ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog

Sunday, August 9, 2026

Everything Museums, Everywhere, All At Once

A few years back, a movie called "Everything Everywhere All at Once" swept the Oscars by flatly refusing to be one kind of movie. Science fiction, kung-fu picture, family drama, tax-audit procedural. Critics kept reaching for a genre label, and the movie kept swatting it away. The whole point was that a life refuses to sit neatly in a single bin.

Museums, I think, are having their own "Everything Everywhere" moment. And I want to make the case that it's a good thing.

The tyranny of the label on the door

We spend an awful lot of energy sorting ourselves. Art museum. History museum. Science center. Children's museum. The word on the letterhead becomes a fence, and pretty soon we believe the fence is real. That a science center can't do a wrenching history story, that a children's museum has no business tackling anything heavy.

But visitors have never experienced the world in those tidy silos. Nobody wakes up craving a purely "scientific" morning. People are curious about everything. How a bridge stays up and who built it and what it felt like to weld it forty stories in the air. The genre categories are for us, and for the grant applications. They were never really for the audience.

The museum that was always sneaking across genres

Which brings me to Chicago's grand old Museum of Science and Industry (now officially the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, or Griffin MSI.)

Here's the thing: MSI has always been an everything museum, even when it pretended otherwise. Walk the floor, and you'll find a captured German U-boat from World War II parked near a walk-through coal mine, a whimsical Fairy Castle built for a silent-film star, and a hatchery full of actual baby chicks. Is that a science museum? An industrial-history museum? A decorative-arts collection? A living zoo? Yes.

All of it, at once. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that right now this "Science and Industry" museum is running two of the most genre-bending shows in the country, side by side.

Anne Frank, inside a science museum

Anne Frank The Exhibition , a presentation of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, runs through the end of January 2027. Chicago is only the second U.S. city to host it, and the first in the Midwest. At its heart is a full-scale recreation of the Secret Annex where Anne, her family, and four others hid during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, anchored by more than 130 original pieces from the Anne Frank House collection.

Sit with that a second. There's nothing here you'd file under STEM. It's a story about a girl, a diary, courage, and unbearable loss -- installed in a building most people associate with locomotives and Tesla coils. And it works, precisely because the institution was brave enough to ignore the label on its own door.

A closet full of Oz, Broadway, and history

Just down the way from the Anne Frank exhibition is Crafting Character: The Costumes of Paul Tazewell (through September 7, 2026).

Tazewell is the designer who, in 2025, became the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Wicked. On top of a Tony for Hamilton and an Emmy for The Wiz Live!

The show puts his actual creations in front of you: Glinda's pink bubble dress and Elphaba's Emerald City gown, the Schuyler Sisters' ball gowns and King George III's getup, Anita's yellow dress from Spielberg's West Side Story. The finished costumes are paired with the sketches and messy middle steps where imagination becomes a garment. Our science museum is suddenly also a fashion museum, a theater museum, and a film-history museum. Nobody at the door made you choose.

Why this matters beyond Chicago

A recent Chicago Tribune commentary put it better than I can: museums like the Anne Frank House and Griffin MSI must keep being the kind of place that helps people "understand the world.

The whole confusing, beautiful, heartbreaking thing, not just one tidy slice of it.

That's the real argument for the everything museum. When a single visit can hold Anne Frank's diary, Elphaba's gown, a fairy castle, and a World War II submarine, you're not diluting your mission. You're admitting that curiosity doesn't respect our departmental org charts.

The takeaway isn't "go host Anne Frank." It's that the noun on your sign is a starting point, not a cage. A children's museum can hold real grief. A history museum can run a hands-on making space. The genre was never the promise. The STORY is the promise.

So here's my question for you: What's the most genre-bending thing your museum has ever done, or the boldest thing you wish it would try?

And what's really stopping you: the audience, or just the word on the letterhead?

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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Thursday, July 30, 2026

What's the ONE Exhibit Tool You Can't Work Without?

There's that old party game where somebody asks, "If you were stranded on a desert island and could bring only one book (or album, or snack), what would it be?" I've always thought exhibit developers deserve our own version.

So here's mine: if you could reach for just ONE tool or resource to develop an exhibit — physical, digital, or somewhere in between — what would it be?

