More than Just Muppets

"Jim Henson's Fantastic World is a collaboration of The Jim Henson Legacy and the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) was designed by Karen Falk, curator of the exhibit and archivist at The Jim Henson Company, to comprehensively showcase the breadth of Jim Henson's art and creativity.  The exhibit was viewed at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  The tour began September 2007 and runs through October 2010.  

The exhibit aims to preserve not only the physical results of Henson's creativity, but the process of creativity itself.  Quotes from Henson and his works are painted on the walls.  Henson speaks directly to the audience about his ideals and goals in a video history compiled from various interviews through the years.  Beloved and well-known popular culture icons Kermit, Bert, Ernie, and Mahna Mahna are there in muppet form and share space with the sketches that captured Henson's original conceptualizations."  


If you have ever been curious about Jim Henson as an artist, you will find answers in this exhibit.  The staff at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA has done a great job connecting the SITES exhibit with its own mission and creatively networked with other Bucks county arts organizations.   In addition to an extensive offering of in-house art classes, other cultural offerings available this fall range from a Jazz concert celebrating the music of Sesame Street to a collaborative film series highlighting Henson films to a variety of programs offered at the Bucks County Free Library, located just across the courtyard.  


What does a traveling exhibit classified as an art display and offered in an art museum teach us about history?  In the case of The Fantastical World of Jim Henson, one's sense of social and cultural history is expanded, in many cases built upon personal memory.  Fascinating in their own right as art, the objects document not just Henson's story, but for anyone of Generation X they also tell our own, triggering memory and generating an emotional response.  Those of the Sesame Street generation are likely to leave the screening room humming, “The King of Eight.”  The memory is triggered again, and one's knowledge expanded, when one views the storyboard and biographical background for that specific skit later on in the exhibit.  

Jim Henson's Muppets are without question a part of my cultural context.  I am one of the early members of the Sesame Street generation. Evening television as a young child consisted of half an hour of The Muppet Show and half an hour of M*A*S*H.  (I've suspected for years that there's a lot of explanation there for who I am, but that's likely another post.)  I learned counting and language skills from the Sesame Street.  I also learned its okay to be a bit odd or not perfectly funny, or to believe in a dream.  I also had my first glance at myriad performers - Harry Belafonte, Candice Bergen, Danny Kaye, and Vincent Price among so very many.  From Sesame Street to the Muppet Show to the Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, I traveled the public path of Henson's creative journey.  At the Michener, I saw some of the not-so-public journey.

Fantastical World is fascinating to me as a historian because it places my friends in context.  Henson and his ideologies are introduced in person via a documentary-style video.  A large poster-style timeline chronicles biographical data and career highlights.  A nice touch is a corresponding poster-style homage to Henson's supporting cast – his family, friends, and colleagues whom together are woven into what we have come to know as the Henson experience. 


Yes, I saw actual Muppets and learned more about their history.  I also learned more about my larger history and asked questions about where we are now.  Cookie Monster started as Wheel Steeler in IBM commercial in the late sixties - IBM had commercials in the late sixties?  One of Henson's proposals for a television show had a hand-drawn cover.  I was struck that today, if it wasn't computer generated, it might go straight to the slush pile.  This wonderfully witty, personal, piece of functional art.  What might we be losing in the technological age?  


Jim Henson was a shy man who imagined fantastical creatures and shared them with the rest of us.  I am grateful to The Jim Henson Legacy and the Smithsonian for offering the opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain, or under the floor in some cases, at the genius behind the characters we, and Henson, loved and made a part of our own histories.