Exhibit designed to trigger creative instincts

October 10, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

“Jim Henson’s Fantastic World” on display

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO

Some roles you might not have known Jim Henson played:

A pitchman: Before “Sesame Street,” the Muppets impresario used his puppets in some impressively wacky TV ads.

A film star: He made a wonderfully eclectic short film, “Time Piece,” that was a 1965 Academy Award nominee and starred not a puppet, but Henson himself.

An evolutionist: His Cookie Monster can trace its roots to the Wheel Stealer, a puppet, devised for a commercial, with a voracious appetite for a salted snack food.

An entrepreneur: As a University of Maryland student in the late 1950s, Henson had a business designing and selling posters for arts events.

The many and impressive faces of Henson are now on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. An ambitious visiting exhibit, “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World,” functions as an artistic biography of a man who was so much more than just a hand in a sock, or a hand holding rods above a frog.

But also on display are many of the impressive felt faces Henson, who would have just turned 74, manipulated into his sideways kind of superstardom. So, yes, Kermit the Frog is there. Miss Piggy is there in her “Muppets Take Manhattan” wedding gown. And so are the duo who defined the ambiguous relationship, Bert and Ernie.

A visit recently, as the show was being installed, suggested this exhibit will captivate the “Sesame Street” crowd and their own puppet masters alike. And although it may be short on science, there is plenty of industry.

“We wanted to show some of these wonderful pieces that had been in storage and to tell a story about how some of this came about,” said Bonnie Erickson, a designer with Henson who traveled to Chicago to install the Piggy puppet.

“Time Piece” plays alongside the storyboards Henson drew for it, revealing how fully he envisioned work in his head.

There is a New Yorker-style cartoon he drew, and some of the student posters.

A collection of the early commercials also plays, mixing 1960s production values and some very contemporary, subversive humor.

The goal of the exhibit was not just to keep alive the memory of Henson, who died in 1990 at age 53. It was also to inspire other creative people with Henson’s ability to, basically, fabricate his own entertainment genre, said Karen Falk, director of archives for the Jim Henson Co. and one of the principal architects of the exhibit.

“‘Look what he did,’” Falk said the creators hope people will say. “’Maybe I can go out and do my own thing.”’