Material World: Sourcing Smarter for Museum Exhibits

Here's a confession: some of my favorite exhibit moments have not come from clever interpretive frameworks or brilliant visitor research, but from wandering the aisles of a restaurant supply store, a theatrical prop house, or a salvage yard, and thinking, "Wait. What if I used THAT?"

Materials make or break museum exhibits. Not just visually, but functionally, monetarily, and (increasingly) ethically. So let's talk about how to find better materials in smarter ways.

Look Everywhere Except the "Usual" Places

The best exhibit materials often aren't in the exhibit supply catalog. Here are some sourcing categories that don't get enough love:

Theatrical and film suppliers. Places like Rose Brand stock an astonishing range of fabrics, rigging hardware, specialty foams, and surface treatments that withstand heavy use because they're designed for stage abuse. They're also frequently cheaper than "museum-grade" equivalents.

Industrial and restaurant supply houses. Stainless steel surfaces, heavy-duty casters, food-safe containers, rubberized mats — if you need something that will survive 300 sticky-fingered visitors a day, it helps to source from industries built around that kind of punishment.

Hardware stores (go deeper than aisle 3!) Most exhibit builders know their way around Home Depot. But have you spent time in the plumbing fittings section? The electrical conduit aisle? The concrete additives shelf? Unexpected textures, forms, and structural possibilities are hiding in plain sight.

Makers and fabricators outside the museum world. Sign shops, boat builders, auto body suppliers, and custom furniture makers all work with materials and finishing techniques that translate beautifully into exhibit applications — and they often have scrap or surplus material available cheaply or for free.

Sample libraries. Material sample collections like Material ConneXion  (now part of Fashionary) catalog thousands of innovative materials from around the world — including bio-based, recycled, and engineered composites that might spark a whole new exhibit direction.

Know What You're Choosing (and Why)

Before you spec any material, ask three questions:

1. Can it survive real visitor contact?  Test it. Scratch it. Get it wet. Drop it.

2. Will it off-gas anything harmful? Especially important for enclosed or artifact-adjacent cases. The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts has useful guidance here.

3. What happens to it at the end of the exhibit's life?

That last question matters more than ever right now.

Going Green (For Real)

Sustainability in exhibit design has moved well past "we used recycled paper in our labels." 

Ditch the foam core. Foam core takes up to 500 years to decompose, creates microplastics, and releases harmful chemicals — including styrene, identified as a carcinogen. Alternatives like Falconboard (made primarily from renewable forest products and fully recyclable) are increasingly accessible. Ask your printer what they can actually source locally before you spec anything.

Watch your wood. Composite woods like standard plywood are often bonded with formaldehyde adhesives that emit toxic fumes that are damaging to artifacts and people alike. Formaldehyde-free options are increasingly available; even Home Depot now carries FSC-certified birch plywood. Products like Medite FR (formaldehyde-free MDF with a fire rating) thread the needle between green credentials and code compliance.

Modular = sustainable.  MoMA has reduced exhibition construction waste by 82% through practices such as refurbishing and reusing display cases across exhibitions and carefully dismantling bespoke installations for donation or reuse elsewhere. Designing for disassembly isn't just an environmental win; it's a budget win for future projects.

Source locally. Looking for materials and fabrication services locally reduces transportation emissions and supports the local economy. A fabricator 20 minutes away beats one across the country, in terms of carbon footprint, communication, and the ability to do a quick site visit when things go sideways.

Resource Toolkits The Sustainable Exhibition Design & Construction Toolkit from the American Alliance of Museums is worth bookmarking. The Museum of Vancouver's SAGE Project has also developed an impressive toolkit for the selection, construction, and deconstruction of exhibitions, including a materials exchange hub concept.

New Materials Worth Knowing

A few materials on my radar right now:

Ecoresin panels are co-polyester panels with recycled content that can embed textiles, natural objects, and textures. 

Xorel is a woven textile wall covering that's eco-friendly, highly durable, and available in a wide range of patterns and textures. Great for sensory surfaces.

