Despite the publication date of this post, this is no April Fool’s joke—though we hope the Surprise Exhibit brought laughter and smiles to many.

Produced by the Albacete Forum for the 2022 New York Encounter, The Surprise Exhibit looked at our everyday experiences of surprise and what they tell us about ourselves and our relationship with reality. Combining original artwork with short videos, historical objects, quotes, and interactive experiences, the exhibit invited visitors to look at life’s surprises and to examine the ambivalent attitudes we commonly have toward the new and unforeseen. Several quotes from Lorenzo Albacete’s writings were interwoven with these riches and acted as an informal guide to the meaning of the exhibit.

The exhibit space was designed to be aesthetically enticing, airy, and provocative. One visitor described the experience of going through the Surprise Exhibit as “fun and strange, like walking through a weird murder-mystery.” In fact, the exhibit was a whodunnit of sorts—where do all of the surprises we experience come from and who gives them to us?

Everywhere there was something to catch the eye and take visitors by surprise—through beauty, or humor, or by an unexpected question. One benefit of this approach was that the exhibit could be experienced on multiple levels and by everyone, young or old. It was both family-friendly and intellectually challenging.

At one moment, you might open a box and be confronted by Big Foot (a favorite of young visitors)...

... while just around the corner, you might be invited to grapple with an Emily Dickinson poem...

The artist Adam Thompson contributed several cartoons to the exhibit that looked at surprise from his unique, comic sensibility. They were placed throughout the exhibit as we led visitors on a path that explored A) how the need for surprise is part of the structure of our brains, B) how we enjoy surprises so much that we try to surprise ourselves (although this usually disappoints us), and C) how reality keeps surprising us no matter what our attitudes or expectations are. Many of Adam’s cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker, but Adam also created an original, full-color cartoon to emphasize that last point.

This area also featured a display of sculpted panels that looked at historical examples of surprises—like the attack on Pearl Harbor, the day that John Lennon met Paul McCartney, the sudden appearance of a Mandarin duck in Central Park a few years ago, etc. Another panel spotlighted the Apollo 13 mission:

Those are just a few of the highlights, which also included the bizarre Ames Window that seems too move in impossible ways, a “Clickbait” box that showed how easily we can be manipulated online due to our yearning for novelty, and a tree with multicolored leaves alongside this quote from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

Many visitors left the exhibit with a better understanding of what it means to be a “fairy-tale philosopher,” with a view of reality that is open to mystery and an attitude of wonder in front of the ordinary.

Near the end of the exhibit, there was a quote from Lorenzo Albacete, which laid out why the “jolt” produced by the unforeseen and surprising is critical to our human journey to truth.

Finally, visitors were left with a question:

Is surprise a false promise or a knock at my door?

In a world that has been constantly rocked by new strains of Covid, by sudden wars, by protests, by economic turmoil and millions of other surprises—good, bad, and enigmatic—we think that this is an important question we must each ask ourselves each and every day.

Our openness to reality and to our ultimate destiny may depend upon the answer we come up with.

You may watch an interview with researcher Vincent K. M. Cheung here. The video was shown as part of the presentation of The Surprise Exhibit at the New York Encounter. Vincent studies how our brains process music and the role that surprise plays in this.