New Year, New Exhibits Approaches

You know that exhibit in your museum? The one with the hand crank that stopped working last July? Or the touchscreen that's been displaying "Loading..." since Thanksgiving? Maybe it's the fabric panel that's faded to the point where visitors squint at it like they're deciphering ancient hieroglyphics.

We've all been there. January brings that fresh-start energy, and while you might be Marie Kondo-ing your sock drawer at home, it's also the perfect time to take an honest look at your exhibit floor.

The question isn't whether your exhibits need attention—they do. The real question is: what kind of attention do they need?

The Keep, Fix, or Farewell Framework

Think of this as triage for your museum floor. Not every exhibit problem requires the same solution, and treating them all the same way is how you end up either throwing away perfectly good exhibits or carrying dead weight.

Keep & Maintain: These are your workhorses. Visitors love them, they're holding up well, and they just need regular care. Oil the gears, replace the worn rope, refresh that label copy. This is routine maintenance, not crisis management.

Fix & Refresh: These exhibits still have good bones, but they need real intervention. Maybe the concept is solid, but the execution has worn thin. Maybe visitor behavior has changed since you installed it. These need intentional work, but they're worth saving.

Farewell & Replace: This is the "tough love" category. Some exhibits have simply run their course. The technology is obsolete, the maintenance burden is crushing your staff, or visitors just walk past it without a second glance.

Ask the Hard Questions

Before you decide which category each exhibit falls into, gather some real data:

Is it still being used as intended?  Stand and watch for twenty minutes. Are visitors actually engaging with it, or just triggering it accidentally while reaching for the hand sanitizer dispenser?

What's the maintenance burden? Track how many staff hours per month go into keeping this thing functional. If your educator is spending five hours weekly unjamming the marble run, that's not an exhibit—that's a part-time job.

Does it still serve your visitors?  Museums change, neighborhoods change, audiences change. An exhibit that worked brilliantly in 2015 might feel irrelevant now, and that's okay.

What would repair actually cost? Not just parts and materials—include staff time, opportunity cost, and the very real possibility that you'll be having this same conversation again in six months.

Low-Cost Refresh Strategies (My Favorite Part)

Here's where scrappy museum thinking really shines. You don't always need a capital campaign to breathe new life into an exhibit.

Surface Solutions: Sometimes it's as simple as replacing a worn tabletop, painting a scuffed frame, or recovering a cushion. Fresh surfaces signal "cared for" to visitors.

Graphics Refresh: New labels, updated colors, contemporary fonts. You'd be amazed at how much visual fatigue contributes to "exhibit invisibility." A $200 graphics order can make a five-year-old exhibit feel new.

Add Challenge Layers: Your gear table is fine, but visitors master it in thirty seconds. Add prompt cards with new challenges: "Can you make the gears spin backwards?" "Build the tallest tower that still turns." Fresh engagement without rebuilding anything.

Swap the Variables: Keep the structure, change what visitors manipulate. Your shadow wall works great—rotate which objects cast shadows with the seasons. Your water table is solid—swap out the boats for different designs every quarter.

Strategic Component Replacement: Replace just the tired piece while keeping everything else. The pulley system is great, but the buckets are cracked? New buckets are cheaper than a new exhibit.

Red flags that signal an exhibit needs to go:

- Repair costs approaching 60-70% of replacement cost

- Maintenance demands are preventing you from developing new work

- Safety concerns that can't be fixed without gutting the whole thing

- Visitor engagement has dropped to near zero despite refresh attempts

- The underlying concept no longer aligns with your mission

Decommissioning doesn't mean failure. It means you're making space for something better.

The graceful exit: Document what worked and what didn't. Photograph it. Save components that might be useful elsewhere. If it served visitors well for years, honor that. Then let it go.

Repurpose what you can: That sturdy frame might become your next exhibit's foundation. Those motors could drive something new. The plexiglass always has another use. Museums should be experts at adaptive reuse.

