The News 03.16.2021

News from the worlds of exhibition design, interior design, and environmental graphics.

The secret life of museums during lockdown; “we miss our visitors” | COVID study finds that museums are safer than any other indoor activity | Covid-19 has driven millions of women out of the workforce | Smithsonian scales back its $2 billion expansion plan | Congress authorizes two new Smithsonian museums: the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum — hoorah! | Steal this job: museum exhibit designer | Or build your own museum in a box | Researching a sustainable kitchen countertop | Should we revisit the term “master bedroom”? — and committing to “going into the basement” | I Love Typography’s favorite fonts of 2020 | Lessons learned about team projects | A treasure trove of exhibition design inspiration: past winners of the SEGD global design awards | Benchmarks for online museums | And while poking around the onlines, I found that an exhibit I designed is on Google Street View Arts & Culture! Here are some screenshots from Pacific Exchange: China & U.S. Mail, which was on view in 2014/2015 at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum:

It’s a little “uncanny valley,” but also really neat to see an old friend. (Previous blog coverage, here and here.)

Fair Play, the fourth Freedom Forum pop-up exhibit

My last post was about experiencing museum exhibits in-person when the museums themselves are closed due to Covid-19 precautions. Habitat is located outside (I shared some photos of it in the snow, but it’s really lovely to see when the weather is nice) and here’s another example, located inside, of an outside-the-museum museum exhibit.

Fair Play: Athletes Speak, Assemble, Petition for Freedom just opened at Dulles International Airport and Ronald Reagan National Airport. It’s the result of a partnership between Freedom Forum (the Newseum) and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority; the fourth in a series designed by Christine Lefebvre Design.

If you’re in the DC area, it’s easy and free to see the exhibit at Reagan Airport!

And here’s how. If you’re driving, park in the Terminal A lot. I prefer to park on Level 5, close to the elevator access. Take your elevator all the way down, to Level G. From there you’ll follow the signs to Terminal A, on moving walkway after moving walkway … until you arrive at and take the escalator up to Level 1. There, you’ll turn LEFT (the signs will say Terminal A is to your right and Terminals B and C are to your left, but trust me: turn left) and you’ll almost immediately find yourself in Terminal A’s historic lobby. There it is, up above.

You don’t have to go through security, and if your visit is less than an hour, parking is free. (You can also get there by Metro.)

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the graphic design for this exhibit was font selection. Fonts were expressly chosen from the work of underrepresented type designers — we looked at typefaces by people of color, women, and LGBTQ people — before we ultimately settled on three typefaces by Black designers that also fit the sporty aesthetic of the exhibit. The typeface used for large headlines is called Bayard, named after Bayard Rustin, organizer of one of the most powerful expressions of freedom of assembly: the 1963 March on Washington. (Making it also fit strongly with the subject matter of the exhibit.) Inspired by protest signs used in the march, the typeface was created by Tré Seals, a Washington, DC-area designer. The other typefaces used in the exhibit are Jubilat and Halyard, by Black typographer Joshua Darden.

I hope you get a chance to see it!

Habitat, in the snow

Before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted everyone’s life, if the weather were terrible … well, at least you could pop into a museum and while away an hour or two.

Museums in the Washington, DC region are currently closed to the public, but there is still opportunity to see outdoor exhibitions — even in terrible weather. I took these photos yesterday, of the exhibition, Habitat, that I designed for Smithsonian Gardens. (More photos, taken in warmer times, along with a project description.)

If you’re interested in exploring the Habitat exhibition, on the National Mall in Washington, DC, here is the wayfinding map to help you locate the different exhibits:

What interesting outdoor exhibitions have you seen recently? Let me know in the comments!

Openings and Closings: The past seven months

It’s been busy, busy, busy here at Christine Lefebvre Design since I last posted — seven months ago! — about the Baselitz and Lozano-Hemmer exhibitions at the Hirshhorn.