I'm asking because one of my favorite ExhibiTricks side projects was a batch of short videos where museum folks from all over the world shared "Just One Thing" about exhibits. The answers were always more surprising (and more useful) than any tidy "best practices" list. So let's do a written version. Leave a comment below, or drop me a line, and tell me the single most indispensable exhibit development tool or resource in your kit.

To prime the pump, here are two tools that have earned permanent spots in my own list, that are pulled straight from the ExhibiTricks back catalog:

• Foam core and a decent cutting setup. Foam core is the bread and butter of exhibit development, but it's only as good as the blade you cut it with. A 48-inch metal straight edge and a sharp rotary cutter will save your sanity (and your fingertips). More in "The Hands-On Toolbox" post.

• 507movements.com. A "back to the future" gem: an animated, web-based version of Henry T. Brown's classic 1868 reference "507 Mechanical Movements." If you're building anything that moves (like gears, cranks, and linkages), it's an endlessly inspiring (and free) way to see how mechanisms actually work.

Those are three of mine. Now I want to hear yours. What's the one exhibit tool or resource you'd grab before anything else? Share it in the Comments Section below! I'll round up the best responses in a future post.

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

What Can a Guy Who Finds Strangers on the Internet Teach Us About Finding Stuff for Exhibits?

Have you found josemonkey yet?

If not, here's the elevator pitch: somebody sends him a short video (usually a few seconds of a parking lot, a backyard, a stretch of nondescript highway) and he tells them, often within striking distance, exactly where on Earth it was filmed. No metadata, no GPS tag, no cheating. Just the stuff that's "in the frame."

The magic (and it really does feel like magic the first time you watch it) is that there's no magic at all. He talks you through the whole thing. A particular species of tree narrows the hemisphere. The style of a guardrail, the color of a license plate, the font on a road sign, a half-glimpsed logo on a passing truck -- each little clue lops off another chunk of the globe until there's basically one place left standing. He gave a TEDx talk about the privacy implications of all this, which are real and worth taking seriously. But what keeps me watching is watching josemonkey think.

Because here's the thing, fellow museum folks: finding things is our job too.

Think about the last time you were handed a mystery photo from a collection. No caption, no date, a handful of people squinting into the sun in front of a building nobody can identify. What did you do? You read the shadows. You read the clothes. You zoomed into the storefront reflected in the window behind them. You noticed the streetcar wire, or the model of the car at the curb, or the way the trees were leafed out, and you started lopping off chunks of the possibility space until you had a decade, then a neighborhood, then a name. Same instinct. Same joy. We're all just geolocating in our own way.

And it doesn't stop at photo research. This is the exact muscle we flex every time we go hunting for objects to put on display. You need a period-correct milking stool for the dairy exhibit, or a plausible surveyor's chain, or a lunchbox that reads as "1962" to a fourth grader from across a gallery. You don't magic it into existence; you go clue by clue. What did the real thing look like? What material, what patina, what maker's mark? Where would one have survived, and who's selling it, and how do I tell the honest reproduction from the pretender? That's josemonkey-brain, pointed at eBay and estate sales instead of a highway shoulder.

Sourcing materials for a build is the same game one more time. Somebody points at a picture and says "make it feel like that," and now you're hunting for the specific laminate, the right weathered barnwood, the fabric that reads right under gallery lights and survives ten thousand small hands. Clue, clue, clue, answer.

I'll admit there's a Cheapbook-shaped reason I love this. None of what josemonkey does requires a fancy budget. His whole toolkit is paying attention, free maps, and stubbornness.

That's an enormously encouraging thing to remember when you're a small institution with a big idea and a tiny purchase order. The most valuable piece of research equipment in the building is still the trained eye of somebody who refuses to stop looking. No line item required.

So maybe the real lesson from a guy who finds strangers on the internet is this: the finding is the craft. Whether you're chasing a location, a caption, an object, or a scrap of the right material, the skill is the same: look harder than seems reasonable, follow the little clues, and don't quit until the answer has nowhere left to hide.

What's the best bit of exhibit detective work you've ever pulled off?

What was the clue that cracked it open? Tell me in the Comments Section below!

I collect these stories the way josemonkey collects rooftops.

