Artful Climbing Sculptures in Collections-Based Museums: Expanding Your Active Engagement Toolkit

In my article From Looking to Doing, I argued that many collections museums – art, science, natural history, and technology – face declining or stagnant visitation, alongside a visitor culture that increasingly demands doing, not just looking. Institutions are experimenting with makerspaces, VR labs, augmented reality, and participatory programs. While promising, these features are often tucked into classrooms or side rooms, peripheral to the core museum journey. They help, but they cannot shoulder the transformation alone. If museums are serious about shifting toward active engagement, they need strategies that are bolder, more visible, and more central. One largely unexplored path is the introduction of monumental climbing sculptures. 

Driver of Visitation and Membership Growth

Long a hallmark of children’s museums, these structures consistently rank among the most popular and most revisited features, anchoring return visits and memberships. The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, for example, cites its climbing tower (The Tree of Sports) as a primary driver of membership renewals. The City Museum in St. Louis, with its well-known exploratory sculptures, has become a high-profile museum destination, drawing over 700,000 visitors annually, pre-pandemic. And the Children’s Museum of Denver, offering an assortment of indoor and outdoor climbable sculptures, is planning to add even bolder sculptures. These signature photo backdrops and marketing icons have a proven track record of drawing visitors, and yet collections museums have barely begun to leverage them.

Bold, Central Statements of Active Engagement

Unlike side-room makerspaces and small-scale interactive equipment such as standing spinners and giant levers, a monumental climbing sculpture offers a centerpiece experience – a grand, visible statement that embodies a museum’s commitment to active engagement. It transforms the visitor’s need for embodied, social participation into a landmark attraction capable of reshaping how the museum itself is perceived.

Mission-Aligned Experience

And these are not playgrounds. They are artworks in their own right – unexpected, imaginative, and nuanced. Commissioning a one-of-a-kind sculpture allows museums to align the experience with their curatorial mission, elevating it beyond entertainment into experiential art, scientific experiment, or interactive installation.

For a collections museum trying to signal that it is evolving, nothing communicates change more powerfully than placing a climbable artwork in a central atrium or courtyard. Such a structure re-frames the museum as a place where art and science are not only seen but climbed, touched, and lived. This is not a departure from the museum’s scientific or artistic mission — rather, it is the museum’s boldest invitation yet for visitors to step in.

The question of mission alignment is crucial. For museum leaders, it determines whether these structures are seen as transformative assets or distracting novelties. For donors, it shapes the confidence to invest. With a climbable sculpture, the alignment is not always obvious, but it is profound. 

In my next article, I will take the science museum as a case study to show how climbable sculptures can embody scientific discovery itself and nurture a spirit of inquiry, planting the seeds of a scientific mindset in children.