Around the same time, and since, we’ve seen a bunch of openings: Five Communities at the National Law Enforcement Museum; Digital Disruption and A Deadly Attack at the Newseum; Habitat for Smithsonian Gardens; Hoops at the National Building Museum; Wíwənikan…the beauty we carry at the Colby College Museum of Art; and Man Walks on the Moon for the Newseum, at Dulles and Reagan Airports.

A few are already nearing the ends of their runs! If you have a chance to visit any, I would love to hear from you about what you thought of them.

The Newseum will close its doors on December 31, 2019 (though the Freedom Forum and the Newseum’s collection will carry on). It’s your last chance to see Digital Disruption in the News History gallery, and the rest of the museum’s incredible exhibitions.

I worked with the Newseum on three “pop-up” exhibitions, on view concurrently at Reagan National Airport and Dulles International Airport. The first of these, Man Walks on the Moon, is closing this week.

Another pop-up at Dulles and Reagan airports will soon take its place — the exhibitions are currently being installed — followed by a third in the spring.

Also closing soon is Hoops: Community Portraits by Bill Bamberger at the National Building Museum. Hoops will close on December 1, 2019, after which the museum will close temporarily from December 2 until March 2020. The gist of a glowing review from a friend: “I thought this wouldn’t interest me because I could care less about basketball, however … this is a really great exhibit!” That sounds underhanded, but I assure you they really liked it.

When the Building Museum reopens, you can look forward to my next exhibition for them, Alan Karchmer: The Architects’ Photographer.

Wíwənikan…the beauty we carry at the Colby College Museum of Art will close on January 12, 2020. If you find yourself in the Waterville, Maine area please pay a visit.

And that takes us through the end of 2019! If you miss the exhibitions that are closing soon, Smithsonian Gardens’s Habitat will remain on view (all over the National Mall) through at least December 2020, and of course there are those three upcoming openings. Until our next check-in....

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken link has been replaced with archived URL, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 29 October 2019.

Two more at the Hirshhorn Museum

Phew! It has been a busy 14+ months since I last posted. (14 months?! Oh my....) In that time, I’ve designed seven exhibitions of varying size and scope, four print projects, and three large production jobs. I am currently in early design development for an exciting project in Maine, and then there is the typical day-to-day of running a small design studio. Yep, just sitting around eating bon-bons.

In an attempt to get back into posting on The Exhibit Designer, I am kicking off with a book-end to my last post: two more exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum. These two were both located in the same gallery, and were on view one right after the other.

Baselitz: Six Decades ran from June 21, 2018 through September 16, 2018, then Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse opened in its place on November 1. Pulse is on view for another month, if you’d like to check it out.

The title treatment for Pulse played on the visual of the pulsing incandescent light bulbs hanging from the ceiling in Lozano-Hemmer’s installation Pulse Room …

… while the title for Baselitz was a straight-forward title lockup. An early concept, in which “George” and “Baselitz” were alternately flipped upside down (Baselitz is known for his “inverted” paintings) was rejected, and I am a little sad for what could have been.

In the end, the final title lockup and entry wall treatment created a neat refraction effect when ascending the escalator, as the letters reflected in the glass.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 25 March 2019.

The Utopian Projects and What Absence Is Made Of

The Markus Lüpertz exhibition I shared in my last post is no longer on view at the Hirshhorn — it came and went so quickly! — but the museum has two other exhibitions currently on view for which I designed the graphics. First, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian Projects:

Working in collaboration with the museum’s design department, I designed the exhibition’s title wall, didactic graphics, and wall quotations.

The title wall graphic is printed on DreamScape’s self-adhesive wallcovering, Caviar texture. I like the print quality of DreamScape wallcoverings — I first spec’ed them for the exhibits at the FDR Museum, and have used them a few times since. The wallcovering was installed using butt seams. The installers (Blair, Inc. in Virginia, also the graphics fabricator) wrapped the wallcovering around the wall’s edges, a tricky detail that would have looked terrible if done poorly.

