Mobile museums make museums accessible to audiences and communities that can not reach a museum’s physical location. Their inherent flexibility and adaptability help create innovative and inclusive approaches to museum engagement. The examples in this article illustrate the ways in which three museums have and will continue to reach audiences beyond their walls. 

Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame and Museum Tour Bus

Last November, the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame and Museum (LIMHOF) opened the doors to its permanent home in Stony Brook after spending the last few years on wheels. The museum transformed a 38-foot long, 400-square-foot Winnebago, into a tour bus to share Long Island’s music heritage including artists like Pat Benatar, Run DMC, and Billy Joel. 

“We established the organization almost 20 years ago and had our first induction ceremony in 2006,” said Ernie Canadeo, Chairman of the LIMHOF. “We had some offers for a location for the hall of fame and museum along the way as we worked to establish our permanent home but none of them were the right fit. In 2015 we were offered this 38-foot Winnebago from the county historical society that wasn’t using it any longer so we transformed it into a mobile museum and traveled around Long Island.”

The floor of the tour bus is covered with album covers featuring Long Island artists like Eddie Money and Public Enemy. One wall has four 65-inch vertical TV monitors that play performances filmed at previous LIMHOF events. Along the opposite wall is the “On the Record” exhibition that includes a video jukebox that displays various album covers with looping  30-second song clips from LIMHOF inductees like Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock,” and Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man.”

Inside the Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame Tour Bus

The tour bus provided a way for the public to view some of the thousands of collection items that had been in storage for years like Harry Chapin’s Congressional Medal of Honor and Billy Joel’s harmonica while the museum searched for a permanent space. 

Board Member Kevin O’Callaghan designed the mobile LIMHOF and went on to design the museum’s permanent 8,800 square foot home. O’Callahan was the designer of the iconic “popcorn” trophy for the MTV Movie Awards and has been a design educator at the School of Visual Arts since 1985. 

The museum tracked attendance and audience demographics of the mobile museum which helped identify its core audience and plan exhibitions for its permanent location.

“We identified our core audience as people who ranged from their mid-fifties who grew up in the sixties and seventies. That’s why our first exhibition in our permanent home focuses on Long Island’s club scene from the 1960s to the 1980s,” said Canadeo. “Long Island’s Legendary Club Scene: 1960s - 1980s” exhibition is about the nostalgia of a club crawl through the nightclubs on Long Island. 

The tour bus also helped the museum grow its audience by traveling to festivals, schools, libraries, and community events. 

The museum is now focusing on sustaining its new permanent location but the tour bus museum remains intact. “Our goal is to keep the bus and continue to bring it around Long Island. It’s part of the next phase for the museum which is to focus on how Long Island became the hotbed of creativity and how diverse the music scene was and continues to be. We’re thinking of creating pop-up museums from the East End into Brooklyn.”

“Cure Porch on Wheels” Historic Saranac Lake

Historic Saranac Lake wanted to better serve the residents of Saranac Lake and reach more people in the Adirondack region. In 2019, the museum opened the “Cure Porch on Wheels,” a mobile museum space that hosts arts and cultural activities. 

The museum was inspired by a presentation at a regional conference in 2010 of another mobile porch created by artist Bryony Graham at Salem Art Works. The “Cure Porch on Wheels” design draws on the American cultural tradition of a front porch as well as early 1900s Saranac Lake which welcomed thousands of tuberculosis patients to come for the “fresh air cure.” Patients would spend most of their time outside on cure porches for the restorative effects of fresh air. “Porches are so much part of our history of tuberculosis curing and fresh air. It’s a huge part of our architecture in our community,” said Amy Catania, Historic Saranac Lake Executive Director.

In 2009,Historic Saranac Lake rehabilitated The Saranac Laboratory and opened it as a museum. The Saranac Laboratory was built in 1894 and was the first lab in the United States to research tuberculosis. Today, the lab and museum have permanent exhibitions on scientific research and patient care as well as temporary local history exhibitions. “The museum is located in the old tuberculosis factory and we talk a lot about people spending time on cure porches, but we don’t physically have one in this space,” said Catania. “The “Cure Porch on Wheels” was us creating a space for visitors to sit on one of these porches and experience the fresh air.”

Since opening to the public, the “Cure Porch on Wheels” has hosted numerous programs for Historic Saranac Lake, including a “Live from the Porch!” music series, the Art of the Cure exhibition about the Trudeau Sanatorium and its therapy programs for tuberculosis patients who went on to become artists, writers, and craftspeople, and “The Story Phone” project that uses a reconfigured antique wall phone as a recording booth to capture local stories.

Catania was interested in building a mobile space that could be shared with other organizations in the region. “I saw it as a space that artists could use or a school for projects. I had this vision of it being a community space.” Since its creation, the “Cure Porch on Wheels” has served as a warming hut for outdoor winter activities and as a studio for plein air painters in addition to its own programming. It’s heated for year-round use, wheelchair accessible, has electrical outlets, and is powered by solar panels.

