Arts at the Exploratorium
Brief History

The doors opened at the Exploratorium in the fall of 1969 because Frank Oppenheimer, its founder, neglected to lock them one morning. When a curious visitor accidentally wandered in and began looking at the handful of exhibits, Frank commented, “I guess we’re open.”

He was working to create and build the hands-on exhibits that within a few years would become the archetype for interactive museums around the world. In the meantime he exhibited, among other things, Cybernetic Serendipity, a London show of technologically generated art curiosities. It was the first public exhibition to link art, science and electronic technology. He also produced experimental sound and light works at night. Performances were designed to make a lot of noise and draw a crowd. The Exploratorium quickly gained a reputation for experimental work and became a magnet for Bay Area artists and composers.

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The point is that from the beginning, Oppenheimer believed that art needed to be integral to a science museum, a philosophy that still distinguishes the Exploratorium from other science institutions. Within a year of the Exploratorium’s “opening,” artist Bob Miller came to demonstrate his experiments with light and shadow. Thus came the first artwork to be commissioned by the Exploratorium itself – Sun Painting. Twenty-five years later, Miller’s piece remains one of the most successful ever created at the museum. It accomplishes the difficult task of being both a model science exhibit and a consummate work of art, breaking sunlight into its component colors and mixing them using mirrors.

In 1971, Oppenheimer hired artist Peter Richards as an exhibit builder, one of the first artists to navigate a machine shop culture dominated by an anarchic and challenging group of physicists, engineers, electricians, woodworkers, and machinists. In 1974, the National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A.) invited Oppenheimer to write a proposal to fund an Artist-in-Residence (A.I.R.) Program. Peter Richards stayed on to run that program. (To this day, his Wave Organ is an iconic public environmental sculpture in the Bay.)

The Exploratorium became not so much a studio, as a laboratory for artistic investigations. Its main goal remains identical to the mission set out in the museum’s first days: to provide artists with the chance to use the shop with its rich human and mechanical resources; to explore the unique opportunity for access to expert scientific instruction, collaborative investigation, and construction; and to provide new exhibits or experiences for the museum’s audiences.

The use of artists at the Exploratorium evolved, on its own independent track. For thirty years, 4-6 artists have been in residence each year, creating artworks that become exhibits. The art and artists have been diverse: stand-alone artworks that describe nature from the artist’s perspective; music series featuring the biggest names in experimental music; poets-in-residence, theater companies-in-residence, guerilla artworks that were one night installations by multiple artists, a kind of Burning Man breeding ground without the desert, and long-term exhibitions on science phenomena using the works of artists.

With the major advances in computing, the Internet and new fields of science, the art world has moved closer to where the Exploratorium has always been. Think of Eduardo Kac’s controversial bunny glowing green with the implanted phosphorescence of the jellyfish gene. That animal, “created” by a French laboratory, shocked the art world and was never exhibited in the public space for which it was conceived. Yet, one of the Exploratorium’s science exhibits features glowing worms implanted with the same phosphorescent GFP gene. (Incidentally, Kac has also been an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium, where he incorporated a genetically modified plant in a provocative exhibit.)

Among other artists who have been associated with the Exploratorium in its forty-year history are three MacArthur “genius” award-winners: environmental and public artist Ned Kahn, who was an artist on staff for fifteen years; the composer and artist Trimpin; and composer/multimedia artist Walter Kitundu, who is still on staff. Among others in the more than 300 artists who have spent time at the Exploratorium are John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Brian Eno. In celebration of the Exploratorium’s 40th Anniversary, take a look back at one of our most popular programs, the Speaking of Music series, which ran from 1983-1991. See video here.

Arts at the Exploratorium have caused a ripple effect over the years, disseminating Exploratorium attitudes, interests, methods, and philosophies to other museums around the world. The museum itself has had a strong influence on art-making in the Bay Area, equal to any of the private or public art schools. It is as much a resource for the arts as for the science community – locally, nationally, even internationally.

Check out http://www.exploratorium.edu/40th/