The graphic panels are digital prints wrapped on sign blank with a matte over-laminate. They are hung on French cleats (simple but strong), which is an easy way to hang nearly anything. Also on the panels’ backsides is MDF blocking that provides rigidity for the sign blank fronts. Here’s a photo I snapped during installation, of the backsides:

The Utopian Projects is on view through March 4. The Kabakovs’ work is fascinating — their models are so cool. Check it out if you can!

The other exhibition at the Hirshhorn, for which I designed the graphics, is What Absence Is Made Of, on view through Summer 2019. For this exhibition I designed the title wall, didactics, and an exterior advertising poster for the National Mall.

The curator requested reflective vinyl. In addition to layout experiments, I played with color combinations (silver on white? silver on black? on gray? which gray?). I love the way the selected title design looks in silver vinyl — it catches reflections and disappears, then reappears, as you walk by it.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 5 January 2018.

Markus Lüpertz: Threads of History

A quick check-in here. I stopped by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden this past weekend for Sound Scene X, and to take some photos of a project I currently have on view in the museum’s lower level: the exhibition Markus Lüpertz: Threads of History, on view through September 10.

I developed the concept for the exhibition graphics, and after many rounds of refinement, handed over template files for the museum’s designers to produce final graphics (with the exception of the timeline graphic, which I laid out). I much prefer to handle the layout of final production files but aligning the museum’s schedule with mine was tough in this instance.

I also designed two exterior signs advertising the exhibition, for display outside the museum. The blue sign has already been replaced with one for another exhibition — things move fast on the Mall sometimes! Additional information about the exhibition can be found on my portfolio.

Please check out the exhibition if you're in the DC area! And if you like it, there is a concurrently-open exhibition to see, Markus Lüpertz at the Phillips Collection. I have become a fan of Lüpertz’s work — particularly the Donald Duck paintings, one of which is visible through the exhibition’s entrance (in the first photo) and on the blue sign above.

This weekend was a good time to be a kid (of any age) at the Hirshhorn—the galleries were full of interactive sound installations, live museum, and sound-related activities, all part of Sound Scene X: Dissonance.

While there, I took the opportunity to also check out the newly-opened, Ai WeiWei: Trace at Hirshhorn.

I am currently working with the museum on another exhibition, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Utopian Projects, set to open in a month. Stay tuned for that!

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 10 July 2017.

Mr. Toilet House and Nam June Paik

In April I spent two weeks in South Korea and a week in Japan. While there, I did what I always do while touristing — visited many museums. Some of them were forgettable, but many are worthy of a post, including these two that are thematically very different but, geographically, neighbors; they are both located in Suwon, about 20 miles south of Seoul. First up is the Toilet Museum (Haewoojae) also known as “Mr. Toilet House.”

The story behind Mr. Toilet House: Suwon’s late mayor Sim Jae-Duck was given the nickname “Mr. Toilet” for his passionate leadership of the “Toilet Culture Movement” to improve public toilets. In 1996 he started the Beautiful Toilet Culture Campaign, and the city declared its intent to build the most beautiful public toilets in the world (motivated also in part by the then-upcoming 2002 FIFA World Cup which they were to host). Mr. Toilet took things a bit further than merely creating government departments and task forces, however, when he rebuilt his own house in the shape of a toilet and named it Haewoojae, which means “a room where you can relieve your worries.” It features a central toilet room as the “core of living,” with transparent glass walls that turn opaque with the flip of a light switch. The house was completed in 2007, and upon Sim’s death in 2009, it was willed to the city of Suwon. The city then converted it into a museum and culture park.

The museum is small and has clear, simple graphics (nearly all with English translations) that earnestly convey information about the history and global spread of modern sanitation, and other toilet-related subjects. There are also lighthearted illustrations of poops and flies (including on the floor, used as a navigational device) and hilarious double entendres in the writing.

Outside, there is a culture park. A meandering path leads you past examples of toilets, used throughout Eastern and Western history, that give an understanding of how toilets have physically changed over time.

Next door you can visit the Haewoojae Culture Center for a birds-eye view of the Toilet Museum.