FLOR carpet tiles are made with renewable, recycled, and recyclable content, with the company taking back old tiles for recycling and reconstitution into new materials. 

The direct-to-substrate process uses inkjet printing directly onto substrates up to 2 inches thick, allowing you to reuse the same physical panel across multiple exhibit iterations. A big sustainability upside that's increasingly cost-effective.

The Bottom Line

Smart material sourcing isn't about finding the fanciest new product; it's about building the habit of looking in unexpected places, asking better questions before you buy, and thinking beyond the current project to what happens next.

The best material for your exhibit may be sitting in a salvage yard, a theatrical supply house, or a restaurant supply store, waiting for someone curious enough to wander in and ask, "What could this become?"

As always, I'd love to hear what unexpected materials YOU'VE found useful in your exhibit work. Let us know in the "Comments Section" below!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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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Museum/Exhibit/Design Inspiration: "Nature's Reflection"

I love the elegantly executed installation "Nature's Reflection" by Brooklyn-based brothers and artists ICY and SOT.

Like many great design ideas, Nature's Reflection seems quite obvious after you see it, yet still creates a quite powerful and thought-provoking impression.

You can find out more about the entire range of ICY and SOT's work by clicking over to their website or Instagram account.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Revisiting "Staff over Stuff"

Every so often, I revisit an old ExhibiTricks post and think, "Yep — still true. Maybe even more true now." That's exactly where I find myself with this one.

When I first wrote a version of this post in 2020, the pandemic had just laid bare some uncomfortable truths about how museums really value (or don't value) the people who make them run. Fast forward to 2026, and the landscape hasn't gotten easier — if anything, the pressures on museum workers have intensified. So I'm sharing this one again, hoping it sparks some useful conversations at your institution. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

What are the things museums and other cultural institutions need to focus on to become stronger, more equitable, and more community-centered organizations?

Here are five things that I've been continuing to think about:

1) Staff > Stuff

One of the first ways museums could become more genuinely people-centered (instead of merely talking about it on their social media accounts) is to clearly prioritize staff over “stuff.” This requires museum management, boards, and museum organizations to act as if they care more for the people working at a museum than for museum collections or buildings. (Of course, you need trained staff to care for collections and facilities properly, but that’s an entirely different story.)

Pay remains one of the most significant ongoing issues in the museum world. It is wrong, if not downright immoral, to hire someone for full-time work at a museum and to knowingly pay them less than a living wage. And many museum workers are woefully and deliberately underpaid. Let’s pause here to acknowledge that many museum administrators are master rationalizers and can spin stories to justify some of their staff needing to work one (or more!) jobs in addition to their full-time museum employment to make ends meet. 

So rather than relying on someone’s rosy notion of what a “living wage” means in different parts of the country, why not use a common yardstick? Fortunately, MIT has developed a free Web-based Living Wage Calculator (https://livingwage.mit.edu/) that anyone can use to determine what a living wage means in different parts of the U.S. All museums should commit to offering their employees a living wage. 

2) Flatten the Org Chart!

The traditional “top-down” hierarchical business structures of most museums contribute to the isolation of museum departments and functions. Instead of creating collaborators moving toward common goals, most museum org charts create multi-level “silos” that compete for limited resources – often pulling in different directions. Front-line and public-facing museum workers often feel that decisions handed down from the “higher-ups” are arbitrary or “out of touch” with the operational realities of running the museum.

Worse yet, museum employees facing severe issues such as the reported instances of sexual harassment or even physical abuse(!) from managers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were routinely ignored or dismissed. The museum management hierarchy simply sought to protect itself. 

Hierarchical structures in museums also contribute to pay inequities across departments. Shouldn’t the roles of Education, Exhibits, and Development departments be viewed as equally important to museums’ purpose and function, and therefore compensated equitably? Museums can systematically change staffing and management approaches by “flattening” their org charts and promoting the true interdependence among workers and departments.

