It's the selfie age. And projects to create photo-friendly pop-up art museums—whether they're showcasing the world's largest pool of rainbow sprinkles or fluorescent yellow stilettos that stand 7 feet (2 meters) tall—are all the rage.
At the Happy Place, which traveled to Chicago, Illinois, USA and Toronto, Ontario, Canada last year, visitors can capture themselves posing in 13 brightly colored rooms across a 20,000-square-foot (1,858-square-meter) space. One room has the aforementioned yellow shoes; another is devoted to the world's biggest indoor confetti dome, with half a million little pieces of flying paper. In the 4,900-square-foot (455-square-meter) Egg House, which got its start in New York, New York, USA last April before moving to Shanghai, China, visitors can celebrate the egg—or oversized plastic versions of it.
People can't get enough of these projects. In New York, all 30,000 tickets for the Museum of Ice Cream pop-up sold out within five days of opening. And in San Francisco, California, USA, its entire six-month run sold out in less than 90 minutes.
But behind the fun, teams are applying lessons learned and adapting project plans to ensure these sites remain photo-friendly—and people-friendly. Here are two noteworthy examples.
Selfie Factory
After witnessing the success of selfie-geared pop-ups on a trip to the United States, Will Bower wanted to create his own version at home in England. He started in Brighton so he could apply lessons learned to a subsequent installation in London. “It was a proof-of-concept exercise in Brighton, which is cheaper than London,” says Mr. Bower, managing director, the Selfie Factory, London. The Brighton pilot showed, for instance, how many workers and trucks he needed to transport the set pieces from their construction and storage site to the venue in as little time as possible.
It also proved useful in crafting the exhibition makeup. “In Brighton, we found out which rooms are more popular than others,” he says. The bathroom installation, where visitors sink into a tub filled with bright pink, plastic bubbles, turned out to be a favorite. So in London, the project team moved that room to a more prominent position at the front of the exhibit. The team also found that the tub's balls tended to bounce out of the much-used bathroom and responded by reconfiguring the room's walls to help keep the balls in place. Mr. Bower says the Selfie Factory team will continue to use such lessons as it tours England in 2019.
Museum of Ice Cream
Since its debut in New York in 2016, the Museum of Ice Cream has scooped up more than US$20 million in ticket revenue, according to MarketWatch. But as it later launched U.S. installations in Miami, Florida and San Francisco, the team had to quickly adapt its original project plans.
The pop-up museum's centerpiece is a giant pool filled with ice cream sprinkle toppings: roughly 100 million tiny pieces of plastic. But the environmentally unfriendly items were sticking to visitors’ clothing and ending up in homes, on sidewalks and in drainage systems—prompting fines and public stakeholder backlash. “The sprinkle pit was a great idea in theory, but its implementation was a mess,” Dave Doebler, co-founder of environmental organization VolunteerCleanup.Org, told USA Today.
In Miami, the Museum of Ice Cream moved the pool farther from the exit, hired cleaners and installed blow-dryers to help remove the sprinkles from visitors’ clothes. But when city officials and environmental activists cried foul in San Francisco, the company went even further: It replaced all the sprinkles with a new version that can biodegrade in seawater within six weeks.—Novid Parsi