An Avery Gallery exhibition time travels back in Seaside history.

Avery Gallery at Seaside City Hall has an art exhibit up now called Milestones in Learning that celebrates the anniversaries of three Seaside institutions of learning: Seaside Public Library, Seaside High School and CSU Monterey Bay.

The exhibit is a trip. Down memory lane. It’s a reading-intensive hodge-podge chock full of memorabilia, interpretive stuff, show-and-tell, artifacts and letters. And it rewards closer looks.

There’s a faded archival photo of Bill Clinton, Sam Farr, Leon Panetta and others at the university’s opening. There is a stuck-in-time photo of a girl with a ’90s haircut and riot grrl clothes reading (maybe a zine like Chainsaw) among CSUMB’s original library stacks.

From the Seaside Library, there’s a vinyl record cover of “Penthouse Serenade” by Erroll Garner, and an array of books like Images of America: Seaside, The Hunger Games and The Purpose Driven Life. Near those, pamphlets titled “Making the Most of the World Wide Web” and “102 Things to do in Seaside, California… and Sand City.”

In the Seaside High School wing, yearbook and class photos reach back to its 1965 first graduating class sporting beehives and crew cuts. Just a dozen years later, wild hair, wide lapels and afros of 1978. There’s the Weekly cover story on Seaside High alum and fashion mogul Rachel Roy next to covers of the school’s magazine The Spartan Chronicle.

There’s an old typewriter. What does it have to do with Seaside? Labels aren’t meticulous. But that’s part of the charm of this exhibit. It’s like someone who’s so excited to narrate a story that they describe it in a flurry, like flipping through the pages of a scrapbook.

MILESTONES IN LEARNING 8am-5pm Mon-Fri at Avery Gallery, City Hall, 440 Harcourt Ave., Seaside. 899-6811.