John Zabrucky thought northeast Ohio’s January weather would be the biggest obstacle in attending the first museum exhibition ever for the iconic pieces of movie history he created for his company Modern Props.

Instead, it was a threat much closer to his southern California home that nearly kept him from making it to Medici Museum of Art in Howland for the opening of “Sci-Fi + Hollywood: The Art of John Zabrucky.”

Zabrucky, a Warren native and 1965 Warren G. Harding High School graduate, has lived for more than 30 years at a house high in the hills of the Pacific Palisades, where one of the worst of the recent California wildfires decimated neighborhoods.

His family was forced to evacuate their home on Jan. 7 and haven’t been allowed to return, except for a brief, police-escorted visit to retrieve medications and a few essentials and to discover that their house had survived the wildfires with apparently minimal damage.

Many of their neighbors weren’t so lucky — six of the nine homes on his cul de sac were gutted.

“The photos don’t do it justice,” Zabrucky said.

“It’s mind boggling. I can only compare it to World War II. I don’t remember seeing anything quite like this. Even when I looked at Louisiana, it wasn’t acre after acre after acre.”

Zabrucky, 77, wasn’t able to retrieve some of the drawings he made while creating some of the props featured in the exhibition, but he will be in attendance for an opening reception at Medici from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday that is free and open to the public.

“If someone has a reception for you, you want to be there,” he said.

Zabrucky won regional and national awards as an artist when he was pursuing his master’s degree and teaching at Kent State University before deciding to move to California in the mid-’70s when he became disenchanted with teaching.

He became the creative force behind Modern Props, which was founded in 1977, and during the company’s 43 years in operation his work appeared in hundreds of films and television series, including “Blade Runner,” “Men in Black,” “Batman Returns,” “Total Recall,” “RoboCop” and multiple “Star Trek” properties.

Medici will be a different experience, one he said during a phone interview that he’s anxiously awaiting.

“It’s overwhelming,” Zabrucky said. “It’s really a wonderful thing. I never really thought I would see it in a formal museum of art … From the glimpses I’ve seen (in photographs), it doesn’t look like a fish out of water. It looked correct, and I was happy about that.

“The only thing I’m bummed about is that I wasn’t able to get back in the house and try to get some of those early drawings. I feel really badly about that.”

In 2023, Zabrucky donated more than 500 of his creations, from small handheld props to towering devices, to the Trumbull County Historical Society, and the collection will serve as the foundation for the Museum of Science Fiction and Fantasy Arts, which will be created in his hometown of Warren.

The Medici exhibition contains a small fraction of the collection. Progress is being made on the sci-fi museum.

Ten semi-trailer trucks filled with props have been shipped from southern California to the Mahoning Valley since August 2023.

A site for the museum at 410 Main Ave. SW has been purchased, and the Washington, D.C.-based architecture film Hickok Cole (whose projects include the International Spy Museum) will design it. However, many other steps need to be completed, according to TCHS Executive Director Meghan Reed.

“That’s going to take us a few years, but we definitely want the community to be able to interact and see the props before then,” Reed said. “We also selfishly want to have a sense from the community of what speaks to them. Which props do they get excited about? Are there pieces that outshine others? Which one should we be focusing on? And we thought that an initial exhibit here in Trumbull County would be the best place to start.”

TCHS also is planning to create a traveling exhibition with the Modern Props collection that will serve a dual purpose, creating awareness and interest in the Warren museum as well as a revenue stream through rental fees.

With the Boy Scouts of America art collection, including its 65 Norman Rockwell works, leaving Medici last September, the museum had a vacancy to fill in its main gallery.

“We had the gallery space, so I thought it would be a great partnership locally to work together to utilize our space and resources and kind of come up with the exhibit before it travels,” Medici Director Katelyn Amendolara-Russo said. “And I think it was a great learning experience for Megan and I both working alongside each other.”

Picking what to include was a challenge.

“We wanted to select a mix of pieces that were both significant because of the movie or TV show that they were in, but also exciting because of what they do,” Reed said. “There are some heavy hitters that lots of people will be excited to see, like (Captain) Kirk’s communicator (from “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”) or the egg chairs for ‘Men in Black.’ Those are iconic pieces that John designed, but they’re also not as high-tech.

“On the other hand, there are a lot of pieces that are extremely exciting to interact with, even if you don’t know what they were in, like the chair from ‘Robocop.’ The mechanics allow it to move, and you can change the chair and almost go upside down in it. And then there’s pieces like the consoles that were in ‘Star Trek’ that light up and have screens in them, and all of the buttons work. And it’s really exciting to see, just from an aesthetic point of view, just how it looks and how the public can interact with those pieces.”

The Medici exhibition will allow viewers to get up close to the memorable props — but please no touching — and provides information about Zabrucky’s career and the history of Modern Props.

Zabrucky has said he doesn’t consider the work he did for Modern Props “art,” at least not in the traditional sense, but Amendolara-Russo disagrees.

“These props are iconic,” she said. “You know there’s an artist behind the work. I’m in awe just seeing how creative his mind was to design each one.”

The approach will be somewhat different when the Museum of Science Fiction and Fantasy Arts opens.

“This show is curated to work within an art museum space,” Reed said. “In many ways, the pieces that Modern Props created and that John designed are in some ways sculptural pieces, right? They are exciting and interesting from a fabrication point of view, but also an aesthetic point of view.

“But when the Museum of Science Fiction and Fantasy arts opens, our goal is to have that museum be a very interactive space, a museum but also in some ways a science center where we’re really grappling with this idea of the science behind science fiction. Some things that were sci-fi 50 years ago, like talking into your watch or FaceTiming on your phone, are now reality. So how can we look at what may be science fiction today and start having conversations with the public and engaging people with those questions of white what might be reality 50 years from now?”

If you go …