The Museum of Pop Culture, aka MoPOP, will retire one of its longest-running exhibits next month when Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses ends on Sept. 7.
The exhibit, which opened in 2011, features hundreds of artifacts that tell the story of Nirvana as it relates to the local and national underground music scenes. Original plans called for the exhibit to close in 2013, however, it became one of the museum’s most popular offerings and at one point the exhibit went on tour and was showcased in Brazil.
When I attended a media preview of the exhibit prior to its opening I wrote that “you get a sense of Nirvana’s transformation from three guys who liked to play music into a band with immeasurable worldwide success. Just about every section contains something iconic or extremely noteworthy for the band’s development.”
It was originally housed in the space where the former local music history exhibit Northwest Passage was displayed. After touring to South America it was moved to a smaller space and kept on display due to its popularity. Some of the original exhibit’s highlights include:
- Kurt Cobain’s high-school painting of two aging, Reagan-era punks in the post-apocalypse, informally known as “punk American gothic.”
- The TEAC reel-to-reel tape machine owned by Mari Earl, Cobain’s aunt, on which a young Cobain recorded material for his early bands, Organized Confusion and Fecal Matter.
- Cobain’s handwritten lyrics for Nirvana songs including “Spank Thru” and “Floyd the Barber.”
- Pieces of the first guitar Cobain destroyed onstage (a Univox Hi-Flyer), along with Grohl’s Tama Rockstar-Pro drum kit, and two of Novoselic’s instruments: a Guild acoustic bass and a Buck Owens American acoustic guitar used during the recording of “MTV Unplugged.”
- The yellow cardigan often worn by Cobain between 1991 and 1994.
- The winged angel stage prop featured on Nirvana’s In Utero tour.
- Candid snapshots capturing the band’s early years, from its beginnings in Aberdeen to the frenzy that erupted after “Nevermind.”
Jacob McMurray, MoPOP’s chief collections and exhibits officer, announced the exhibit’s upcoming closure on social media. You can view the announcement below.
The exhibit is one of two that focus on a local music icon. The other is an exhibit that focuses on Jimi Hendrix’s career overseas. But the loss of “Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses” doesn’t mean the museum is going to stop putting the spotlight on the rich history of music from the Pacific Northwest. In the fall of 2026 a new exhibit about local music history will be installed in the space where the Nirvana exhibit resides.
MoPOP plans to host a farewell party for the Nirvana exhibit on Sept. 6. According to an event description, it will feature “T-shirt printing with The Vera Project, DIY zines with Push/Pull, button-making, film screenings, confessional videos, and a panel of Seattle music scene veterans discussing the multi-decade impact of the early ’90s ‘Grunge explosion.” Tickets range in price from $17.50-$25.
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