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?
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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