THE PLAN
While the Museum has become a model for disaster recovery, it must now become a living, breathing symbol of rejuvenation and renewal in the face of adversity.
Despite disaster-related setbacks, the Barnum Museum is forging ahead with plans for the future. Working with award-winning design firm BRC Imagination Arts, the Museum is creating new and vibrant exhibits that offer learning through exploration, imagination and innovation, stimulating the power of creativity and sparking intellectual curiosity.
All memorable experiences share something in common: they change us. They affect the way we think or the way we feel, or they inspire us to take a certain action. The Barnum Museum has charted a new and vibrant course for its future that will transform guest experience.
Visitors will emerge with a greater attraction to and fascination with the life of P.T. Barnum. This interest will translate into both immediate and lifelong follow-up expressions of interest, such as increased reading, site visitation, talking about Barnum and learning about his life and work.
We will achieve this by immersing the audience in Barnum’s world: his life stories, contribution to society, his failures and monumental achievements. In doing so, we will give new meaning to the artifacts of Barnum’s life and career.
BRC
IMAGINATION ARTS
BRC was selected to work with the Barnum Museum based on their years of experience as extraordinary storytellers and technical wizards (designing globally acclaimed sites including the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library and the Kennedy Space Center.) Barnum’s great stories will be presented by seamlessly combining rigorous and uncompromising scholarship and storytelling with traditional museum design, artifact display, and award-winning state of the art media, theater, technology and immersive environments.
The Barnum Museum of tomorrow will be a new kind of place designed for a new kind of audience. It will give 21st century guests the experience they require – emotional, immersive, cinematic, and story-driven. The re-imagined Barnum Museum will transform and expand perceptions of Barnum from showman to a remarkable thinker, entrepreneur, philanthropist, a force for good, and timeless role model for the power and strength of the indomitable human spirit.