Sheila Noone on the Memphis Museum of Science and History
Sheila Noone has served as the Communications Manager at the Museum of Science & History (MoSH) in Memphis for nearly five years, helping guide one of the city’s most historic institutions through a time of significant change and renewed purpose.
About Sheila Noone
Originally joining the team to lead communications across MoSH’s broad portfolio, Sheila has since played a central role in some of the organization’s most significant transitions—from high-profile exhibit launches to a full rebrand and the museum’s shift to independent nonprofit status. Her work touches every part of the museum’s public presence, helping connect generations of Memphians to science, nature, and cultural history.
Sheila helped guide the return to the museum’s original name—the Pink Palace—a move that honored its nearly 100-year legacy. She also helped shape messaging around MoSH’s 2024 transition to operational independence, a shift that gave the organization greater flexibility in programming, budgeting, and growth.
What Is MoSH?
The Museum of Science & History—known as MoSH—is a multi-site institution rooted in Memphis, Tennessee, that brings together science, nature, culture, and local history under one umbrella. It includes the iconic Pink Palace Museum & Mansion, Lichterman Nature Center, Mallory-Neely House, Magevney House, the Sharpe Planetarium, and the CTI 3D Giant Theater.
From dinosaur fossils and Civil War artifacts to immersive space shows and wildlife observation trails, MoSH offers experiences that educate, inspire, and connect visitors of all ages.
Did you know?
MoSH attracts more than 240,000 visitors annually across its five properties. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, all revenue supports education, programming, conservation, and facility preservation across the Memphis region.
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Carli: Sheila Noone Communications Manager. Mm-hmm.
At MoSH or the Pink Palace. Welcome to Signature Required. It's, yes. It'll always be the Pink Palace.
Okay. But we're under the umbrella of MoSH. That's wonderful. Tell me a little bit about where we are today. Well, today we're sitting in what we call the Deep End Theater. But it used to be an indoor swimming pool.
So wait, I'm sitting where, so I might have to back up a little bit. Okay. Tell me more. This, this, the building we're in is the Pink Palace mansion. Okay. Now a museum, but it was built by someone named Clarence Saunders. Okay. And he was an entrepreneur. He founded the first Piggly Wiggly. He had worked in a country store.
That's the kind of place where you would go in with your list, hand it to the shopkeeper, and they would bring you things. Okay. So he created the Piggly Wiggly, where you could get a basket, pick your own things off the shelves, go to a cash register and check out, which is still what we do today. Wow. He reinvented.
He reinvented it shopping, so he did really well. He decided to build himself this extravagant over the top mansion. It was gonna have a zoo in the backyard, an indoor swimming pool. Unfortunately he never moved in. Okay. He went bankrupt before the house was complete.
Oh, that's a bummer.
But where we are now would've been the indoor swimming pool.
So the, the stage area would've been the deep end. And where we're sitting is, is the incline. So this is where we would've been swimming towards the deep bend in this space. Exactly. If you were, yeah, if you knew how to swim, you'd be swimming back here.
Okay. So the Pink Palace, it started as meant to be a personal residence.
How did it become what it is today?
Well, he, um, he was taking his company public, and I won't get into the, intricacies of what went wrong, but he, he ended up losing everything. He tried to play a few tricks on Wall Street and it didn't work. He lost everything. The building was still going on.
He didn't alert everyone immediately. So the house was continuing to be built in this era about a hundred years ago. And then when the, the city decided to sell off the land to developers to develop Chickasaw Gardens, which is the neighborhood we're in, uh, keep the House, and it was donated to the city as a museum.
So it started as the Museum of History and Industrial Arts. Somewhere around 1930.
Wow. Okay. So it started as a personal residence, then became a museum. Mm-hmm. How did it evolve into what it is today? Can you tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing today?
Sure, sure. Well, along the way, you know it, it started as a museum of of curious objects of history in the nearby region.
Slowly morphed into today's museum, which is we added a planetarium and a giant screen theater in the seventies. Um, it's a distinctly history of Memphis and the surrounding areas and the people. And then the science. So the si the science, the geology of the area. We have mastodon bones and masur bone, uh, skeletons.
Masur is probably the most frequent animal that was swimming in these waters. So a long time ago. Wow. From the Mississippian embayment, all of this was underwater.
Well, I got to see. Spoil alert. I got to see right before we did this, some of the skeletons and the bones that you have. Yes, it's
great.