Make This Manageable

Don't try to evaluate your entire museum in one week. Pick a gallery or a zone. Spend an afternoon observing, taking notes, and being brutally honest. Then make decisions exhibit by exhibit.

Create three literal lists: Keep, Fix, Farewell. Assign realistic timelines. Fix doesn't mean "someday when we get a grant." It means Q2 2026 with a specific plan.

The museums that feel fresh and vital aren't necessarily the ones with the newest exhibits. They're the ones where someone is paying attention, making thoughtful decisions, and refusing to accept "that's just how it is" as an answer.

So walk your floor with fresh eyes this month. Your exhibits (and your visitors!) will thank you.

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"

Frame by Frame: What Two Graphic Novels Can Teach Us About Museum Storytelling

If you're looking for fresh inspiration for your next museum exhibit, pick up a graphic novel.

I recently read Guy Delisle's "Muybridge" and Lauren Redniss's "Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout," and both books made me think hard about how we tell stories in museum spaces. Each provides compelling examples in visual storytelling that translate directly to exhibit design challenges we face every day.

Motion Studies and Sequential Revelation

Delisle's "Muybridge" tells the story of Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneering photographer who essentially invented motion pictures by breaking down animal and human movement into sequential images. Delisle uses the static medium of comics (itself based on sequential art) to tell the story of someone who revolutionized how we see movement.

What struck me most was how Delisle varies his panel layouts to echo Muybridge's own photographic grids. Some pages feature rigid, uniform panels that mimic Muybridge's famous motion studies, while others break free into more dynamic compositions when depicting the drama of his personal life (including a murder trial that reads like a Victorian soap opera).

The exhibit takeaway: Think about how your visitors move through space and encounter information sequentially. Just as Muybridge broke down a galloping horse into 12 frames, we can break down complex ideas into digestible moments. The pacing matters. Sometimes you want uniform, predictable "panels" (like a series of identical cases showing technological progression), and sometimes you need to disrupt that rhythm with a dramatic reveal or an unexpected spatial break.

I've used this approach in exhibits where we're explaining a multi-step process. Instead of a single massive graphic panel trying to show everything at once, we create stations that visitors encounter in sequence, like frames in a motion study. The physical movement through space becomes part of the learning.

Materiality as Metaphor

Redniss's "Radioactive" is a visual knockout. She uses a unique visual language in which no two pages look alike. Text appears in hand-drawn lettering that changes size, color, and style. Images are layered, scratched, collaged, and printed using a cyan-magenta split that creates this eerie, glowing quality—perfect for a book about radioactivity.

The book's physical form is the message. Pages feel unstable, dangerous, beautiful, and unpredictable, exactly like radiation itself. Redniss uses cyanotype prints (a historical photographic process) to tie the book's materiality directly to the Curies' era and their scientific work.

The exhibit takeaway: Your materials and fabrication methods are part of your content, not just decoration. We often default to standard exhibit systems and conventional graphics because they're easier and cheaper, but sometimes the medium needs to match the message.

When I'm working on exhibits, I think about how materials can transport visitors. Rough-hewn wood for agricultural exhibits. Cold metal and institutional fixtures for exhibits about industrialization or medical history. Soft, tactile materials for exhibits about childhood or domestic life. The sensory experience reinforces the content.

Nice example of materials use from Hiferty & Associates

Redniss also does something brilliant with how she handles scientific concepts. When explaining radioactive decay, she doesn't give us a traditional diagram. Instead, elements appear and disappear across spreads, fading and transforming visually. 

We can do this in exhibits, too. Instead of static diagrams that explain processes, consider how light, shadow, motion, or even the visitor's own movement can reveal or demonstrate concepts. Exhibits where visitors cast shadows that show how X-rays work, or where walking past a panel makes images appear to decay or transform.

Negative Space and What's Left Unsaid

Both books use white space brilliantly. Delisle often isolates his figures against blank backgrounds, focusing our attention. Redniss uses negative space to create mood—empty pages feel lonely, crowded compositions feel chaotic.

