Engineering Mini Utopia

Welcome to the Museum for Insects

We are an insect-sized museum that features artwork specifically created for house crickets. Cricket museum-goers can interact with hands-on/legs-on exhibits, enjoy food and drink from the café and experience live humans, both through a picture window and through a videophone chat that connects the Museum for Insects to the human museum-goers. Internet viewers can visit via live webcam, and can activate a cricket puppet and electronic chirping instruments located within the mini museum.

From May 30, 2017 - July 15, 2017, we are hosted by the Urban Arts Space Gallery in Columbus Ohio as part of the Engineering Utopia, exhibition curated by Kris Paulsen. The current exhibition on display inside the Museum for Insects is, Engineering Mini Utopia. It features cricket-sized artworks by Ken Goldberg, TradeMark Gunderson, Isla Hansen, Tucker Marder, Ken Rinaldo, Lillian Schwartz, Stan VanDerBeek, and Jim Wilson.

Between 2013 - 2014 we were hosted by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Three exhibitions were produced and archived. Trans-Species, a solo show by Ken Rinldo, Telepresent Animal Hall of Fame, curated by Doo-Sung Yoo, and Interspecies Housing, which was co-created by landscape architecture students at the Ohio State University in a course taught by Katherine Bennett, David Shimmel and Ian Mackay.

We hope this experience provides a platform for communication, appreciation and aesthetic pleasure across species.

– Amy M. Youngs, Artist and Director of the Museum for Insects