What would a museum system built on self-organization principles look like in practice? At its core, “self-management” means knowing what you are responsible for and having the freedom to meet those expectations however you think is best. “Self-organization” is the ability to make changes to improve things beyond what is required of you. Simple in theory, but everyone has to truly commit for it to work!

3) Communities as True Creative Partners

Whose stories are museums telling, and who is visiting museums to experience the exhibits, programs, and events related to those stories? As researchers like Susie Wilkening have shown (http://www.wilkeningconsulting.com/data-stories.html), museum visitors are concerned about a broad range of issues, but can museums provide what their communities want and need – and in a timely way? There are large groups of people that museums are simply not reaching. Visitors to cultural arts organizations, including museums, continue to skew older and whiter than the U.S. general population.

How can museums counteract the notion that “museums are not for me”? I would contend that, rather than merely presenting stories, museums also need to engage with their communities as real creative partners. That way, museums no longer become the only authorities and sole judges of the value of certain stories over others. This systemic shift toward co-creation with communities may well upset museums with a “Curators Uber Alles” approach, but demographic realities point in a different direction.

An excellent example of a museum that sought to reinvent itself with a more community and visitor-centric approach is the Oakland Museum of California (https://museumca.org/). A book outlining their work, “How Visitors Changed Our Museum” is available online. 

4) Money Changes Everything

The continuing mismatch between cultural institutions’ operational needs and the available funding sources has made even more evident the weak financial positions of so many museums.

This raises a sort of “museum lifeboat” question: should unsustainable museums be allowed (or even encouraged) to go out of business so they don’t drain limited resources from more vital institutions?

This is a tricky proposition since many museums really can’t survive without constant (if erratic) infusions of cash from both private and governmental sources. The long-term systemic solution here is to create reliable public funding streams for all museums through political pressure at both the local and national levels. We should support and vote for politicians who view museums as necessary to civic life as libraries, police stations, or garbage trucks. The politicians who eliminated organizations like IMLS, NEH, and NEA are no friends to museums.

More systemic public funding of cultural organizations would also reduce the dependence of museums on wealthy donors and reduce the systemic and ethical dilemmas caused by balancing selling objects from the collections versus preventing the firing of staff -- which brings us back to “staff versus stuff” again. Although in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, “stuff” seems to be winning the battle -- if you consider examples such as the Museum of Modern Art (with an endowment of over one billion dollars) terminating every single contract of all 85 of its freelance educators in April 2020 or the Royal Academy in the U.K. that refused to sell one Michelangelo statue to save the jobs of nearly 150 museum workers in September 2020.

5) Leaving the "Numbers Game" Behind

Ultimately, to change the current museum “system,” we need to leave the “numbers game” behind. The notion that admissions numbers are an accurate measure of a museum’s worth, or of the value of a museum visit to visitors, may be a more severe sickness affecting the museum world than even COVID-19.

Randi Korn’s book, Intentional Practice for Museums: A Guide for Maximizing Impact, offers meaningful alternatives to the museum admissions figures “numbers game.” Many museum leaders and boards continue to be deluded by an “edifice complex.” The reckless rush to build larger, grander new museums without considering whether we can sustain them has to stop. If we cannot sustain (parse that word in as many ways as you like) existing museums worldwide, should we really be adding to the number of new museums?

Can we bring the required sense of urgency and the necessary hard decisions to the tasks ahead? 

Museums have talked a great game for years (even decades!) about systemic inequities and failings in the museum field – often with little, if any, real change. The current moment requires not just talk but timely and creative actions.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Your Museum and America's Big Birthday Party

July 4, 2026, is coming fast — and it's not just for history museums.

The U.S. 250th anniversary is one of those rare cultural moments when everyone is paying attention. Science centers, children's museums, and natural history institutions all have a genuine stake in this celebration. The question isn't whether to participate — it's how to do it in a way that feels authentic to your institution, not like you slapped a tricorn hat on your usual programming.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Science Centers can explore the remarkable scientific curiosity of the Founding era — Franklin's electricity experiments, Jefferson's obsessive botanical collecting, George Washington's early work as a surveyor, and the Lewis & Clark expedition as one of the great scientific adventures in American history. The 18th century was buzzing with scientific inquiry. Lean into that.

