Masks, Portals, and Non-Museums
Every few years, someone outside the museum world builds something that makes all of us inside the museum world squirm a little.
People line up around the block. They pay real money (often more than museum admission). They come back again and again. And they tell their friends with the kind of breathless enthusiasm we'd love to hear about our galleries.
So instead of grumbling about "those immersive things," let's look at what a few of them do right and steal (er, borrow) their best ideas.
Sleep No More: Let visitors choose their own path
For many of us in New York, Sleep No More was the gold standard. The show adapted Macbeth, stripping away nearly all of its spoken dialogue and setting it mainly in a dimly lit, 1930s-style establishment called the McKittrick Hotel. Instead of sitting in seats, audiences wandered at their own pace through a set filled with actors. The production closed after its matinee on Sunday, January 5, 2025, but drew more than two million attendees over its 14-year run.
What can museums take from it?
• The threshold matters. After checking their coats, visitors "checked in" at a themed reception desk, got a playing card that set their entry time, and waited in a themed hotel jazz bar until called. The experience started long before the "exhibit" did. How much thought do we give to our lobbies, coat checks, and ticket lines?
• Anonymity is freedom. Audiences wore anonymizing Venetian-style masks that encouraged a sense of freedom and lowered inhibition. Many adult museum visitors are self-conscious about "playing" in public. What small cues could give them permission?
• Nobody sees everything, and that's okay. Every visitor left with a different story. Museums often design experiences as if everyone must see every panel in order. What if we designed for discovery instead of completion?
Meow Wolf: Story as connective tissue
Meow Wolf began as an artist collective in Santa Fe, and its original location, House of Eternal Return, is in a former bowling alley where visitors meet a full-size Victorian-style house at night. It was a hit, drawing more than 400,000 visitors and grossing $6.8 million in its first year. Today, Meow Wolf locations include Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Denver, Grapevine, and Houston, with a seventh permanent space announced for Pier 17 in New York.
What makes it work isn't just the neon. Each location is part art exhibit, part escape room, part scavenger hunt, and for visitors who look hard enough, the Meow Wolf crew has woven an amorphous narrative across its locations.
That's the lesson I keep coming back to: layered depth. Casual visitors can just enjoy the spectacle. Curious visitors can dig into the story. Obsessive visitors can piece together clues across multiple cities. Museum exhibits can work the same way: a "wow" layer, an "ah-ha" layer, and a "rabbit hole" layer for the folks who want to go deeper.
And a note of caution from my "skeptical of tech for its own sake" corner: the magic at Meow Wolf mostly comes from hand-built, physical, artist-made environments. Secret doors in refrigerators are pretty low-tech!
Fantasy Non-Museum of Plovdiv: Local character as the collection
Here's one many of you may not know yet. In Bulgaria, a creative group opened the Fantasy Non-Museum of Plovdiv in August 2025, right in the heart of the city. It's a three-story house with no showcases, only experiences.
The Non-Museum describes itself as a place where visitors, guided by comic characters through a blend of analog and digital experiences, explore interactive installations, VR, graffiti art, and surreal stories that blur the line between the real and the fantastical. What I love most is how it celebrates a place's personality.
The Non-Museum pays tribute to local legends like Mitko the Sock Man, Autograph Stephan, and Maestro Bhagavan. These are the kinds of neighborhood characters that most "official" history museums would never think to include, yet they're exactly what locals love, and visitors remember.
It's also refreshingly modest in scale compared to the big immersive players: the total investment was BGN 680,000. One visitor review sums up the sweet spot nicely: the information was massive, but presented in such creative and diverse ways that it never overwhelmed. (Isn't that what we're all trying to do?)
So, what are the takeaways for museums?
Pulling these threads together, here's what I think all these "non-museum" experiences are teaching us:
1. Design the whole journey, not just the galleries. The experience starts at the curb, not at the first exhibit.
2. Give visitors agency. Let them choose paths, follow curiosity, and miss things.
3. Build in layers. Spectacle for some, story for others, deep clues for the devoted.
4. Celebrate the quirky and local. Your town's "Sock Man" may be more memorable than your most valuable artifact.
5. Grant permission to play, especially to adults.
6. Remember that spectacle is not the same as meaning. The best immersive experiences use atmosphere to serve a story, not replace one.
My biggest takeaway: Museums have something these attractions often don't: real objects, real stories, and real expertise. We don't need to become Meow Wolf. We just need to remember that being trustworthy and being delightful aren't mutually exclusive.
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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