Under the volcano: how a museum team builds jaw-dropping exhibits

Before the lava flows and the neon graphics, before the ash clouds swirl and the people leap across a glowing “floor is lava,” and well before the doors open to the High Desert Museum for the day, there’s a forklift trundling around in the dark. Welding equipment sits in a warehouse. The woodworking shop is better than Santa’s. Outside, I could spend hours in the scrapyard, imagining all you could do with that lumber, scrap metal, and the top half of a telephone pole. 

Here, about seven miles south of downtown Bend, these outbuildings, studios, and even the heavy machinery, all form the mechanical heart of what makes the High Desert Museum an exceptional destination by any metric. Exhibits don’t come to the museum in crates. They’re built here by a team bubbling with enormous creative talent, taking ideas from sketches and hallway conversations to full-blown exhibits that require asking your boss for some often odd-ball items. 

“I love it when the curators catch me in the hallway with an idea that they’re not sure if I’m going to like or not,” says Dana Whitelaw, the museum’s executive director. “They’ll say, ‘Hey, Dana, I was thinking about this wartime exhibit and what we really need to find is a tank.’”

The High Desert Museum’s team of designers, builders, thinkers, and dreamers have been testing the limits of what they can do since the museum began more than 40 years ago. The latest exhibit, Under Pressure: A Volcanic Exploration, is no exception. It dives deep into the fiery forces that have shaped Central Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, a topic that could feel stuffy and uninspiring in the hands of a less imaginative team. Instead, visitors will find a full-scale erupting volcano, arcade machines, a chance to play “the floor is lava,” and lots of nostalgia-inducing neon and fonts that create a very ‘80s vibe—the decade Mt. St. Helens erupted and brought volcanoes to the forefront of American minds. 

“We want this to be playful and nostalgic and for people to be engaged,” says Dustin Cockerham, a sculpture and art historian who serves as the museum’s senior curator of exhibitions and collections. “Art is the connective tissue. For me, it’s the easiest way to learn about the world around you.” 

Cockerham quite possibly has the coolest job on the planet. In building exhibits, his to-do list has included tasks like “saw a Subaru in half” (check!) or “turn an old Rolls-Royce into a display case” (check!). He and the team have cut apart an exercise bike and glued an optical mouse to the pedal mechanism to trigger an interactive projection. He once rebuilt a shag-carpeted van for a climbing exhibit set in the 1970s at Yosemite’s famous climber campground, Camp 4.

“No material is off limits,” Cockerham says. “It’s always been a bit about discovery and pushing materials and seeing what you can do.”

The process of building an exhibit is equal parts precision and improvisation. The team mocks up the entire exhibit in a three-dimensional digital model before anything goes into the gallery. For Under Pressure, they drew schematics, selected colors and fonts, sourced specimens, consulted regional volcanologists and scientists, and fabricated components in-house. Months of design work eventually lead to a narrow installation window—often just three weeks—to remove a previous exhibit and bring the new one to life.

By the time visitors step into the gallery, awash in a neon glow and surrounded by sound and motion, the artistic wizardry has resolved into rad, immersive fun. Whitelaw calls this a “liftoff exhibit.” 

“That’s one that feels like we’re taking some risks,” she says. “We’re going to do something in that gallery space that we haven’t done before, and we want to take our visitors there as well.”

Opening day always carries a mix of anticipation and relief. After months, sometimes years, of sketching, modeling, welding, wiring, and refining, the real test begins when the first visitors walk through the doors. Cockerham watches closely. He knows that not everyone will notice the carefully selected typefaces or the precisely angled projector. But someone will. 

That’s the magic of the High Desert Museum’s immersive designs and the crew that makes them happen. Visitors don’t absorb information here so much as participate in it. Under Pressure may run until January 3, 2027, but Cockerham and the team are already working on their next big idea. They’ll have those hallway conversations and hash it out around a design table. Along the way they’ll ask themselves the same question that guides everything else, Cockerham says. 

“What’s the coolest thing we can do?”

The High Desert Museum sits off Highway 97 about a ten minute drive south of downtown Bend and consistently ranks as one of Central Oregon’s top attractions. Adults and children alike adore the playful river otters, the art, and the chance to see live raptors swoop right over your head during a birds of prey show led by the museum’s wildlife experts. Outside, a new playscape combines learning with active fun. The museum’s cafe serves a great lunch.

Are you spending the night in Bend? If so, you’re supporting arts and culture in Bend. A portion of a lodging fee you pay to stay in Bend hotels, inns, and vacation rentals gets reinvested into grants that Visit Bend, the city’s tourism development agency, awards to groups that boost our creative scene. The High Desert Museum has won several of these, including in 2025 for the Under Pressure exhibit. That’s just one way your stay helps keep our town great. Thank you for choosing Bend!