Our next stop in Suwon: the Nam June Paik Art Center. The Nam June Paik Art Center opened in 2008 and holds 248 pieces of video installations and drawings, mostly of Nam June Paik’s but also of other contemporary artists. The art center hosts changing exhibitions of Paik’s work, special exhibitions of contemporary artists, performances, events, and educational programs. It also houses Paik’s archives and a library, undertakes research, and publishes scholarly journals and monographs.

The art center changes exhibitions regularly; they use their Nam June Paik-focused exhibitions to focus on different aspects of his work. While I was there, the exhibition was called Point-Line-Plane-TV, which “explored Nam June Paik’s canvas including intermedia [sic] such as television, score, film, and video, in notion of flatness.”

On the mezzanine level is the Education Room, seen in the photos below; a quiet place to have a seat and read some tables about the artist’s life.

Upstairs was Imaginary Asia, a special exhibition of 23 pieces in the motion images genre. Many of the videos were projected onto large walls, with small bench nooks that could sit 2–3 people for viewing.

Like at Mr. Toilet House — and actually at many, many places I visited in South Korea — navigational cues and directions were applied directly to floors. In the Point-Line-Plane-TV exhibition as well they applied interpretive text to the floor. Interpretive text was in both Korean and English.

Outside, the curved glass exterior of the the art center is modeled on the form of a grand piano, a common motif in Paik’s work, and on the letter P. But that is only apparent when you look at the museum map — the actual experience from outside is simply of an impressive modernist building.

There is a small park just beside the museum — perfect for a rest after an afternoon’s museum visit — and nearby are the Gyeonggi Provincial Museum (which has limited English translations) and the Gyeonggi Children’s Museum.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 24 May 2017.

Letters With Wings sneak peek at the National Postal Museum

If you stop by the Smithsonian National Postal Museum during the next couple of months, you’ll be able to see two exhibitions that I’ve designed. One is New York City: A Portrait Through Stamp Art (on view through May 14; full project view here); the other just opened.

Beneath the museum’s escalators, in the Franklin Foyer, are two cases for temporary exhibitions. The museum intends to change these cases often with displays of recent acquisitions, favorite objects, niche subjects, and the like.

I created a design system for the museum’s in-house use when putting together these quick little exhibitions, and I designed the first exhibition to use the system: a “sneak peek” of an upcoming exhibition about WWII airmail tentatively called Letters With Wings.

The design system included color palette, guidelines for layout of didactic and label graphics, sets of case furniture and graphic panels, and examples of case arrangements.

I also designed a series of banners and an “attract graphic” to brand the Franklin Foyer space. The attract graphic will be a geometric, cone-like acrylic structure with a changeable title panel; two will be installed in the open triangles of space between the artifact cases and the undersides of the escalators. (You can see the “open triangles of space” in the photos above.) They will protrude slightly into the space, above head level, and draw visitors’ attention from the atrium space. They’re not currently installed, but I look forward to seeing them there in the future.

There are no physical artifacts in either case of the currently installed exhibition, so objects are represented as printed graphics. (Docents will occasionally bring out the real objects for visitors, which are being prepared for the larger exhibition.) The printed representations are mounted to sintra (a lightweight, yet rigid, PVC sheet) to give them depth.

If you’re in the Washington, DC area, please check out this little exhibition — and New York Stamp Art, too — while they’re still on view!

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 28 March 2017.

Pointe-à-Callière: Crossroads, Building Montréal, Snow

My final post about the Montréal museums I saw during my visit to the city in September 2015 — see also the Insectarium, the Biodôme, and Lazy Love at the Biodôme — here’s a look back at Pointe-à-Callière, Montreal’s Archeology and History Complex.

The Pointe-à-Callière complex is built on archeological sites that span the city’s history. Exploring the museum is very interesting, and a lot of fun — you take passageways, bridges, and stairs over and through the archeological remains. Like the museum building itself, which was built on pilings to protect the site, exhibition elements tread lightly among the artifacts, and visitors are asked repeatedly via signage not to touch the remains. Like most places in Montréal, museum graphics are in French with English translations. I like the way the two languages are interwoven on the red lobby banner above.

