New and Renovated Exhibits

Exhibits are the most iconic way that Boston Children’s Museum engages with families. Our exhibits are boldly visible, deeply memorable, and central to our identity as a children’s museum.

The Museum is famous for being “about someone and not about something,” which is largely manifested through our focus on hands-on learning experiences. While this phrase comes from former Museum president Michael Spock, serving from 1962 to 1985, the vision it offers has been carried forward since by leadership and staff that have followed. The Museum has a history of offering extraordinary experiences, whether through a spirit of innovation and playfulness, a willingness to tackle challenging topics, use of community input, or leveraging objects from our Collection that elicit stories and memories.

Since Carole’s arrival in 2010, the Museum has proudly created a host of permanent exhibits, traveling, and temporary exhibits, and experiences that reflect these qualities and have enriched our offerings. Highlights include:

• The newest (fifth!) version of PlaySpace, the Museum’s innovative permanent exhibit dedicated to children ages birth to three and the adults in their lives, opened in 2020. Built on 40 years of the Museum’s learning and research about how children develop and grow, the reimagined and redesigned PlaySpace is a nurturing environment where our youngest visitors and their families can wonder, explore, play, discover, and connect in a safe place built just for them.
• Opening in 2023, You, Me, We offered thoughtful, playful guidance and tools to engage children as they begin to perceive, explore, and question complex topics such as identity, fairness, stereotyping, and discrimination. This permanent exhibit was developed in response to, and in support of, needs expressed by parents and caregivers, and helps children build cultural competence at an early age.
• My Sky, funded by NASA and created through a partnership between the Museum and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, was an immersive and inspiring traveling exhibit designed in 2014 to encourage families to “look up” and explore objects and phenomena visible in the sky.
• Native Voices, created in 2012 and refreshed in 2015, was a traveling exhibit that introduced visitors to five Indigenous communities from New England. Hands-on activities, compelling immersive environments, evocative collections objects, and engaging first-person media presented stories of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy of Maine, the Narragansett of Rhode Island, and the Aquinnah Wampanoag and Mashpee Wampanoag of Massachusetts.

… and the list continues with Explor-a-Saurus (2017), the Museum’s first-ever dinosaur exhibit; Fantastic Forts (2021), which invites visitors to create and play within their own special spaces; the imaginary world of Dinos in Space (2022)—a mash-up of dinosaurs and outer space; countless Gallery installations, highlighting works of artists from across New England; and Snowmazing, Hundred Acre Woods, and Curiosity Kitchen, current seasonal experiences that draw visitors back to the Museum each year.

With Carole at the helm, we have continued to strive to be the best place for children and families to play, explore, and learn together. We have aimed to create magical, whimsical, transformational, and memorable experiences for Museum visitors; to use our exhibits to share our culture of innovation; and to value children and families as partners in building our Museum experience.

As we look back to look forward, for future exhibits, we aim to enliven iconic Boston Children’s Museum approaches. We plan to intentionally harness nostalgia for the Museum of the past, engage in collaborations with artists, and add elements of surprise, whimsy, and a sense of humor that we believe our exhibits, visitors, and staff will enjoy.

Exhibits are the focal point of the Museum experience, meaning that visitors come for (and come back for) our exhibits. Carole often tells a story of making a list of broken or worn exhibit components that filled a notebook when she first arrived at the Museum in 2010. Today, there’s not a single out-of-order sign on our exhibits (because that makes us sad), and by maintaining current experiences, and creating new exhibits and refreshing old ones, we have set ourselves on a path that points towards the future of exhibits at the Museum. As we look into 2026, we’re excited to welcome Dream It! Build It! (working name)—a new take on our beloved Construction Zone exhibit; a refreshed Countdown to Kindergarten, which originally opened one week after Carole started; and a series of new Infant Nooks throughout exhibits to support the Museum’s very youngest visitors and their caregivers. As we plan for the exhibits that will define the future of Boston Children’s Museum, we are grateful for a strong legacy to build upon, and confident that the unique, exciting, innovative, creative, dynamic, and surprising spirit of the Museum will continue to flourish in our new spaces.