The exhibit takeaway:  We tend to pack exhibits full of content because we're afraid of "wasting" space. But emptiness is a tool. Strategic negative space gives visitors room to think, breathe, and process what they've just experienced.

Some of the most powerful exhibit moments I've encountered have been simple benches placed where they overlook something meaningful, or blank walls that let a single object command attention. The space around your content is part of the composition.

Personal Stories, Scientific Content

Both books root scientific achievement in deeply personal, often messy human stories. Muybridge's technological innovations are inseparable from his toxic marriage and a murder that results. The Curies' scientific partnership is a love story, and their scientific legacy is measured in both Nobel Prizes and radiation poisoning.

The exhibit takeaway: We know visitors connect with personal narratives, but we sometimes treat "the science stuff" and "the human-interest stuff" as separate tracks. These books show how they're on the same track. The messy human details are what make the scientific achievements comprehensible and meaningful.

When developing exhibits, resist the urge to sanitize the personal stories or to relegate them to sidebar "fun facts." Let the human drama drive the narrative and let the science grow organically from it. Your middle school visitors will remember Marie Curie carrying vials of glowing radium in her pockets more than they'll remember atomic weight numbers.

The Bottom Line

If you're stuck on an exhibit concept, if your layouts feel stale, or if you're struggling to translate complex content into three-dimensional space, spend some time with ambitious graphic novels. They're dealing with the exact same challenges we face -- how to guide someone through a narrative using sequential images, text, and physical form. They're just using paper instead of drywall.

"Muybridge" and "Radioactive" are excellent starting points, but there are dozens more. Richard McGuire's "Here" tells stories spanning thousands of years, all from one fixed viewpoint in a house. Perfect inspiration for exhibits about places with deep histories.

The best museum exhibits and the best graphic novels share the same DNA: they're both about using visual sequence, spatial relationships, and material choices to create meaning. They both ask readers/visitors to actively construct understanding rather than just passively receive information.

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"

Happy New PROJECTS!

2026 sounds like a date from a retro sci-fi novel where we should all be commuting via jetpack. While the jetpacks might be on backorder, the future is definitely here. And looking at the calendar, the "Holiday Fog" has finally lifted. The confetti has been swept up, the champagne flutes are put away, and now we are left with the most exciting (and terrifying) thing in the museum world:

The Blank Whiteboard

Maybe you have a gallery that’s been collecting dust since 2022. Maybe you have a grant deadline looming that requires "innovative engagement" (whatever that means this week). Or maybe you just have a team that is talented but tired, and needs a creative jolt to get the gears turning again.

If you are looking at 2026 and thinking, "We need to do something different this year," then you and I need to talk.

Why 2026 Needs More POW!

At POW! we don't do "business as usual." We don’t do dusty cases or labels that read like textbooks. We believe that if a visitor isn't smiling, surprising themselves, or getting their hands dirty, we haven't done our job.

This year, I’m looking for partners who are ready to embrace the idea that you don't need a million dollars to create a million-dollar experience. You need ingenuity, a bit of bravery, and a lot of prototyping.

Here is how we can partner up to make your 2026 projects awesome:

Whirlwind Workshops: Does your staff feel stuck? I’ll come in for a day (or two), dump a pile of materials on the table, and teach your team some prototyping tricks! It’s hands-on internal capacity building that actually sticks.

The "Un-Sticker": Have a project that has stalled in committee meetings hell? Bring me in as a creative catalyst. I’m great at cutting through the noise and getting to the "fun part" of the visitor experience.

Life is too short for boring exhibits!

Let’s make 2026 the year we stop talking about innovation and start building it.

If you’re ready to add a little POW! to your museum this year, then let’s talk about how we can turn that blank whiteboard into your visitors' favorite new experience.

Happy New Year, and Happy NEW PROJECTS!

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"