The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures (T/m) invites qualified exhibit designers or exhibit design firms to submit proposals for the design and development of Saturday Morning Cartoons, a temporary exhibition scheduled to open in May 2027. The selected consultant will collaborate closely with T/m staff to create an immersive, accessible, educational, and visually compelling exhibition that aligns with T/m’s mission, interpretive goals, and audience needs.
T/m seeks a creative partner with demonstrated experience in museum exhibitions, interpretive planning, graphic and spatial design, and project management. The exhibition is anticipated to remain on view for approximately 9 months in T/m’s South Gallery.
Care Bears, He-Man, Alvin and the Chipmunks, DuckTales, The Smurfs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers…the 1980s were a golden age of Saturday morning cartoons. Animated characters leapt from television screens into toy boxes, shaping how a generation played and imagined. For many children, cartoons didn’t end when the TV was turned off; they continued on the living room floor through expansive imaginative worlds brought to life through toys.
Saturday Morning Cartoons explores this pivotal moment in American childhood, when television, toys, and marketing converged in powerful new ways. Drawing from T/m’s nationally recognized collections, the exhibition examines how cartoons and toys worked together to create immersive play experiences, blurring boundaries between entertainment, advertising, and imagination.
