First look: Paisley Park's 10-year Prince Celebration special exhibit
May 26, 2026
On Wednesday evening (May 20), Paisley Park invited members of the press to a special sneak preview of a new exhibit that will be unveiled publicly for 2026 edition of Celebration, the annual Prince fan gathering. The new exhibit marks the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death — or, to paraphrase the museum’s typification, his passage from this plane into immortality, from corporeality to the eternal. Or, as the signage throughout the area put it, “Prince: 1958-4EVER.”
As the first round of 20 members of the media were handed pouches to muffle our cell phones prior to entering the anteroom off Studio C, where the exhibit is being held, the vintage Prince song playing over the PA was almost too perfectly selected: “Strange Relationship.” That song, from 1987’s Sign ‘O’ the Times, wasn’t necessarily written about Prince’s oft-contentious rapport with the press, but in that moment, it could have been. (Note: photos from the exhibit are embargoed until Prince Celebration begins.)
A pair of Paisley employees preceded things with a brief pronouncement: 2026 marked the 10th anniversary of Prince’s “transition from this life,” adding that Paisley Park was “a place of innovation.” Thankfully, the latter statement did not mean that we would be treated to something made with AI.
The group was first led into Studio C itself — already set up with a smorgasbord of artifacts and multimedia that hit many of the highlights of Prince’s career. These include the purple Yamaha CP-70 electric piano that features on the artist’s early album run from 1979’s Prince to 1984’s Purple Rain, as well as the worldwide tour behind the latter, and his Academy Award for Best Original Song Score for the Purple Rain film, encased in glass. The latter is displayed below a TV showing, as the first of two groups stopped in for a few minutes, the Revolution’s bravura performance at the 1985 American Music Awards.
A narrow door to the left of the Yamaha CP-70 led to the new exhibit’s site — a narrow white room, each of whose long walls were essentially split in three, with a film projected onto the left and a selection of objects gathered on the right. Both halves emphasized the maestro’s passing, albeit in very different ways.
First, the film on the left — or, at times, films, since much of it was done split-screen style into thirds that occasionally bled into one widescreen image. Typically, the middle was the main frame and the sides offered commentary. The left and right mingled in other ways as well, such as when shots of Prince’s notebook pages threaded wittily from the right to the left in real time, “behind” the middle frame.
Much of this footage, we learned, was previously unseen. That was evident, given that much of what we saw carried visible timecode at the bottom corner of the frames. This offered a kind of patina of authenticity — evidence that this stuff had come straight from the archives.
The notebook pages were fascinating. They contained blueprints galore, for outfits, for instruments, for Paisley Park, as well as handwritten lyrics in Prince’s loopy, florid penmanship — handwriting that seemed to echo (or prefigure) the songs’ emotional or musical tone. Prince’s outline sketches for objects to be made from cloth, or steel, or concrete also carried much of the quirky precision of his music, be it a colored-pencil rendering of the exterior of the building where we stood, the flowing sleeves of a stage costume, or the layers of a custom-made instrument. In the latter case, we got a glimpse of the top, middle, and bottom of the Purpleaxxe, Prince’s MIDI controller/keytar from the mid-’90s. As that flashed on the sides, we saw him playing it in the middle frame.
Naturally, there was also a good amount of rare and enticing performance footage. This included a glimpse of Prince in the studio, listening to playbacks and leading a horn section through an overdub. The truly amazing bit came from a rehearsal circa the 1988 Lovesexy tour: Wearing a magenta outfit and matching heels, Prince puts his microphone down on the stage floor, then stomps out a counterrhythm over a drum-machine beat, then first crouches and then lays down on the floor singing extemporaneously into it. That’s the kind of tidbit a fan might wish that the Prince Estate would put more of into the world.
The footage also contained its less-enticing moments. For a presentation that makes so much of the guy’s alleged immortality, there was a real disconnect in watching Prince doing multiple sets of splits in three-inch heels. Seeing it, the viewer was both amazed at his agility and unable to help but be reminded that this very act, and his medical numbing of the pain that resulted, was literally the thing that killed him.
There were also some clips from Prince’s latter-day appearances on interview shows. Prince had typically avoided the press until the ’90s — particularly after he left Warner Bros. in 1996 and had to become his own public salesman, and oftentimes not a particularly forthcoming one. We see him on a British chat show talking about his compulsion to make music all the time — a gift he typifies as being “like heaven.” He leads Oprah Winfrey around Paisley Park’s tailoring studio, where all his clothes were made to order. But when Prince sits there with his face covered entirely by a black-lace mask, refusing to speak to the interviewer, as his first wife Mayte answers all his questions for him, it does not portray him in the divine light that the film’s assemblers seem to think it does. Artistically, Prince’s insolence could be thrilling. Person to person, it was frequently less so.
When the film finished, the group’s attention went to the other wall. There, another three-way split. On the right side, the emphasis was on photos from various eras and a poster with a history of his Love 4 One Another Charity. In the middle were a pair of podium-mounted iPads below a sign: “Share What Prince Means 2 U,” with guests invited to type their thoughts on the devices. (A couple members of this reporter’s group did so.)
The left third was the most visually detailed part of the exhibit, a length of fence festooned with flowers, buttons, and other Prince-related trinkets — a re-creation of the impromptu fan memorial that took place following his passing far more regimented than the original. At far left is the street sign: PRINCE ROGERS NELSON MEMORIAL HIGHWAY.
Directly above the door coming in from Studio C, in glowing pink, are the words ANY CHARITABLE ACT IS LOVE IN MOTION. Anyone who ever went to the NPG Store on Hennepin Avenue during the ’90s will see that his taste in neon signage has remained intact.
The exhibit, we were told, was keyed to what the museum dubbed “seven elements” of Prince’s life and career: faith, fashion, dance, performance, community, innovation, freedom. Parts of it were indeed fascinating, even if the whole didn’t quite add up.
To book a tour of Paisley Park and find out more about Celebration 2026, visit paisleypark.com and princecelebration2026.com