Monday, July 13, 2026

Getting People INSIDE Museums When It's Gorgeous OUTSIDE

It's the height of summer, and you know the drill: the sun is out, the humidity is (mostly) tolerable, and every single person in your community has decided that today is the day to hit the beach, the lake, the pool, the trail, or basically anywhere that isn't your museum.

If I had a nickel for every summer weekend I thought, "Why would anyone go inside right now?" I'd have a lot of nickels, and probably a sunburn to match.

But here's the thing: "nice weather" isn't actually the enemy of museum attendance. Boring programming is the enemy of museum attendance. Nice weather just makes boring programming failures more visible, because suddenly people have somewhere else (somewhere free, somewhere with a breeze) to be instead.

So the question isn't "how do we compete with the beach?" You can't. Don't try. The real question is:

What can only happen inside your walls (or just outside them) that people can't get anywhere else?

Let's dig into a few approaches, with some real-world examples.

1. Stop fighting the outdoors — Annex it!

One of the smartest moves I keep seeing is museums refusing to treat "inside" and "outside" as a hard boundary. The Eric Carle Museum in Massachusetts hosts "Sunset Thursdays" all summer, featuring late hours, live jazz, picnicking on the museum grounds, and food trucks. All with the galleries just steps away for whenever people are ready to wander in. Nobody has to choose between "outside fun" and "museum visit." The museum grounds become the outside fun, and the collection is right there as a bonus.

You don't need a blockbuster traveling exhibition to pull this off. You need a lawn, some chairs, a local musician, and permission to stay open later than usual. The "innovation" here isn't technological, it's logistical and hospitality-focused. Low cost, high payoff.

2. Give the grown-ups a reason to show up without the kids

A huge chunk of "why would I go to a museum in summer" resistance comes from adults who mentally filed museums under "field trip" or "thing I do with my kids."

The After Dark/After Hours model exists specifically to break that association, and it's everywhere right now:

• The Exploratorium's After Dark series in San Francisco mixes cocktails and playful science and art programming for adults only.

• MIT Museum's After Dark leans into its research culture -- actual MIT scientists showing off current research, plus a DJ and a cash bar.

• Fernbank After Dark in Atlanta bills itself as "date night, friend night, and 'why haven't we done this before?' night" — which might be my favorite tagline in this whole roundup.

Notice what all of these have in common: they're not really about the exhibits changing. They're about permission and framing changing. Same building, same collection, completely different invitation. That's a cheap lever to pull if you've got the staffing bandwidth for evening hours.

3. Make "hands-on" mean something outdoors, too.

Boston Children's Museum runs outdoor pop-up exhibits built entirely around messy natural materials like mud, pinecones, and stones. No screens, no batteries, nothing that needs an IT ticket when it breaks. Just kids being gloriously, appropriately filthy in a controlled way. It's about as "down and dirty" as an exhibit gets, and it turns "but it's so nice out" into an argument for visiting rather than against it.

4. Lean into what only you can offer

The New York State Museum runs free weekday summer programming built around its own collection strengths, explicitly pitched as a way to beat the heat. That's smart framing: you're not competing with the beach, you're offering cool, calm, air-conditioned learning and fun.

This is where I'd push back gently on the instinct to just throw more tech at the "summer slump" problem. The museums having real success this summer aren't doing it with elaborate digital installations — they're doing it with live music, food trucks, docents, and content only they can provide because it lives in their collection or their expertise. Nobody's beating the beach with a touchscreen.

So what does this mean for your museum?

You probably don't need a $50,000 outdoor exhibit fabrication budget or a full liquor license overnight (though hey, if you've got one, use it). What you likely already have:

- A patch of grass or a plaza you could borrow for an evening

- Staff or community members who play music, tell stories, or lead a craft

- A collection with at least one thing that's genuinely fascinating after dark, after hours, or with a drink in hand

- A "why would anyone come inside today" skeptic on staff.

(That person is your best editor.)

Start there. Pick one Thursday and see who shows up!

Has your museum tried an after-hours or "beat the heat" program this summer?

What worked, or what totally flopped? Drop a comment below!

Friday, July 3, 2026

What Fireworks Can Teach Museums About Celebrating (America's 250th Edition!)

This summer, millions of people will stand outside, crane their necks, and go "oooooh" in unison at exploding balls of colored fire.

No labels. No touchscreens. No 400-word interpretive panels explaining the chemistry of strontium salts.