There's so much here. There's some
really cool stuff. So if somebody's walking in, they have no idea about the Pink Palace. Mm-hmm. MoSH, what can they expect to see? Take me through some of your
exhibits. Oh, sure. When you, the first thing you see is our geology exhibits. So you walk into. Bones, a lot of Charles Darwin drawings and, and things he would've been looking at in the Galapagos.
Um, snake skeletons. I did see that and I like quickly gave it a ride a wide berth. I was not interested in the snake skeletons. There was a python that I was like, Python. Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah. Moving on. But we also have an evolution exhibit. We have, um, an area that leaves you past Tyra, who's our animatronic dinosaur.
Oh, I met Tyra. She's a diva. Yes, she is a diva. Yeah. and then we have a lot of geo, geo geological stuff, so we've got a lot of geodes and we have a fluorescent room, which is all, you know, black light.
And kids really love that room. It's small, but kids really can see how the different geodes and things pick up the light, um, that leads you into our dinosaur area. And, um, that is our geo ge geology section. And then if you're coming to the mansion, you start to see the cultural exhibits. So we have, you know, how did Memphis do during the yellow, the yellow fever epidemic?
Mm-hmm. How did we do during the Civil War? What was medicine like? Memphis has a lot of big, um, medical companies, um, Medtronic and, uh, Smith and Nephew that make. Artificial joints and limbs. So we have a, a strong medical presence here. We have St. Jude, we have Le Bonner Children's, uh, center, so we do have a strong, uh, background in medical arts.
And so we have some interesting exhibits. A little scary. Mm-hmm. Um, but it's, it's a great place to really learn the background of the city.
And then you have what would've been an original
Piggly Wiggly. We have the replica of the Piggly Wiggly, which is really going back to your roots is fun. And you can grab kind of an old timey basket and fill that with different things from the shelves.
Um, and it's always amazing to me when I visit the Piggly Wily. How many brands are still around today? You know, the Hellmans and the Flower and the Borden's and things like that? They're still around today. Um, so we're talking about a hundred year old brands. That are representative. I saw
Crisco in there, Crisco, and it's not PC for me to say, but we still have Crisco for baking in our house Of course.
Mm-hmm. And I saw that all in that Piggly Wiggly. Yes. It's a lot of fun. So how many of your exhibits are permanent versus traveling? We tend to have three traveling exhibits a year. Okay? Mm-hmm. Right now we have the Earth Matters, which is a traveling exhibit, and our staff created an exhibit called All Rise. And it's 150 years of the Memphis Bar Association.
Oh, cool. Which might sound dry. Dry, but it's actually really interesting. And there's fun sections like, you know, 10 really weird facts about Tennessee law. You know, can you marry your cousin in the state of Tennessee? But there's some really interesting things in there that you wouldn't. Expect from a law exhibit. Our mission is to really touch different parts of our community.
Mm-hmm. Um, so from school kids to grownup adults to maybe teenagers. So we're always trying to look for things that'll bring people in here more than just a field trip.
What are you hoping to get? Is there anything that that is that elusive,
shrunken head on a traveling, I know last. Year we had Sue of the, the T-Rex, which was a traveling exhibit from the field museum.
And that was pretty amazing I bet. But, um, there is also some like an oceans under an underground dinosaur exhibit and that would be really fun. But I don't think we can do that or underwater here. Yay. We don't have, um. I think the, the, the depths of ceilings and, and space. I mean, you've got a pool here.
We have a pool here. Sheila Pool. We had a pool. I feel like there's an
opportunity for water. Yeah. Um, so how did you get into this line of work?
Mm-hmm.
Did you wake up and be like, I wanna have Tyra the T-Rex as my coworker? Was that always I fell into
it thinking it was temporary during COVID and loved it.
I, I was in magazine publishing for a very long time and, um. During COVID, I was talking to the director and everything was going online. And they just didn't have time to even proofread it. Mm. Because everything had to shift from in person to online. So I said, I have some time, I'll just, I can just proofread your stuff in the morning.
So I would proofread things. And then finally it kind of started realizing we have room for a communications here, person here in addition to the marketing team. So it just worked out and I love it. It's such a fun place to work. It's, it's fun to come work in a palace every day. I
bet, especially at Peak Palace.
Mm-hmm. I'd love to get into how people can get involved. Let's say they're not in Memphis, but they're planning a trip, or they really care about how you're trying to invest in the community. What are your goals in terms of fundraising or trying to get involvement across the state of Tennessee? Can you talk about that?
Sure. We rely heavily on, on fundraising. Mm-hmm. We have, you know, there's different sources of income. Here's. We have a rental space. So we have weddings and parties and corporate retreats. We have classrooms, so we actually have people in, we have groups like Code Crew, which teaches kids how to code and they have an office in the basement.
