Exhibition - Jim Henson's Fantastic World April 21, 2010

The exhibition features 100 original artworks, including drawings, cartoons and storyboards that illustrate Henson's talent as a storyteller and visionary. Among the variety of exhibition objects are puppets and television and movie props, photographs of Henson and his collaborators at work and original video productions, including excerpts from Henson's early career and experimental films.Visitors will get to know Jim Henson through his doodles and drawings, his puppets and his fantastic performances. Seeing his original work firsthand opens a window into his visual thinking and provides both an appreciation of Henson as an artist and a reason to laugh out loud.From the very beginning, Henson expressed his ideas with incredible bursts of invention, through a variety of visual forms, clever dialogue, songs, comic bits and animation. All of his work reveals a highly sophisticated and nuanced thought process, evident in the decades-long metamorphosis of a small group of captivating characters from simple doodles to cartoons to puppets to films.What began as a one-man enterprise eventually grew into an international phenomenon. As time passed, the simple hand puppets Henson created for his first television show, "Sam and Friends," evolved into increasingly more sophisticated charactersfrom the Muppets of "The Muppet Show," "Sesame Street" and "Fraggle Rock" fame to the larger-than-life fantasy creatures of "The Dark Crystal" and "Labyrinth." Free admission and parking.