Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2018

I was the exhibition designer on this show with curator, Meghan Melvin, graphic designer, Eben Haines, studio manager, Quinn Corte, and production by Neal Johnson and Cyrille Conan.

This exhibition traced the history of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by E.H. Shepard through an immersive display, taking visitors directly into the story setting, while being surrounded by drawings, letters, photographs and ephemera.

The show first opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum and then travelled to the MFA. Most of the nearly 200 works on view were drawn from the archives of the V&A.

The Visitor Journey

The show began with a large case filled with ephemera that showed the vast reach of Winnie-the-Pooh across cultures and time. Boardgames, a dress, dolls, and dishware are some examples of objects on view.

Next, the visitor was taken into Christopher Robin’s childhood bedroom and introduced to Milne and his family. This room had a period bed, lighting, original dolls and drawings, and a window seat with a period style phone through which you could pick up and listen to the author reading while you looked through the window into the story scape a few rooms ahead.

From there, one walked through Shepard’s studio and was introduced to the illustrator. In this room, I found an old drawing table that we converted into a case for works on paper. This was another instance where one could peak through the window and view a few rooms ahead, seeing the realization of the story from the view of the illustrator’s studio. The bead board and wall color were chosen to match Shepard’s original space.

After that, with an option to enter through a child-size recreation of Pooh’s front door, the visitor entering into an immersive story-book space. This included lighting, projections, hanging word mobiles, full scale wall graphics, interactive puzzles, a full scale bridge and trees, a drawing table and an area carved out for inside Pooh’s house that included a slide. There were many spaces to explore and to tuck away with a book.

Amidst this backdrop, we hung drawings in playful clusters, arranged by theme and with large text panels to give them presence in the space.

From this immersive story book space, the visitor was taken by a serpentine like gallery wall where the topic of the art of book design was covered and continued throughout the rest of the exhibition.

This exhibition was a lot of fun to work on and a true team effort to accomplish.