After Hours: Soundwaves

Activities free with gallery admission. Planetarium ticket fees apply.

Enjoy an evening at the museum! Curate your night from a host of activities, including sketching in the galleries, art-making activities, a show in the Whitney and Elizabeth MacMillan Planetarium, and stargazing on the Ruth and John Huss Observation Deck (weather permitting).

Sketching theme: Draw from a collection of critters that are known for making sounds like frogs, birds and cicadas.

Hands-on activity: Play with toys that focus on sounds and waves in one of our classrooms.

Diorama Tours

Tours begin in Horizon Hall at 6:15 and 7:15 pm.

Dive deep into the dioramas with ecologist Daniel Stanton from the College of Biological Sciences. Learn about how our native plants defend themselves against predators, amazing adaptations, and Minnesota’s biodiversity—and threats to it.

Special Guests

Environmental Futurisms: Sound, Technology, and Imagination
Arrange and sculpt sounds collected from the natural environment at tonight’s sound-mixing activity, from 2019-20 showcase artist Michael Wilson. The installation is an interactive workstation in Horizon Hall that asks participants to engage with performance and sound design tools to manifest possible future environmental realities.

You can see this process at work in Wilson’s award-winning 2017 audio work, Elcrys. In it, Wilson imagines a future in which elk have not been seen in nearly a generation, and scientists attempt to lure the last known herd of elk down out of the mountains with cybernetic replications of elk calls. Here sound is central to humanity’s last, desperate effort to make contact with a species at the edge.

Planetarium

6 & 7 pm: Sounds From Space

Click here for tickets and availability.

Advance tickets for planetarium shows are available up to three weeks ahead of time via the link above. If you are a current Bell member, please log in first, to receive your discounted tickets.