Children's Museums can frame experiences around the simple, powerful question: "What does it mean to be an American?" Invite kids (and families) to add their voices, stories, and drawings to a living community mural or memory wall. 

Natural History Museums can highlight how America's landscape shaped its people. Westward migration, the role of rivers and geography in settlement patterns, and Indigenous relationships with the land that predate 1776 by millennia.

The unifying thread? Make it personal, tactile, and local. Every community has its own semiquincentennial story hiding in plain sight, and it's probably right outside your museum's front door.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Take It Inside! When Museums Bring the Great Outdoors In

Museum visitors want to DO things. Preferably, things that are slightly surprising, a little bit physical, and things they may not be able to do anywhere else.

That's why some of my favorite exhibit ideas flip the usual script. Instead of asking visitors to imagine the outside world from inside a building, these exhibits just... drag the outside world inside. No bus. No field trip permission slips. Just a great big "yes, and."

The Humble Sock Skating Rink

Let's start with the obvious hero of this post. The indoor sock-skating rink has quietly become one of the most visitor-beloved (and cost-effective!) temporary exhibit ideas in Children's Museums. Kick off your shoes, slide around a smooth surface on your socks, and suddenly you're a winter sport athlete — no Zamboni required.

Boston Children's Museum's Snowmazing! has been running this indoor winter experience for a remarkable 10 years now, pairing sock skating with igloo fort building and a Northern Lights-inspired art installation. 

Out in Santa Barbara, MOXI's Seaside Sock Skating takes the concept in an off-kilter direction; it's on the museum's roof,  with ocean views! They even suggest cotton socks for the best glide performance. (Science!) 

The genius of the sock rink isn't the surface material. You've taken away the barriers — cold, cost, gear, age restrictions — and just given families the pure kinetic joy of sliding around together. 

A video or graphic teaches kids about ice skating. A sock rink produces genuine delight, some wobbly balance practice, and the occasional spectacular fall.

Going Further: Other Outdoor-to-Indoor Wins

Sock rinks may be the poster child, but the broader concept has legs. Here are a few more examples worth stealing inspiration from:

The Providence Children's Museum has "Little Woods," which drops visitors into a colorful indoor woodland complete with tree climbing, caves, and animal costumes. It's not a forest, but it feels like one, and that emotional hook matters enormously.

Boston Children's Museum also features a full indoor nature exhibit called "Investigate,"  where kids and families can crawl under a turtle tank for a bug's-eye view, or handle natural specimens.

Museums that capture the sensory, physical essence of an outdoor experience and bring it indoors in an accessible, repeatable way are the ones that get return visits.

What "outdoors-in" exhibit ideas have you seen (or created!) that deserve a shoutout? Drop them in the Comments Section below!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Where are Your Museum's "Fans" on Super Bowl Sunday?

Super Bowl Sunday will be a great day to visit your local museum --- because it will be even quieter than usual. 

Why are so many people, even folks who don't normally follow football, more rabidly enthusiastic about watching the "Big Game" or attending a local Super Bowl event than visiting your museum?

  

I'd say one possible answer lies in finding the difference between a "fan" and a "casual visitor."  Fans wear logo gear all year long and have no compunction in excitedly telling total strangers how great their team is.

So how can museums create more "fans" and expand their demographic reach as well?  

Places like the City Museum in St. Louis have set out to be gathering spots for their local communities and have opened up to all sorts of fun ideas that are edgy enough to attract a wide, enthusiastic audience of repeat visitors who definitely become City Museum fans.

Of course, all this talk of creating "museum fans" is pointless if your museum isn't really fan-worthy.  Is your admissions procedure torture?  Do you create core exhibits and attractions that are worth revisiting, or do you depend on the hucksterism of events that are only vaguely related to your museum's mission and purpose?  What are the obstacles that prevent your visitors from becoming fans?

Let's see if we can create more museum fans. 

  

GO MUSEUMS!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"