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MSI is the granddaddy museum of corporate-sponsored exhibits, where they abound. Abbott Labs sponsored their new genetics exhibition and Petroleum Planet was supported by BP Amoco. Like most museums, MSI needs financial help to plan and build exhibitions, and the Pfizer money was critical to help update and travel Women’s Health to the nine science museums who worked on it, including MSI. What was unusual was Women’s Health’s equal-if-not-more-important support from two heavy-hitter nonprofits, National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the consortium of museums that developed it.
I saw this exhibition when it was in Maryland (at the Maryland Science Center), New York (at the New York Hall of Science in Queens), and in Portland, Oregon (at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry), where it was always afforded a better image and location. Those museums seemed to recognize the potential of this exhibition’s gender-based audience. A more prominent location for Women’s Health in Chicago and more aggressive marketing of it could have broadened MSI’s image for an audience base to include adult women, their friends, and their daughters.
