Muse Knoxville turns 13 in August, and like most newly minted teenagers, it is experiencing the challenges and brand-new possibilities of an incredible next chapter as they age up.
To increase its capacity to serve more age groups, Knoxville’s only children’s science museum is expanding its footprint from 10,000 square feet in its current building to almost 57,000 square feet in a new location. “We want to assure all families that your children are not going to age out of Muse,” explains President and CEO of Muse Knoxville Allison Comer. Thanks to a landmark lease agreement with the City of Knoxville and a $25 million gift from the Clayton Family Foundation, Muse is set to move into and renovate the historic Jacob Building in Chilhowee Park.
“We’re so grateful to our two biggest partners, the City of Knoxville and the Clayton Family, in this unique public-private project,” Comer says. “We’re honored to be able to transform a public asset with private dollars on this lease of the Jacob Building.” Construction is scheduled to begin by February 2027, with ribbon-cutting by the summer of 2028.
Muse for All
Veteran elementary visual arts educator in both Knox County and Denver, Colorado school systems, Comer assumed the executive leadership role of Muse during COVID. “It was a privilege to join at a time when Muse was looking at its next stage post-pandemic—how to pivot, stay relevant and meet our community’s changing needs. I’d just been here a few months when we opened back up seven days a week in June 2021 in a new version of Muse … and now five years later, we are planning a big new chapter.”
During her first five years, Comer and her lean staff worked hard to help the play-based museum bounce back for parents seeking fun, hands-on learning STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math) experiences for their children after so much isolation.
“Our community had a greater interest in Muse, and we pushed into community events as never before to meet families where they were, which raised our brand awareness while also growing our audiences with older age groups. We honor the early childhood core audience that Muse Founder Ellie Kittrell—one of East Tennessee’s amazing experts in early childhood—had cultivated,” she explains.
“We wanted to keep that audience, but we also age up and we’ve been in that growth pattern ever since,” Comer continues. She and her staff envision an informal learning center where, whether you’re 2, 12 or a teen, a parent, a grandparent or a great-grandparent, everyone has a great time. Under the banner “Muse for All,” the staff focuses its energies and resources on creating a place where families can say their kids grew up with Muse. “Instead of a space where families grew out of it, we see a space where families grow with it,” Comer adds.
The visionary team endeavors to dispel the perception that if you experience a museum one time, you don’t need to go back. “So, we have our super durable, hands-on exhibits, as well as modular activities children can build and take apart, and ever-changing programming that will attract families back again with different themes, missions and weekly activities. It’s fun, kids learn and it’s worth parents’ time to pack their kiddos up and bring them because it’s a great experience every time.”
In the past fiscal year, assisted by 2,550 volunteers, Muse empowered nearly 140,000 children and caregivers with the power of play, served 1,843 unique ZIP codes, and for the first time entertained visitors from all 50 states and 12 countries while growing memberships to nearly 2,800 (including 1,385 low-cost Family Access Passes), and providing scholarships to 3,225 students.
With local business, civic and university support, Muse has grown as a play-based destination for East Tennessee children and visitors alike in a building jam-packed with hands-on exhibits that offer learning experiences to ignite curiosity, foster creativity and build skills. (See Sidebar: A Playground for All).
And that’s just at the brick-and-mortar Muse.
Muse Moves Beyond the Walls
As a partner of the Science Alliance of Tennessee, made up of six science centers across Tennessee, Muse has had the largest outreach footprint in the state. “We know that because we do statewide programming and impact monitoring together,” Comer explains. One reason for a larger outreach is the building’s size constraints, with only one classroom. “For us to engage with all the schools that want to engage with us, there are only so many field trips we can bring in, so we push into schools across East Tennessee.”
This past school year, traveling Muse visited 192 schools in 31 East Tennessee counties, often with its mobile planetarium, serving 50,000 students, educators and caregivers off-site. “It’s such a value-add for teachers to have informal, play-based STEAM programming brought into the classrooms without worrying about transportation costs and barriers,” she adds. Even after expanding its building footprint, the goal is to keep outreach impact the same. “Letting us come to them, providing lessons they couldn’t have experienced without our hands-on approach, is a great benefit to our East Tennessee communities.”
30,000-Foot View From a 4-Foot Kid
Comer says the staff has become adept at the scientific method to discover new ideas. “We’ve been on this journey of exploration, of trial and error, trying new things we’ve never done before to discover how we can best serve our core and new audiences by listening and implementing their feedback.”
However, she candidly admits that after developing their 2023-26 strategic plan based upon extensive stakeholder input (staff, board, members, visitors, donors, nonprofits, school partners and civic leaders), they realized they’d left out formal feedback from the most important stakeholder of all—children.
