Jeff Hoke

I grew up in Chicago in a family of teachers. Every summer vacation my parents would pack my sister and I in the back of a station wagon and we'd travel the country. On these trips my dad would collect stones, wood, and rusty bits of metal he'd find on the ground, label them, and put them in a special curio cabinet he made. We called it his "museum."

Years later I got an art degree and a teaching certificate from colleges I attended in England, and then a bachelors degree in painting at the University of Illinois. Then I needed a real job.

Eventually I found myself working at a museum creating exhibits. I worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for 13 years. Now I'm at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where I've been designing exhibits for another 13 years.

Much of my job as an exhibit designer has been to take impersonal scientific facts and somehow make them meaningful, (or at least interesting,) to people. In my spare time I continued to make art, which had more to do with myth than science. Eventually I put my personal and professional interests together and created a museum of my own, the Museum of Lost Wonder. Here I explored how we mix myth and science to find meaning in our everyday lives, by using examples from history, and creating do-it-yourself experiments.

I started creating the book in 1996. It began as pamphlets I published in series, usually with a do-it-yourself model as the centerfold. It was called the Guide to Lost Wonder, and was created in the guise of an activity booklet published by the Museum of Lost Wonder. The activities and experiments were always very important, because I wanted to inspire people to explore for themselves what was meaningful and to be there own experts.

Starting in 2003 I put all the pamphlets together, colored them, and added material to make it into a tour of the museum in its present from as a book. My dream is that when each person opens the book and visualizes the museum, that it becomes a little more real.