Discover the Jim Henson world-exclusive exhibition in Brisbane.
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Gabe Reed, Vegas-Jack Reed, 10, and Becs Reed at the launch of Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company, at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
The Jim Henson exhibition is currently showing at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), bringing together 500 objects and seven decades of creativity and nostalgia, Rosalie Liddle Crawford writes.
The best way to see the new Jim Henson exhibition in Brisbane is not to stand respectfully pretending you
have outgrown Sesame Street.
It is in a wildly coloured costume, preferably accompanied by your family.
I realised this when I spotted Gabe and Becs Reed and their 10-year-old daughter, Vegas-Jack, at the opening of Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art.
They had travelled from Sydney, donning bright, fantastical costumes.
Observing them, I thought this was possibly the best way to do this exhibition properly, because this isn’t really an exhibition about puppets sitting behind glass.
It’s about the moment a piece of foam, fabric, wire, or a scribble on a scrap of paper becomes a character capable of making generations of people laugh, cry or believe in another world.
Take Bert, Ernie and Oscar the Grouch – created in 1969.
1969?
Somehow, I had mentally filed them away as permanent residents of childhood - characters who had always existed.
Standing in front of the originals, their age suddenly became part of the magic.
I had another small personal mission: find Beaker.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME. Asking a friendly monster the way to Sesame Street. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
While everyone else seemed to be hunting down Big Bird, Snuffleupagus, Kermit or Cookie Monster, I was scanning for that anxious, orange-haired friend who had sustained me during my early laboratory career.
That is one of the joys of Make, Believe, Magic: everyone can arrive with their own Henson character lodged somewhere in their memory.
The world-exclusive exhibition brings together more than 500 objects spanning seven decades of The Jim Henson Company’s work.
There are famous puppets, costumes and props, but I was equally fascinated by the drawings, scribbles and early attempts at characters and creatures.
Early drawings of Big Bird. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
On display are actual drawings from the company’s archive - the beginnings of ideas that would become some of the most recognisable characters and worlds in popular culture.
I lingered over the imperfections: hurried lines, little marks, evidence of somebody thinking with a pencil. The scribbled notes were an eye-opener: Labyrinth was nearly titled Magic Maze or Inside Out?
The early character design for Oscar the Grouch was inspired by two memorable and gruff encounters –a raspy-voiced New York tax driver and a surly waiter at the Manhattan restaurant Oscar’s Salt of the sea. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
Lisa Henson, Jim Henson’s daughter and chief executive of The Jim Henson Company, told me her father would have understood why those objects belong in a gallery.
He was interested in museum exhibitions, she said, recalling a 1980s The Art of the Muppets show. But there was a problem with putting puppets in a gallery.
“Puppets are meant to move. You see the art side of it, but at the same time, they’re not moving,” Henson said.
“My father thought that immobilisation was a challenge.”
The Jim Henson Company chief executive and Jim Henson’s daughter Lisa Henson, at the launch of Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
The company trained its people to pose the puppets and their armatures so they would look as alive as possible.
It is an idea that runs through the exhibition: these aren’t simply objects. They were made to perform.
Lisa recalls her parents working together on early productions, bringing her as a baby on set while they made live television.
Her answer to what her father might make of today’s digital technology or AI was revealing.
“There’s really no way of knowing. Today our company is doing very little work with AI, if any at all. On the other hand, my father never met a technology that he didn’t love.”
A Labyrinth production still.
He was fascinated by gadgets and experimentation.
“Before television remote controls existed, he wired our television up to a little single button mounted on a box painted very graphically, so he could mute commercials.”
It was quintessential Jim Henson: if something didn’t exist, build it.
That philosophy is everywhere at GOMA.
Iconic hecklers Statler and Waldorf are on display as characters from the 1996 film Muppet Treasure Island and From the Balcony: Dead Man's Chest. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
The exhibition moves from practical puppetry through animatronics and creature design into digital innovation, showing how the company kept asking: what if?
And then I walked into the Great Hall set from Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock.
On television, it’s something you see through a camera. Standing inside it is completely different.
The Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company is on display at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art until April 18, 2027. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
You can walk through the enormous set and see where the puppeteers worked, explore behind the illusion, and see how the rocks and surfaces were constructed.
What looks like an enormous underground world on screen is, up close, an extraordinary feat of construction and puppetry.
As curator Amanda Slack-Smith told me, the exhibition is both a nostalgic exhibition and an art exhibition.
“There are elements which are nostalgic because that’s just been built into the characters and our relationship with those characters.
“And it’s an art exhibition as it looks at the making of the work, whether that is the puppets and creatures, or the character building and world building or whether that’s the actual final artwork, which is the work on screen, which is what we know and love.”
Kermit the Frog seated with a banjo. The opening scene of the Muppet Movie featured Kermit singing the song ‘The Rainbow Connection’ while strumming a banjo will sitting in a swamp. Photo / Rosalie Liddle Crawford
Slack-Smith has spent three years immersed in the Henson archive and said the company’s greatest legacy isn’t any single character.
It is the culture Jim Henson created around “innovation and creativity, experimentation” and a passion for the craft.
That feels particularly pertinent now.
In an era when artificial intelligence can generate images and characters in seconds, there is something unexpectedly moving about seeing the physical evidence of people making things slowly, painstakingly and imperfectly.
Xeno Thompson, dressed up and trying her hand at puppeteering at the Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company exhibition. Photo: Rosalie Liddle Crawford
Slack-Smith believes audiences are hungry for handmade creativity.
When I asked what she hoped young artists might take from the exhibition, she didn’t nominate one discipline. It could be puppeteering, puppet building, set construction or animation, she said.
“The joy that comes from making something should be shared. It’s what makes us who we are,” she said.
But take a tip from the Reeds and wear something wonderfully colourful.
Because once you have seen how much imagination, craftsmanship, experimentation and sheer stubbornness went into making these worlds, standing there in normal clothes suddenly seems like you’re missing the point.
Checklist
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to Brisbane direct with Air New Zealand, Qantas and Jetstar.
Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company
This exhibition is organised by the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in collaboration with The Jim Henson Company and runs from September 12, 2026 to April 18, 2027.
New Zealand Herald was hosted by Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA).
