Iceberg Right Ahead: Dallas Is Getting a Massive, Interactive Titanic Exhibition

The mysteries of the Titanic have fascinated the world since well before they became director James Cameron's obsession. If you ever fantasized about being aboard the ship (at least until that one fateful day), now you can. Titanic: The Exhibition is coming to Dallas early next year.

Beginning Feb. 14, 2025, at Pepper Square in Dallas, the exhibition will give visitors an in-depth dive into what the Titanic looked like and the lives of those on board. The showing will highlight individual stories of passengers onboard and offer recreations of the ship’s interior and exterior, hundreds of artifacts from the ship and sister ships and movie props and costumes from the Titanic movie.

The exhibition has stopped in major cities across the globe including Paris, London, Sydney, Moscow and Perth. Since 2003, the curator and historian of this exhibition, Claes-Göran Wetterholm, has been an expert on the history of the Titanic. Wetterholm is also an ethnologist, historian, researcher and author of several books about the ship. His most popular book is Titanic, from 1988.

This will not be the first time that Titanic: The Exhibition sets sail through Dallas. The exhibition was held at Fair Park in 2000. Titanic creative director and coordinator Mark Lach has brought exhibitions about the world’s greatest wonders for two decades. He’s designed exhibitions on King Tut, Michael Jackson, Cleopatra and others.

“We're excited to come back to Dallas, because, you know, the whole metroplex has always been great for exhibitions.” Lach says. “Dallas in particular has an amazing cultural scene and great museums and great exhibitions, and we're kind of honored to be part of that.”
Lach worked with a team of experts to make the Titanic exhibition as interactive as possible and connect guests to the passengers. The exhibition will have replicas of different parts of the Titanic: the grand staircase, first and third-class hallways of the ship, the iceberg that the ship crashed into, a full-scale layout of the lifeboats and over 350 artifacts.

When visitors arrive at the exhibition, they will receive a boarding pass that has the name and information of a real-life passenger who was on the Titanic. At the end of the exhibition, there is a memorial wall honoring all 2,200 passengers. The exhibition will also feature stories of passengers from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“It's really all about the people, the passengers and crew, and their stories of these folks throughout,” Lach says. “And you start to connect with that person on your boarding pass in a way that I think we never really imagined how deep it would be.”

Information about the passengers was collected in a variety of ways. Lach points to the story of a 19-year-old man, Leonard Taylor, who was a crew member of the Titanic and sent a postcard to his mother about how beautiful the ship was and how excited he was to work on it. Many passengers sent postcards that reached loved ones before or after the wreckage, and that’s how the information about their lives was collected. Lach credits his team of experts for gathering the stories and information about the Titanic passengers.

“Leonard was a passenger that probably certainly would have gotten lost in the pages of history,” Lach says. “But he sent a postcard to his mother days before Titanic sank from Southampton, where Titanic left, and that postcard arrived after his mother found out about the sinking.”

The artifacts from the two sister ships identical to the Titanic, Olympic and Britannic, at the bottom of the ocean, were collected using a robot that picked up the artifacts and placed them into a bin that was brought up to the surface and taken around the world in the exhibition. Artifacts that came from the Titanic happened to make their way somewhere else before tragedy struck. Lach tells the story of a woman who took a teacup before leaving the ship in Cherbourg, France.

“I sit at the feet of the experts, the historians, the underwater researchers,” Lach says. “So we've done incredible research over the years about her passengers, her crew, the folks that built the ship, that never really sailed on the ship.”

Titanic: The Exhibition opens Feb. 14, at Pepper Square, 14902 Preston Road. Early bird tickets are on sale but are in limited supply. Children under the age of 4 enter for free.