From early December 2018 to February of 2019, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston hosted a special exhibit titled “Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic,” that brought visitors back to their childhood through the art, history, and culture surrounding the iconic character Winnie-the-Pooh and his creators, author A.A. Milne and artist E.H. Shepard.

      The exhibit explored the origins and life of the now ninety-three year old bear and the other inhabitants of the Hundred-Acre Wood. Walking through the exhibit, visitors could see stuffed animals, Winnie-the-Pooh memorabilia, original pencil-and-ink sketches, book covers, and sketchbooks and journals containing inspiration for the series. Designed to appeal to kids and adults alike, it was a multimedia experience that captured the imagination of the Pooh world.  The walls were painted with blown up reproductions of drawings by Shepard, and there were 3D replicas of Pooh’s home, the bridge from the Wood, and other set pieces from the books for visitors to enjoy. Fun additions like an old-fashioned phone that played the only recording of Milne reading Winnie-the-Pooh out loud also made the exhibit more of an immersive experience than just art on the walls. The walls with full-sized images and 3D replicas of recognizable landmarks from the world of Pooh created a walk through childhood, the exhibit leaning into the charm and nostalgia surrounding Pooh.

        Winnie-the-Pooh is a much-beloved figure around the world. Originally created in Britain in 1926 and based on stories that Milne told his kids about their stuffed animals, Winnie-the-Pooh has enjoyed fame not just in Britain and the United States but globally. The first room of the exhibit included Winnie-the-Pooh memorabilia like clothing, sneakers, silverware, and various stuffed animals, from several countries, such as Japan, Sweden, and Brazil. The rest of the exhibit was more focused on evoking warm, nostalgic feelings from visitors as they traveled through rooms bringing them into life in the Hundred-Acre-Wood.     

      The Museum of Fine Arts clearly anticipated Winnie-the-Pooh being a high-volume attraction. The museum created a special stroller parking area for families near the exhibit entrance, showing the MFA’s expectation that it would be heavily populated by families. And this was true to an extent—there were a number of families visiting the exhibit on a Friday evening, but the attendees were predominantly adults. There were couples on date nights, families made up of parents and adult children, and groups of friends, as well as some solo adults. They listened to the Milne recording and drew their own Winnie-the-Pooh renditions at a coloring table. Even though most of them were too tall for the child-sized Pooh setting replicas, they still ducked into Pooh’s house in the hollow of a tree. They climbed over a bridge in the central room of the exhibit and pointed at the fish projections swimming through the “river”, and enjoyed a table laid with reproductions of different scenes from Winnie-the-Pooh, the original prints of which could be seen throughout the exhibit. Some of the behavior adults were engaging in throughout the exhibit may have been “undignified” in the outside world, but in that little bubble of happiness and nostalgia, it seemed perfectly normal and charming to see adults coloring or crawling into a tent on the floor. There is something humorous about this behavior, but unlike in the outside world where the humor or fun might have been based in irony, the laughter and smiles of the adults seemed sincere.

       Adults also traveled through the exhibit more slowly than families with children, lingering in each room and pulling their companions over to look at their favorite features in the exhibit. People could be heard talking about which scenes they remembered from childhood; this made the love and nostalgia that people felt while traveling through the exhibit clear. It may have been aimed towards children in some ways, but the pure joy that it brought the adults illustrated how badly a lot of people need that dose of kindness and remembrance of childhood right now.

        This said a lot about how Americans experience nostalgia and how much they treasure experiences from their childhoods. People reminisced about what editions of Winnie-the-Pooh they had as kids, tearing up in front of their favorite features of the exhibit, and taking second and third passes through the exhibit to savor the experience. For adults, the value of an experience like this is a re-experiencing of childhood memories, and a return to a simpler world of friendship, love, and jars of honey. In the chaos of today’s America, people feel that they need something simpler, kinder, and purer than our current reality. The central enjoyment of the exhibit seemed to be the opportunity to enjoy a return to a world of friendship and love that is so far from the reality we’re living in today.  Walking through the exhibit, it was easy to forget the outside would for an hour or two and just let myself enjoy the warm emotional experience of remembering my mom reading me Winnie-the-Pooh stories from copies of the books that she’d had as a child. I went home afterward and dug out those very copies and flipped through them to see the illustrations featured in the exhibit once more, and I bet I wasn’t the only one.