Exhibits by Collection

Since its inception in 1974, the Exploratorium’s Artist-in-Residence Program (AIR) has grown to include hundreds of artists and performers. The museum works with individuals and artist groups who are drawn to collaboration, interested in interdisciplinary dialogue, and open to developing new working methods. Projects have taken countless forms, such as multimedia performances, theatrical productions, animated filmmaking, immersive installations, walking tours, and online projects.

Cells to Self considers the incredible diversity of cell form and function, from the environmental awareness of bacteria to human heart cells beating in response to electricity. Through microscopes, digital models, and first-hand interactions with cells, visitors can explore how cells move, divide, communicate, and respond to their surroundings.

We’re developing new exhibits for the Cells to Self collection, expected to open in 2019. Until then, you might notice us experimenting with prototype exhibits in the East Gallery Corridor.

These exhibits are designed to engage visitors in mathematical thinking and concepts.

This exhibition was part of a series of shows themed Patterns of Change. From life cycles to bicycles to orbital cycles and more, the show focused on the cycles that are all around us, in both expected and unexpected places.

Explainers are stationed throughout the Exploratorium doing structured and open-ended demonstrations. For example, Explainers dissect cow eyes, perform magic tricks, explore marine life, and engage visitors in philosophical discussions. Ask an orange-vested Explainer to help you explore.

Chaperone guides help focus students' explorations and connect their experiences to the Next Generation Science Standards. They don’t require students to use paper and pencil; the chaperones will document the students' experiences.

This traveling exhibition developed by the Exploratorium explored the geometry of seeing, moving, and fitting things together.

Living Liquid aims to discover how to design exhibits that allow visitors explore and ask questions about scientific datasets, through interactive data visualizations about marine life.

The Mind exhibit collection showcased over 40 exhibits about thinking and feeling. Working with expert advisors, the Mind team spent over four years researching the cognitive sciences to create provocative and compelling experiences that illuminate the way your mind works. Explore the inner workings of the mind through this collection of exhibits from the Mind team.

The Exploratorium’s location on a major civic promenade has inspired Over the Water, a program of large-scale, often temporary, commisioned artworks for the museum's dynamic site on the edge of the city and the Bay.

Pictures have always played an important role in the scientific process, especially in the history of anatomy. Whether woodcut, sketch, sculpture, X-ray, or MRI, visual images have helped us observe, describe, model, categorize, analyze, and conceptualize the human body. How has this imagery changed the way we look at our bodies? The Exploratorium invited visitors to delve into this provocative question with Revealing Bodies exhibition that ran in 2000.

During the summer of 2002, after more than three years of research and experimentation, the Exploratorium’s revitalized collection of exhibits on visual perception officially opened to the public. Seeing showcased classic exhibits as well as new visual experiences created especially for this exhibition.

At San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza, people come together to explore sound, changing the tenor of this public space.

In creating this traveling exhibition at the Exploratorium, the artists, scientists and exhibition creators were inspired by poetry, writing, other artworks, but primarily the patterns created by natural forces.