At the museum, whimsy is afoot

This past weekend, we hosted the 15th Annual Night at the Museum. At a Halloween celebration, I expected costumes and candy and the predictable sugar-induced mischief. The Tampa Bay History Center team had organized face painting, excellent superhero photo ops, and many pirates in salty character. But what I hadn’t fully understood was how the galleries and artifacts themselves would be much more than mere backdrops (clearly, I need to rewatch the film that inspired the event’s name, I know). 

Children always enjoy encountering the pirates in our exhibits, but when those children are already in a mode of whimsy, creativity, exploration, and adventure, the experience is even more heightened. Kids love the life-size cabin in our A Land Remembered exhibit, but when they are dressed up as fairies and Dora the Explorer, the intense joy is over the top. 

I watched astronauts and witches traipsing through 14,500 years of human history. Hundreds of families came, and I had so many conversations across generations. Some identified as “museum families” – a point of pride. Some came for the first time. Still others only came for this event and wanted to come more frequently. 

The thread that ran through the day was sheer, unbridled imagination, and it brought to the fore the spirit of the museum enterprise. The invitation to explore. The swords held in their hands felt like a transporting artifact. Their capes were the capes worn by the pirates. Their “candy passport” where they checked off at specific stations were little maps that echoed the maps in our Touchton Map Library. 

Artifacts are portals. They make explorers of us all. And here were children arriving with their imaginations already running at full tilt, ready to step through.

It was the ultimate metaphor for the ideal museum experience.

The museums that orchestrate this well know this deeply. They inject the unexpected. They engineer joy and surprise and delight. With the right connections made between galleries and participants, history literally comes to life under an imaginative gaze. 

I loved seeing the whimsy afoot. The imagination at play. I watched the children with their full candy bags head off into the evening, their brains abuzz, hearts aflutter, senses of adventure galloping away. New memories of learning history threaded through with joy, with puckish delight, with the knowledge they can enter a time machine any time they wish, not just at Halloween.