Out of that emerged the Student Advisory Board, a group of homeschool, public- and private-school K-5 students who submit applications for a slot on the board that meets twice during the school year. “Their applications were epic. They drew pictures, submitted videos, wrote essays, anything that communicated their passion for STEAM and Muse. One kiddo who is passionate about outer space had his mom take a video of him in his astronaut suit describing how he felt about space travel, including a virtual tour of his bedroom covered with NASA memorabilia.”
With children, you get pure, unfiltered feedback. “In our first board meeting, we had breakfast, a formal agenda and a SWOT analysis (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats). I had no idea the incredible feedback these students would offer. Everything from ‘The rocket ship is horizontal, but in real life it’s vertical’ to ‘It’s hard for my grandmother to get out of the car because the parking lot is on an incline’ to ‘You call yourself a science museum, but where is the weather exhibit?’”
The weather exhibit feedback Comer offers as a personal favorite. “That first year, our team took their feedback to implement what we could right away. By February 2025, we cut a ribbon on a new Weather Wonders exhibit. We took the least-engaged area, ripped it out and installed a weather-themed space. Then we brought the students on the board back in to let them see their ideas matter.”
“Like with so many things we’ve done, we try an idea, thinking it will be fun. Then, stunned, we see it unfold, realizing this is going to lead to absolute greatness.” One fifth-grade board member offered to stay on the next year because a K-6 (adding a middle school student) board better reflects the mission to age up.
Blue-Sky Thinking With a Dream Team
“With the incredibly generous, once-in-a-lifetime gift from the Clayton Family as a starting point, the total capital campaign goal is $50 million,” Comer says. “Other public gifts we’re privileged to announce are $1 million gifts from the Bill and Crissy Haslam Foundation and from the Boyd Foundation. We’re also deeply grateful for the state of Tennessee’s nonrecurring $1 million capital allocation from Governor Lee’s last budget in office, and Bank of America’s commitment of $250,000 toward a play-based financial literacy concept. We’re thrilled to have the support of existing Muse donors and scholarship providers like the ASTROrdinary Dobbs Foundation, whose founder, Josh Dobbs, is excited we’ll have an aeronautics and astrophysics exhibit. It’s such an inspirational project for the whole region.”
From the donors to the design, build and project management teams for the renovation to the creative group custom-crafting new exhibits, Comer calls it the assembling of a mission-aligned, too-good-to-be-true Dream Team.
Project managers are Partners Development; Denark Construction is the project’s general contractor; and BarberMcMurry Architects is the architectural firm. “There’s great chemistry with this remarkable group working together on such a fun and unique project,” Comer says. LUCI Creative, the Chicago exhibit design group, is a specialist in children’s museums, science centers and history centers. “We chose them because they will create every single exhibit 100% custom-fabricated to East Tennessee … interactive and play-based, appealing to young kids and older students, telling STEAM stories specific to East Tennessee. They’ve been here countless times, conducting listening sessions with people in regional industries. There’s not going to be another exhibit like it anywhere else in the world.”
The goal is for people to walk into the new building and be visually overwhelmed with dynamic stories from East Tennessee’s history of innovation, invention and industrial enterprise integrated into the design of every museum exhibit. The mission is to be the play-based STEAM museum destination Knoxville deserves, while also impacting STEAM career trajectories for future scientists, artists, engineers, inventors and innovators.
Comer believes the new Muse Knoxville is “truly a beautiful public-private partnership where we are taking private funds and pouring them into a public asset, acting as careful stewards of this public asset, reinvesting back into the building and serving the community with the structure of the lease allowing us to do so.”
The mother of six- and eight-year-old boys, Comer muses about this field she is devoted to. “We know that play changes kids’ lives, the way they learn and think, form memories and core values. At every age, it’s a sweet thing when kids learn their ideas matter, they’re important, they can be problem-solvers, create, invent, discover things. What does success look like for Muse Knoxville? If we can achieve that for our region’s children, we will know we have succeeded.” Learn more at TheMuseKnoxville.org.
At every age, it’s a sweet thing when kids learn their ideas matter, they’re important, they can be problem-solvers, create, invent, discover things. —Allison Comer.
Muse Knoxville: A Playground for All
Allison Comer, President and CEO
Through a variety of hands-on exhibits and outreach programs for children, Muse creates the power of play for all families, with exhibits such as: We Bee Long honeybee exhibit from the City of Knoxville and Knox County Government; Comcast Foundation’s Stellar Playground, where budding astronomers drag-and-drop planets on a giant multitouch display; Dremel 3D Printer donated by the University of Tennessee Tickle College of Engineering; Knoxville’s only public-access planetarium;Mini Food City and Healthy Kids’ Clinic; the U.S.S. Muse spaceship; A-Mazing Airways; Sound Garden; Illumination Station; and many more. Open Monday-Sunday. 516 Beaman St. Knoxville, TN 37914.