Um, but really we wanna get in touch with investors who understand how important STEM subjects are to kids. Mm-hmm. So there's a lot of opportunities to sponsor a lab. We have a lab called, um, the Greening of Mars. We have a lab, um. About, it's called bio build, about working in industries that help, you know, build the skin and, and the bones and the artificial implant, things like that.
So we like to stress to, um, prospective donors and sponsors. You know, we are really helping with work workforce development, so we're helping kids learn. I might like science. I didn't realize that until I went to the pink palace. Hmm. And, and saw how much energy it takes to make a cup of coffee. Mm-hmm. So we really.
Try to set things up so that there's always something here that's an extension of school and might be providing something that they're not learning. Hmm. In school.
So since 1968, you have had something called Friends of the Pink Palace. Yes. Can you tell me a little
about that? Sure. Oh, it's this wonderful volunteer group.
Uh, it's primarily women as it seems to always be, and they get together and they, they plan special events. They help us, um, they volunteer for events. So if we have a, say we're having our Science of Beer event where we. I bet that's not popular at all. Oh gosh, come on. Yeah, it's a huge sellout every year.
Yep. But they will help staff those things. Cool. But primarily what they do is an annual crafts fair. And it's a 53rd year, I think this year, and it's, um. The only juried crafts fair in Tennessee, which means people send in an application and they have to be chosen.
Oh, cool.
To be there.
So who chooses it?
Is it the friends of the Pink Palace? It's, they have a panel. Oh. And it's, so you maybe send them a gift basket of your craft products? No, no nepotism.
Well, we wanna avoid it. It's not a flea market where people might be able to mass market things. It's, it's a true artisan. So we have. Woodworkers and we actually have a place at, at the crafts fair where woodworkers can demonstrate what they do.
Uh, there's a broom maker that can demonstrate how they do that. They make brooms. There's knife, uh, forgers, there's all sorts of artists. Almost every medium of art is, is represented in the crafts Fair. Wow. And it has a really fun festival, uh, atmosphere as well. The friends do a wonderful job. They have live music every day.
There was a petting zoo this year. There's this really cute. Train trolley ride that kids can get on and ride around the fair. It's a lot of fun. It brings a lot of people to Memphis. It brings a lot of artists to Memphis, not just local artists. Artists from all over the country, and it's a great way also to teach things.
We have demonstrations so people can learn what is involved in being a woodworker, what is involved in being a forger.
That's really neat and you have the perfect grounds for it. I mean, there was meant to be a zoo here. It was
here, but actually we actually got too big for the grounds. It used to be here on the, on the premises, and now it is in Ottoman Park, which is in the center of Memphis.
Do you guys really lean into special events and working with the community in that
capacity? Mm-hmm. We do. Yeah, we have. I mentioned the signs of beer. We have a tree of events that are very social. It's a lot of fun, but it raises money for our education department. So we have the science of beer. The science of wine, which is coming up in April, and the Science of spirits.
Oh man. So lots of fun. If it don't, if it ain't fixed start, lemme reay it. If it ain't broken, don't fix it there. You guys, guys found your
trio there, so there's, you know, you might be able to sample a hundred wines. Oh my God. But then interspersed with that, do you offer free, like rides home and there's designated driver tickets as well and restaurants come together and donate food and wine and it's really great too because interspersed with that, our education department might have.
You know, here's what hops look like and here's what happens. Here's the process of making beer. So we try to keep it tied to our mission of, of serving, you know, the STEM community of teaching, the value of science and history. Mm-hmm. Especially in these changing times.
So for people that have never heard of the Pink Palace, what is your mission?
What are you guys setting out mm-hmm. To accomplish? Mm-hmm. Well, I'll,
I'll read our formal. Please do, if that's okay. Um, our mission is to inspire discovery through collecting, preserving and interpreting the cultural histories and natural sciences that shape our region. So it gives us a very clear cut path if it's, if it has to do with our region, what be what?
Built it, what our future is. It's, it's, it's part of our mission. So we like to connect different communities, have events, you know, as diverse as a bebop story time, uh, which is coming up. We have jazz performances. We've had, we have a children's art show in our, in our mezzanine right now. So we try to make sure that we're connecting to every different part of Memphis.
And one of the things I love about. This museum and its importance to the city is most people were here as kids, so they have wonderful memories of coming here, maybe on a class trip or with their grandparents, or with their parents and, and seeing things. And while probably 80% is the same as when they were kids, you know, we love to surprise them with something else to think about.
