James A. Michener Art Museum

The decision to go to Doylestown PA and the Michener Art Museum arose a year ago when I discovered that the Smithsonian had created a Jim Henson traveling exhibit. It is coming up to the Boston area in April of 2010, but I wanted to see it earlier, and considered where I could go to see it. I considered D.C. and Atlanta, but decided that the timing didn't work out quite right. Then, faced with more paid time off than I knew what to do with this fall, I decided to go on a small vacation and visit the exhibit in Pennsylvania.

The museum is located in the cultural center of Doylestown PA on the former site of the county prison that closed in the early 80s. The museum opened in 1988 and holds an extensive collection of Pennsylvanian art, and specifically a great collection of Bucks County art. It has a beautiful sculpture garden within the old stonework walls of the prison.

The decision to bring Jim Henson's Fantastic World to this museum was probably to increase the offerings for families in the area. The museum is directly next to the town library and there is a good working relationship between the two institutions. The day that I was at the museum there were a number of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts visiting the museum for the Jim Henson show. The museum set up activity rooms for the groups to further explore the themes and the library also had some joint programs to continue the experience.

To facilitate the groups and larger than expected numbers of visitors the museum set up a special sign in table for the scouts, and a separate check in for people going to the Jim Henson exhibit. (As unlike the normal ticket, these were time specific) The price of admission to the museum included the price of the special exhibit and was only 10 dollars per person and could be purchased in advance on their website using a very easy interface.

The exhibit itself was very good though very heavily paper artifact based, which was unexpected given the subject. There were a number of video screens set up around the room, and due the hordes of screaming scouts, the closed captioning on these videos was very helpful. The exhibit traced the life of Jim Henson and his growing creative process.

There was an audio tour available for download on their website, which I downloaded and listened to at home, and then forgot to bring my headphones into the exhibit, but as there were no signs about the audio tour, it is very unclear how this was supposed to relate to the exhibit. The audio tour was produced by the Smithsonian and traveled with the exhibit.

One of the most interesting things about the exhibit was watching people in their late twenties and early thirties excitedly talking to their children about what they remembered from Sesame Street, and the kids looking on a bit bored. While it was on a "kid friendly topic" the people who got the most out of the exhibit were much older than the small children running everywhere.

My favorite part was the old commercials that he had done early in his career for Wilkins Coffee
See some of these commericals on youtube! (Early version of Kermit!)

What was your favorite memory of Jim Henson and the Muppets?