John Brown Wax Museum

The John Brown Wax Museum is a strange, stubborn little institution: wax figures, a raid that still rattles American mythology, and a building that needs both conservation and a better way to tell the story. The work sits at the seam of physical craft and narrative design.

The museum closed its doors in 2020. In 2026, the collection was rescued from a barn. The restoration process is underway, and the collection is finding a new physical home — alongside the construction of a digital museum that follows the restoration process and tells the story to a larger audience.

In this time where the history of the United States is being whitewashed and rewritten to gloss over the reality of racism, the John Brown Wax Museum will stand again — not only memorializing a great man, but as a bastion against the wave of revisionism.