One of my favorite things to keep in mind is, you know, we don't tell people what to think, but we wanna give you a lot to think about.
Oh, I like that. We don't tell people what to think, but we give them a lot to think about. So for you personally while working at this museum for, you said four years, right?
Mm-hmm. Since COVID almost five. Mm-hmm. What do you think has kept you coming back day in, day out? Like what makes you excited to walk in through those doors? Right. And say hi to Tyra and do the thing
every day. Well, first of all, it is wonderful to work at a palace. Mm-hmm. It's just a fun place to come every day.
It's, the building itself is probably about a hundred years old. It's been a museum for 95 years, and there's just so much here. I feel like it's like gonna graceland like no matter how many times I go, there's always something else I think. Did I ever see that before? So our museum is full of, you know, little corners and tucked away spots where you could really discover a lot.
Mm-hmm. I'm a transplant to Memphis and I love the city, and to me working here is just, it's wonderful way to give back to the city. Mm. And discover all of its little secrets and, and histories because
you have a ton of field trips. I mean. Have on field. I hear you already had
three field trips here today, three today.
There are days we've, we've had between three and 700 kids here, so those days are amazing. The energy in the building is fantastic. The building really comes alive when it's crowded. Hmm.
Are there any stories you would like to share or personal anecdotes about kids that have come
through? The one that comes to mind is last year we had an exhibit, um.
Called Sue the T-Rex, and there was a boy from New Jersey who had traveled to four different museums to see the exhibit. And his family was wonderful. They accommodated him. He, they, they lived in New Jersey and the Mus, the exhibit was in Jersey City for a long time, but he estimated he had been to the exhibit a hundred times.
So it's really fun to see when kids. Really dig in and start to love history and love discovering science and history. Hmm. I
love that. Well, we play a game with everybody that comes on the podcast. Okay? I promise. It's not a scary game. It's a fill in the blank game. And so I'm gonna read a sentence to you, okay?
And I'm gonna have you fill in the blank. Memphis history is unique because
Blink Memphis history is unique because of the richness of the people here. We have such an amazing history in the arts and culture and music alone.
You could spend a month in Memphis and discover different places to hear music. Who made the music? Why? How did it develop? We have so much culture and music and yet we're a very accessible city. We're, we don't have the traffic of other cities. We don't have the congestion that can maybe hold people back. Like you can come to Memphis and really. Go anywhere you wanna go at any point and get in.
I really appreciate you saying that because everyone thinks of Nashville as Music City and I'm not knocking mm-hmm.
My hometown. But at the same time, Memphis is rich heritage mm-hmm. Of all different types of music. Yes. Street can't be forgotten.
Right, exactly. So, so much started here.
Hmm. That's great. One exhibit that everyone should see at MoSH is blank.
One exhibit that everyone should see at MoSH is our natural History exhibits.
They're our permanent collection, but we're constantly tweaking it. So we're trying to keep it up to date, but it's so important to understand, you know, where we come from as people, uh, what our ancestors may have looked like. And also the natural history, like things like tornadoes and hurricanes. We're actually on a very large fault here in Memphis. We've been fortunate not to have an earthquake, but it really, we have so much to read about that would help us guide the city through maybe what would happen next if there was something like that.
I do wanna ask you about your volunteers here at MoSH.
We had the most wonderful time with Jenny, and she was showing us all through the exhibits and helping us not miss the big things. Tell me about the power of volunteerism here.
Oh, it's so important. The, the power of volunteerism is really the power to open our doors. We are a huge mansion and we have several properties, so we really wouldn't be able to function without our, our volunteers.
They provide the local co color, you know, we can open the doors and turn on the lights and, and provide all the exhibits. And that plan, the different events. But our, our volunteers really help us fill in the gaps maybe with our events, they're, they're there to provide, um, they're, they're special knowledge of the place and, and Memphis, and we have plant sales, and we couldn't do our plant sales without our volunteers.
They help us propagate local plants. They, they water our plants. They come, they're, they're passionate. So one of the things I think is best about our volunteers is how passionate they are about. Our causes and our interests and our mission.
This museum is a really special place. You can tell by the pink stone on the outside.
And the beauty of the grounds. And then you walk in and everyone is so warm and so willing and ready to show you all of the gems. Metaphorically and literally, That you guys have on display here. And it is such a homey place to learn. So much. It's, bookish. It's, but with a lot of heart.
Exactly. Thank you. You summed that
up perfectly. I'm so good. Thank you for being here, Sheila. Thank you.