Just wonder, shared in public, with strangers.

As museums in the United States mark America's 250th birthday this weekend, it seems like the perfect moment to ask: what can fireworks teach us about designing celebrations and exhibits that people actually remember?

1. Fireworks are about pacing.

A good fireworks show doesn't fire everything at once. It builds. A few teasers, some quiet moments, a mid-show surprise, and then the finale that makes the car ride home worth it. Compare that to the anniversary exhibition that dumps 250 years of history onto the walls in a single, undifferentiated wash of artifacts and text. Visitors, like fireworks audiences, need rhythm: moments of intensity followed by moments to breathe (and to turn to the person next to them and say, "Did you SEE that?").

2. Fireworks are gloriously low-resolution.

Nobody complains that fireworks aren't in 4K. The "technology" is centuries old, and yet it reliably outperforms every LED wall and projection-mapped spectacle I've ever stood in front of. Production values don't create wonder — surprise, scale, and shared experience do. Before your museum drops six figures on an immersive installation, ask whether a simpler, more human-scaled experience might land harder.

3. Fireworks are a communal experience by design.

You can watch a fireworks video on your phone, but nobody does, because that's not the point. The point is being there, together, on a blanket, with kids running around and someone's uncle narrating every shell. The best anniversary programming works the same way. Don't just mount an exhibit about 1776 — create reasons for neighbors to gather, argue, celebrate, and add their own stories to the mix. A birthday party where the guests just observe isn't much of a party.

4. Anniversaries are prompts, not endpoints.

The most interesting Semiquincentennial projects I've seen ask forward-facing questions: What do we want the next 250 years to look like? What does founding-era language about liberty and self-governance mean on your block, in 2026? Those questions belong in science centers, children's museums, and art museums just as much as in history museums. Every institution has a stake in what comes next.

5. The finale isn't the whole show.

July 4, 2026 will come and go in a burst of light and a haze of smoke. But the neighbors you stood next to are still your neighbors on July 5th. Museums that use this anniversary to build lasting relationships with communities, schools, and local storytellers will still be reaping the benefits when the 251st rolls around and nobody's writing grant guidelines about it anymore.

So this weekend, when you're standing under the fireworks, do a little professional observation (we can't help ourselves, can we?). Watch how a centuries-old, decidedly analog experience holds a crowd of all ages in genuine, phone-lowering wonder.

Then ask yourself: how do we bottle that and set it off inside our museums for the next 250 years?

Happy 250th, everybody! Ooooh. Ahhhh.

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

A Leaf, a Blade, and a Whole Lot of Patience.

I'm always on the lookout for folks who turn the "ordinary" into something that stops you in your tracks.

Which is exactly why I want to introduce ExhibiTricks readers to Lito, a Japanese artist who does something deceptively simple: he cuts intricate scenes into single fallen leaves.

Yes, just a leaf. No paper, no canvas, no do-overs. Lito works in the Japanese tradition of kirie, or "cut picture," but instead of paper, he uses leaves. Lito started applying these techniques to leaves back in 2020, partly as a way to channel and focus the energy that comes with his ADHD. He'd never formally studied art or design; instead, his ideas come from childhood memories, family dinners, things he sees on TV, and ordinary daily life turned into "another world."

Each piece is cut from a single leaf, and Lito deliberately leaves the leaf's midrib intact in every cutout (a small, consistent gesture of respect toward his material). That's good design thinking right there; a signature constraint that becomes part of the story, not just a technical limitation.

If "tiny, ephemeral, single-object art" makes you wonder how on earth you build a whole museum around it, check out the LITO LEAF ART MUSEUM in Fukushima, a dedicated home for his work that's become a pilgrimage site for fans. As an exhibit designer, I'm fascinated by the challenge: how do you give scale, pacing, and context to art objects you can practically hold on one fingertip?

Lito also posts new work regularly on Instagram: @lito_leafart. It's a genuinely lovely feed to scroll through. Lito's IG feed is also where many of his audience first found him, leading to exhibitions across Japan and the publication of books of his work.

Lito's story is a nice reminder that you don't need elaborate materials or formal training to build a devoted audience. You need a distinctive point of view and a willingness to share your process where people already are (hello, social media). Museums and exhibit developers, take note.