The permanent exhibition in the basement, Crossroads Montréal, takes you through 1,000 years of the city’s remains, including the first Catholic cemetery (dating from 1643), and the foundation of the Royal Insurance Building (dating from 1861). Excavations continue and more exhibitions are planned to interpret what is unearthed. On the one hand: very cool premise, and very cool space to explore. On the other, I had trouble getting and keeping my bearings. Perhaps because the graphics didn’t hold my attention? The ruins themselves were more intriguing.

I would have liked more information directed at the museum “streakers” like myself: the people who move quickly through exhibitions, and only read titles and very selective [random] bits and pieces of labels. (On my best days, I can be a “stroller.”) Perhaps a printed guide map would have helped me to understand where I was within the museum and what I was looking at. Perhaps I should have taken a guided tour.

I did like the graphics’ integration into the museum’s building structure, particularly the ceilings, and the minimalist construction-site aesthetic of their structures. Artifact cases, too, were carefully integrated into the site.

Most graphics were rear-illuminated, which worked perfectly with the museum’s underground atmosphere.

Also below-ground is the Building Montréal exhibition, where you’ll find the museum’s archeological crypt. The photos below are of the vaulted stone tunnel built on the bed of the Saint-Pierre River. See what I mean about the museum being fun to explore?

Set into the floor of Building Montréal are more than a dozen dioramas that show the city at different points in time. I love this use of space, and the vantage point it gives visitors. (I wrote this post about exhibition flooring, seven years ago, and Bridget mentioned the Pointe-à-Callière in the comments. I finally saw it for myself!)

At the time, the museum also had a temporary exhibit on view called Snow, a fun look at winter culture in Canada. Notice the snowflakes cut from the apron fronts of reader rails!

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 25 March 2017.

Space for Life, part 2: Insectarium

Update: The Insectarium is being redesigned, and is scheduled to reopen in 2021.

The Insectarium was our second stop in Montréal’s natural museum complex, Espace Pour La Vie (“Space for Life”). It’s a fascinating and excellently-designed museum. Its exterior looks like a home for insects, almost like a bee hive:

The permanent exhibition is called We Are the Insects and it is predominately ... very green. Graphics are a mix of strikingly clean layouts and comic book-inspired illustrations.

Here’s the view down to the bulk of the exhibition:

Each of the glowing cubes is a display case. Specimens are pinned to a rear-lit graphic, around text and images arranged in a clean, gridular design. Each layout looked nicer than the last, so I'm going to share photos of many.

Some layouts have a sense of irreverence, like this one, with its marching ants:

The different accent colors and stylized illustrations indicated the habitats (e.g. tropical forests) for the specimens.

Throughout the exhibition there were terrariums with some live critters, and beneath some display cubes there were dioramas (faux terrariums, if you will).

There were wall displays, and plenty of interesting charts and diagrams. There were sections about insect lifestyles, diets, reproduction, and what people can do to protect endangered insects. The sheer number of displays could have made for a repetitive slog, but it did not feel that way at all — specimens were fascinating, text was succinct, and the layouts were visually varied while staying true to the design system.

Outside were additional exhibitions and a temporary interactive art installation. And then we were off to explore the Botanical Garden.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 15 March 2017.

Space for Life, part 1: Biodôme

Back in September 2015, I spent a handful of days in Montréal. I visited a few museums, but at the time, I only gave one temporary exhibition at the Biodôme brief mention on this blog. This happens all the time — I take photos everywhere I go, and then I just sit on them.… So let’s dust off those photos (or pretend it’s September 2015), and visit the Biodôme.

