Kathryn Jones, 33, takes a tour of Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington on June 23. Photo / Maxine Wallace, the Washington Post
Underneath the towering 11-tonne African bush elephant immortalised in the rotunda of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Kathryn Jones unfurled her map.
Unlike the tourists in bucket hats and campers in matching T-shirts around her, she knew where she was going.
Sections of the crinkled paper were X-ed off with black marker, noting the exhibits she had strolled through.
Today, she would be tackling one unmarked section: the Fossil Hall. The 2890sqm exhibit is a tour of the natural world from present day backward to deep time.
And she would go through the exhibit reading every word on every plaque, watching every video on every screen. Just like she plans to do at every exhibit of the DC-area Smithsonians.
For many residents, visiting every local Smithsonian museum is a bucket list item that turns someone who lives in DC into a true Washingtonian.
Jones’ journey takes that challenge to the extreme.
The 33-year-old is on a mission not only to visit every museum, but to engage with all the text, videos, and interactive displays in each of the institutions.
Her project comes, incidentally, at a time when the museums have come under attack by the Trump Administration.
In March, the White House issued an executive order to eliminate “anti-American ideology” from the museums.
It has also made plans to substantially decrease the Smithsonian’s budget for 2026, and to eliminate separate funding for the long-planned National Museum of the American Latino and the Anacostia Community Museum.
US President Donald Trump’s Administration has also taken aim at the National Portrait Gallery’s director and what it calls DEI programming in the museums themselves.
Jones, who has been posting videos of her exhibit tours on Instagram, never thought of her project as one for posterity.
Now, she’s considering how her videos could one day become a primary source - a look at the Smithsonians pre-Trump.
“I hope we never get there, but it does now lay in my mind, and it makes [the project] feel less frivolous and less about me,” she said. “It’s documenting this for maybe myself, maybe for others, but also for knowing that it’ll exist.”
Jones has rules for her exhibit tours.
She must read print big and small. No skimming or skipping. The total reading time, calculated on her phone’s stopwatch, must go in her tracking sheet. Only after data is logged can she cross off a room on her map.
Her spreadsheet, perhaps unsurprisingly, is intense. Green progress bars show that, after five months of multiple museum visits per week, she’s only about a third of the way through her project.
It’s taken her 35 hours so far. And those hours haven’t always been pleasant, especially for her faulty knee and ankles.
“I really struggle with focus,” she said. “I get really hangry, and I have, apparently, geriatric limbs at this point. Sometimes the way I talk about it is like I’m running a marathon.”
Before embarking on this project, Jones worked as a vice-president of marketing for a real estate financing firm. But corporate life burned her out. She quit about a year ago.
“I thought I would be the physical embodiment of that trend, ‘your unemployed friend on a Tuesday’, and they’re on some yacht in Saint-Tropez or something,” she said. “But I couldn’t get out of bed.”
After six months of recovering, she started asking: What brings me joy? What can I contribute to this world?
The answer: embarking on a sizeable challenge, and sharing it with social media followers to spark, in others, her own love of learning.
The initial idea for the project wasn’t Jones’ alone; she recalled a throwaway line in a book she read as a tween about visiting the Smithsonians.
“They’re just so full of information, and if you tried to read everything, it would take you six months just to see it all,” she paraphrased. The quote bounced around her head for two decades before she decided to find out if it was true.
Her friends and family weren’t surprised by her new undertaking. She’s always had a maximalist approach to her pursuit of knowledge. To Jones, it serves a greater purpose.
“Knowing where we’ve been helps us know where we should go,” she said. “It provides a context for what’s happening now. The more you know, the more you empathise with other people, the more you understand.”
Jones came to the museum prepared. She packed a sandwich and fruit alongside a portable charger, ChapStick, and hand sanitiser in a bag big and full enough to get a family of six through a day on the National Mall.
She did standing toe-touches and stretched her neck. She also brought her noise cancelling earbuds, which she slipped on at the museum just before entering the Fossil Hall.
She usually listens to movie soundtracks or EDM while she reads. On that day, it was music from Downton Abbey.
Jones pressed start on her stopwatch and began.
Hands clasped behind her back, she ambled her way past plaques about the most recent ice age, around 20,000 years ago.
She stopped to stare at fossils of giant species - large bodies and fur better equipped to handle icy terrain than their modern relatives. Two graphs compared post-ice age warming to current global warming.
“It’s interesting that there are things that happened that affect terrestrial ecosystems and the ocean,” said a tourist studying the same charts. Jones stopped her timer.
“It’s almost peaceful how interconnected everything is,” she tells him.
That’s by design. There is an unseen art to museum exhibit creation, says Laura Donnelly-Smith, an exhibit writer and editor at the Natural History Museum.
She’s one of three employees whose fulltime role is to take scientific research - often decades of work - and disseminate it via text and video in digestible ways to a diverse audience. Every public-facing piece of information is vetted by scientists.
Museum exhibits aren’t books - visitors may not approach them from beginning to end. The Fossil Hall has several entries and exits, so the same information appears multiple times in different ways. “We try to be redundant,” Donnelly-Smith said.
“We have the big messages really large,” she continued. “For someone who finds themselves with a lot of prior knowledge or who is a real enthusiast, we provide the sort of detail in the object labels, in the image captions … Once you get into the hall and orient yourself, it becomes fairly easy because of different colour patterns to get the level that is right for you.”
That might mean, as is in the case in the nearby Ocean Hall, whale icons alongside text meant for children in halls with a wider reach.
Or for exhibits with specific target audiences, like young adults for the Cell Phone Unseen Connections room, language tailored to specific groups.
The museum tracks how long visitors spend at displays with observation timing and tracking, which Siobhan Starrs, the museum’s exhibit developer and project manager, said is “a bit like museum stalking”. Audience researchers observe the galleries to inform staff where guests spend the most time.
Starrs categorises visitors into three groups based on their speed: streakers, strollers, and scholars. But Jones, she said, is in a league of her own.
“She’s doing what many people wish they could do,” Donnelly-Smith said. “There are lots of museum lovers out there and many folks just don’t have the time or stamina.”
Despite her Dr Scholl’s sneakers, Jones finished her tour of the Fossil Hall with her knee wrap on.
Total reading time: three hours and eight minutes.
Total time in museum: five hours and 13 minutes.
She learned that snakes use their scales to climb trees, and that fossil fuels don’t come exclusively from dinosaurs.
When she returned home, she felt exhausted.
She’d been “field testing” cocktail recipes, so she tried a homemade French 75. She kicked up her feet and, to stay on theme for the day, watched The Land Before Time.
She’s spent over 60 hours (including snack breaks and filming time) in museums this year for this project alone.
Next weekend, she plans to see exhibits at the National Museum of African Art and the Hirshhorn she hasn’t yet checked off her map. But the more she learns, she said, the more she realises she doesn’t know.
“Instead of making me anxious, it almost gives me a peace, of like, ‘We’re part of something so much bigger,’” she said.
“We’ve been through crazy stuff before. The wind will move dust to dust after death. We will persist. You got to enjoy it while you got it, right?”
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