05/01/2026
Gentle Readers! A little cultural to start the weekend off (very) right 🫶🏻
Meet Jim Prohaska, Exhibit Technician at Kiewit Luminarium
If you’ve ever walked through the Luminarium and thought, “How on earth does this all work?” the answer is, in part, Jim Prohaska. And like many of the best people in the cultural world, his path here was anything but linear.
Jim didn’t set out to build exhibits. He started in nursing school before pivoting to art and sculpture, with no clear plan for what came next. While working as a carpenter in Chicago, he spotted a newspaper ad for an Exhibit Preparator role at the Kohl’s Children’s Museum. Yes, an actual paper newspaper. And just like that, a career most people don’t even realize exists came into focus.
From there, Jim built a résumé that reads like a cross-country tour of curiosity, with stops at the Chicago Children’s Museum, the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Mesa Arts Center, Loveland Museum Gallery, the Arizona Science Center, and now, the Luminarium. Along the way, he developed a wide-ranging skill set in fabrication and exhibit design. So what keeps him coming back? It’s the creativity, the hands-on building, and the behind-the-scenes magic that turns ideas into something you can experience. That, and working with great people. Also, coffee. Reliable coffee helps.
And in case you were wondering, yes, Jim has always been this cool. In a past life, he played in a psych-garage rock band in 90s Chicago and was, big on the dive bar circuit. These days, he’s building a home studio and finding his way back to music, proving that the people behind our cultural spaces are still very much artists at heart.
