, the guitars remained with the Chinery family until 2021, when they were acquired by the Archtop Foundation. The Foundation’s goal is to share the collection with everyone – it is too good to keep hidden,
The World’s Most Important Archtop Guitar Collection
“I saw the archtop guitar hitting a peak in terms of quality and diversity. The instruments that were being made at that point, in my view, surpassed those at any other time in history. I had often thought that it would be neat to get all the great portrait painters together to interpret the same subject and then see the differences among them. So that’s why I set out to do The Blue Guitars. To get all the greatest builders together and have them interpret the same guitar, an 18-inch archtop, in the same color blue that Jimmy had used. All of these great luthiers saw this as a friendly competition, and as a result they went beyond anything they’d ever done. We ended up with a collection of the greatest archtop guitars ever made.
-Scott Chinery
