At Historic Nirvana Exhibit Closing in Seattle, Fans Bid Farewell to ‘Priceless’ Artifacts

It’s a perfectly dreary Saturday in Seattle as the morning rain has subsided and cooled off an unseasonably warm September. Earlier in the day, the doors of the Museum of Pop Culture, or MoPop as it’s colloquially called, opens its doors for what they know will be its busiest day in years. A month ago, the museum announced their unpopular decision to close its ever-popular Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibit after 14 years, with a farewell gala planned for September 6. 

Thousands of Nirvana fans made the pilgrimage Saturday to see many of the artifacts one last time: Kurt Cobain’s artworks, smashed and un-smashed guitars, stage-worn clothes, rare photographs, personal letters, the MTV Unplugged setlist, and more, all displayed in chronological order to tell the story of the band’s Aberdeen beginnings and punk rock escapism to their meteoric rise and sudden, tragic end. 

The exhibit, which also shined a spotlight on the Pacific Northwest grunge movement that orbited around Nirvana — think Screaming Trees, Tad, Mudhoney, etc. — had resided at the Experience Music Project (EMP), and then the rebranded MoPop, in various forms for nearly 15 years, and was a constant draw for Seattle tourism, siphoning off foot traffic from the nearby Space Needle. Over 30 years after Cobain’s death, Nirvana remains as popular as ever, and have become not just the Pacific Northwest’s defining band, but perhaps the entire country’s. So, why is the exhibit now closing?

“It wasn’t really one thing, it was a number of things,” MoPop curator Jacob McMurray, who created the Nirvana exhibit, tells Rolling Stone a day before the closing ceremony. “An exhibition is a living, evolving creature. I wanted it to be very community-oriented. I wanted the primary sources to be telling the tale and kind of providing those objects. So there’s 20 different lenders to that show who provided different objects. We also have objects in our permanent collection that are in that exhibition as well. So there’s a bit of that, where lenders want their stuff back because they miss it, or because they want to sell stuff at auction or they have other ideas for other projects.

“The Nirvana exhibit has been up for longer than any other exhibit that we’ve ever had,” McMurray adds. “Let’s use it as an opportunity to recast our Seattle music story. Have an exhibit that still includes Nirvana and all of these other bands, but also as the opportunity to tell some broader, more inclusive stories.”

These Pacific Northwest stories extend outside of grunge: McMurray cited the city’s early hip-hop movement, glam rock band Ze Whiz Kids, and Portland’s the Kingsmen of “Louie Louie” fame as other artists that played a crucial role in the region’s musical history.

“What if we created an exhibit that told 15 to 20 vignette stories across time and genre that will always include [grunge] — the stuff that people really want to see as tourists or when you think of Seattle music — but where we’re able to constantly highlight these stories that were also very important, but maybe don’t get as much airplay.,” McMurray says. “Nirvana is part of MoPop’s DNA and will always be here, but as a museum, we also just want to tell different stories all of the time.”

McMurray’s personal favorite items in the exhibit: A handwritten letter that Melvins singer Buzz Osborne sent his friend Krist Novoselic forecasting that this Cobain kid “might have some kind of future in music,” as well as the reassembled remains of a guitar Cobain smashed at an Evergreen State College dorm show in 1988. 

“Maybe there’s 50 people in the audience, and [Cobain] probably doesn’t have enough money to pay rent, much less buy another guitar, and for some reason, he smashes that guitar out of the spirit of punk rock nihilism,” McMurray says. “That idea that one, [Cobain] was so moved to do that, and then two, somebody in the audience was so fucking psyched about that that they grabbed that guitar and held onto it for like another 10 years before we acquired it.”

Longtime MoPop museum guide and resident music expert Neal Kosaly-Meyer, who on Saturday led the final two guided tours for a select number of fans, also pointed to the Osborne letter to Novoselic about Cobain as one of the items he’ll miss the most. “There’s that prophetic line at the end: ‘I think he might have some kind of future in music if he keeps at it.’ I think that’s beautiful,” Kosaly-Meyer says. 

(This writer’s favorite items: The sacred text that is the printed MTV Unplugged set list housed behind plexiglass, and early photo proofs of the naked baby on the Nevermind cover with the handwritten note: “If anyone has a problem with his dick we can remove it.”)

In addition to one last walk through the exhibit, Saturday’s closing ceremony touted extracurricular activities like shirt screen-printing, zine-making, DJs spinning grunge classics, a theater showing Nirvana’s concert films and music videos, and a panel of Seattle area music folk — including McMurray, Sub Pop CEO Megan Jasper, and Recording Academy executive (and Seattle native) Jessica Toon — discussing the grunge era, the exhibit’s impact, and the museum’s future. What wasn’t on the lineup, however, was the biggest (and definitely tallest) surprise of the afternoon: An unannounced appearance by Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who provided the opening remarks prior to the panel.

“I started to get involved with, it was EMP, Experience Music Project, then MoPop, and it was just a great place to keep my stuff,” Novoselic joked. “Like, ‘Why is this guitar under my bed? Or, ‘why am I playing this guitar at a gig when I’m going to lose it and it’s gonna get ripped off. These are basses I played with Nirvana.’ So I donated to the museum. ‘Here you go.’ And people enjoyed them.”

Novoselic added, “Just that thinking and foresight like, ‘This is a vault with certain conditioned air and certain fire suppression. Security, white gloves… this is a bass that I bought for like 300 bucks at a pawn shop, and now it’s this artifact. It’s priceless.”

Following the panel, Novoselic hung around to chat and take photos with every Nirvana-shirted adult and Cobain-looking teenager that approached him. Sidling up to the towering figure, I asked him how he felt about the exhibit coming to an end. “Grateful,” Novoselic said, and not because he’s getting his stuff back.

“Grateful, because all this” — motioning to the still-packed theater, the dozens of fans waiting to meet him, the throngs of people still waiting on the hours-long line to walk the exhibit one last time — “just shows how much we meant to people.”

The exhibit spans just seven years, from 1988 to 1994. For the band, less than half that time was spent in the mainstream. One of the displays captured Cobain’s quote about why he chose the name Nirvana: “In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering, and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of punk rock.” During his guided tour, Kosaly-Meyer extensively quoted Buddhist text about the meaning of nirvana. The astrophysicist Michio Kaku once described it more succinctly, “Never-ending, no beginning, no end.”