How can a museum exhibit space be organized in a specific way to insure the exhibit’s content most accessible to its audience?
I was really interested in researching about the curation of museum exhibits. Ever since I have been here, I have visited many museums for different classes and each time I would go to a museum and a specific museum exhibit I would have a different experience. As I started to visit more museums, I began to think about the design and format of the exhibits and ask myself questions that I never even thought about all these years when I visited a museum. For example, how many different departments are there within a specific museum for curating a exhibit? Do all museums curate their exhibits in the same way? Who has the most say in it? Who makes the final decision? Does the museum ask for the artwork or does the artist ask for their work to be put into an exhibit? ( Or does it depend on the situation?). There were four museums in NYC that I was really intrigued by because each one had their own unique set up for each exhibit. There are obviously some similarities between the exhibits, but altogether one can differentiate the exhibits without talking about the subject matter because of how they were laid out. I was really fascinated about knowing how can museum exhibit space be organized in a specific way to insure the exhibit’s content is most accessible to its audience and what manipulative strategies do they use for to attract more visitors to come.
I started this process by first researching and going to 3-4 museum exhibits that I found most interesting and examining their layouts, the types of pieces used, how they displayed them, etc. Then I did some online research on museum curation, the process, different ways a museum exhibit can be organized, and the specific tactics curators use for visitors to have a certain type of experience. After, I interviewed the director and chief curator of the Shelia C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons, Radhika Subramaniam and I got the details of curation in general, the process, and what it is like curating a gallery. After doing all that research, I decided to create my own mini museum exhibit on how the NYC infrastructure has influenced Parsons students in their first-year projects. Therefore, I choose to create a two room exhibit with the two different kinds of set up I noticed in the museums I visited with 16 pieces of artwork of Parsons first-year students. One of the rooms had sculptures in the middle of the room and artwork on the walls around it. The second room had a huge wall in the middle of room, which displayed an installation and on the back wall had a video and around was artwork.
For this project, I kept my topic the same, but I kept on changing my idea or question that I wanted to answer because there are so many divisions within museum curation that I needed to be more specific, but I didn’t know how to do that. So, I started asking myself questions about the topic, researching the different aspects of museum curation, visited a couple of museums several times to see what I was interested in and that helped me narrow down my ideas on what exactly I wanted to research on. Also, I struggled with how I was going to make my mini model because I first decided to make it in a shoe box, but then I realized that it wouldn’t correctly convey what I wanted to. So then, I thought what if I just make the actual physical thing myself instead of having a preset box to represent the space. That’s when I decided to create the space with foam board and print the works on glossy paper and glue it on an illustration board to give it a frame. Another thing I struggled with is deciding how to make the sculptures look three dimensional with flat images, but then I decided to put two images of the sculpture back to back and in between put a square made out of sculpted to have that 3D effect. The last thing that I had a problem with was deciding if I should put an entrance to the exhibit or not because if this museum exhibit was life size, then I would want people to enter from the left side. However, then I thought about it and I decided that it wouldn’t matter where people entered from because that was not what I wanted people to get out of this project. I wanted people to see the layout the room and how the pieces were set up.
I started out with these ideas for my studio project relating to museum curation. The top and bottom picture shows how I wanted to create my own museum exhibit with artworks of Parsons students. The middle photo shows how I also wanted to create a video of my research process about museum curation and how it works.
The two room set-ups that I noticed that was most commonly used in the museum exhibits that I visited. One with the sculptures in the middle of the room and artwork around the walls. The second picture is with the huge wall in the middle of the room and artwork surrounding that.
I designed the way the exhibit would be setup on Illustrator but in a 2D way. I, also decided where each piece was going to go and what size each piece would be.
This is when I just built the actual exhibit space with foam board and decided where I was going to put each piece of work.
This was my final outcome of the museum exhibit. I added in frames around the pieces I put on the walls, I colored the floors to make them look like wood floors, and added in the sculptures.