The Cure Porch on Wheels at the Winter Carnival, February 2023.

“Since the beginning, this mobile museum has been about wanting to connect with people without the expectation that they necessarily come to us. If there’s something really neat and traditional happening somewhere that we want to know more about, we bring the porch,” said Catania. Each February, there is an ice fishing contest in Saranac Lake that attracts hundreds of people. Historic Saranac Lake brought the “Cure Porch on Wheels.” “Our program coordinator interviewed people involved with the competition about this event, ice fishing in the region, and more. We were able to collect some oral histories about this tradition in our community and meet people that likely would not come to the museum. This was an ideal use of our mobile museum. It’s super visible, draws attention, and engages with our community.”

Historic Saranac Lake also brought “Cure Porch on Wheels” to the winter carnival and installed an exhibition of historic images of ice palaces. “It’s participatory too where people can share their thoughts about the current winter carnival or reflect on past ones,” said Catania. Museum staff also distributed museum passes. “It’s sort of a stepping stone to get people to the museum but generally just traveling around and having people notice us and talking about us helps raise awareness for our organization and helps us reach out to the community.”

Historic Saranac Lake offers detailed plans as well as a general “how we did it” section on its website for other organizations interested in creating a mobile space. “There’s a porch design page on our website that can tell you what kind of trailer to buy, what size frame you’ll need as well as the insurance you’ll need.”

Currently, Historic Saranac Lake is restoring the former home and medical office of Dr. E. L. Trudeau which will explore the history of the Saranac Lake region and Trudeau’s work in tuberculosis treatment. The project will create a museum campus in an effort to drive arts and culture tourism to the North Country. 

“I want to take a step back and really talk to the other regional organizations and brainstorm how this mobile space could be of use to them,” said Catania. “It’s important to us that we build ownership in the community and that we’re not competing with each other. We’re asking how can we physically share this mobile space better. Right now it’s parked at the museum but it’s a mobile space and we want it out and about in our community.”

Lewis Latimer House Mobile Lab

The Lewis Latimer House Museum in Queens will temporarily close to the public this November as the museum reinstalls a new exhibition and completes restoration work. While the museum is closed, a new mobile museum will open thanks to a collaboration with BioBus, an organization that repurposes school buses to connect students with hands-on science education. “The idea for this collaboration started at a networking event,” said Ran Yan, Lewis Latimer House Museum Executive Director. “I thought that while the museum is closed, we should collaborate and make a mobile museum where we can continue to provide educational tours and programs.” The Lewis Latimer Mobile Lab extends the museum’s Tinker Lab to bring hands-on STEAM activities on the road. 

Lewis Latimer was an African-American inventor, electrical pioneer, and the son of two formerly enslaved Virginians who were self-liberated. Latimer taught himself mechanical drawing while in the Union Navy and became a chief draftsman, patent expert, and inventor. He played a critical role in the development of the telephone, significantly improved the production of carbon filament, and made important contributions to the commercialization of the incandescent light bulb.

The mobile lab is divided into two parts. One section is focused on observation and discussion with some hands-on activities. The other is STEM projects. “We designed a scavenger hunt based on the museum’s collections and we’ve brought a couple of items from our teaching collection as well as images of different artifacts from the museum onto the bus” said Yan. There is also a video about Lewis Latimer and the museum. In February, the mobile lab traveled to the Variety Boys & Girls Club of Queens for an initial programming test. “After that, we refined the curriculum because we were adapting what we usually offer in the museum to the bus, which is a very different space.” 

4th graders from PS22 outside the Lewis Latimer Mobile Lab

In May, the mobile lab conducted seven days of programming at three different schools in Queens. “Since this is the beginning phase, we approached schools that we already had relationships with and were able to secure those programming days.” Following the May programs, the museum continued to evaluate and assess the mobile lab. Now, the museum has opened a booking process starting in September, planning around the museum’s block party celebrating the 175th birthday of Lewis Latimer where the mobile lab will be front and center.

“The mobile lab has great potential of becoming a tool for the museum to reach more people and tell more people about Lewis Latimer,” said Yan. “It’ll never replace the experience of actually visiting the museum, stepping inside this historic landmark, but I think the mobile lab is similar to virtual programs. It doesn’t replace the in-person experience but it’s complementary to that experience. It’s a good way to introduce people to the museum and activities we have. This historic house is small and has limited space so having this mobile lab helps with our physical limitations. It’s also flexible to drive it anywhere and deliver programs. It’s part of our strategy to attract people and engage with them while introducing this history and dynamic legacy of Lewis Latimer.”

Learn more about the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame and Museum: https://www.limusichalloffame.org/museum/ 

Learn more about Historic Saranac Lake:https://www.historicsaranaclake.org/ 

Learn more about the Lewis Latimer House Museum: https://www.lewislatimerhouse.org/