The Biodôme is part of a museum complex called Espace Pour La Vie (“Space for Life”) that also includes the Insectarium, Jardin botanique (botanical gardens), and Planétarium. You can buy combination admission tickets and pick which you would like to visit. The largest exhibition, and primary draw, within the Biodôme is Ecosystems of the Americas. (But don’t miss the Insectarium!) The Ecosystems exhibition is broken into four ecosystems conveyed by immersive landscaping, climate, and live vegetation and wildlife. For example — the air inside the Tropical Rainforest ecosystem is warm and muggy, while inside the Sub-Antarctic Islands ecosystem it is decidedly chilly.

Inside the Tropical Rainforest you walk through mature and secondary forests, and pass a waterfall, lake, river, cliffs, and caves. Graphics throughout are minimal, restricted to brief labels and occasional monitors. Like most places in Montréal, text is in French, with English translations.

Charming illustrations and species’ statuses are available in the free Identification Guide.

Inside the cave you’ll find terrarium-dwellers and nocturnal-types; these graphics were all rear-illuminated, and included a bit more information than graphics in the Rainforest:

Moving along, you reach the Laurentian Maple Forest. At the entrance to each ecosystem you are greeted by a large wall mural: a collage of color-saturated photos, clean-lined vector illustrations, and a where-in-the-world diagram.

Maintaining the minimal aesthetic throughout, there are still elements of whimsy, such as photos of playful otters applied to the glass wall of their enclosure. Wayfinding elements also show up on the floor, and on support columns.

Downstairs, there are a couple of small exhibitions: the Naturalia Room, which is directed toward children, and a temporary exhibition, which at the time was The Fossil Affair.

Overall, the Biodôme was a fun museum to visit, and the immersive ecosystems were well-done.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 14 March 2017.

AIGA Design Week and Timber City at National Building Museum

DC Design Week events have wrapped. This was a good Design Week — there were many more events than in years past, with a range of design focuses — and I was able to make it to a number of them! An event of particular interest to exhibition designers was held on Wednesday, at the National Building Museum: Design Matters with Debbie Millman featuring Abbott Miller: Design for the Built Environment.

The conversation touched on exhibition design, architectural graphics, and performance design. And as a bonus, prior to the event start, the museum's newest temporary exhibition, Timber City, was open for us.

Timber City opened in September and is on view at NBM through May 2017. The two huge title signs in the museum atrium draw your eye up and point to the bay where the exhibition is located. Also impressive in its scale is the scaffolding holding up the signage.

The exhibition is not restricted to the interior gallery space. Lining the hall outside the gallery are large plinths, of staggered heights, that feature stories about buildings' timber technology. Within the window bays are views into the exhibition, and architectural models in cases. The text on the painted green walls appears to be cut vinyl.

Inside the gallery space, the exhibition is made up of large-scale, extra-thick, freestanding wood walls. (You can see the support structures below.) Graphics appear to be a mix of direct-print and cut vinyl. The large murals at either end of the gallery space are applied wallpapers.

Note for future exhibits: Laminated Strand Lumber does not take cut vinyl letters well. (above)

In the center of the gallery space are a trio of cheeky display case plinths, made of stacked wood circles. The wood walls are peppered with infographics, stylized illustrations, and green circles highlighting quick facts about timber.

Timber City was curated and designed by Boston-based ikd. And thanks to AIGA DC for putting on a great week of design events!

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 31 October 2016.

California Academy of Sciences, part 2: color and quakes

If forced to choose, my favorite part of the California Academy of Sciences would be the Rainforest Dome — check out Part 1 of my visit — but there were many other fascinating exhibitions to enjoy, including Color of Life: Discover Nature's Secret Language, designed by the museum’s Exhibits Studio and opened last year.

The exhibition uses bright, bold colors, beautiful photographs, and accessible writing to “reveal the significant roles color plays across a spectrum of species.”

Within the 8,000 square foot exhibition are immersive interactive experiences, including a musical color visualizer, designed by Tellart. Video screens respond to strings, plucked by visitors, with a show of images and videos related to that string’s color.

Another popular interactive experience is the “Courtship Dance Stage.”

Throughout the exhibition are dioramas and small interactives that allow you to see organisms under different types of lighting, or through the eyes of other animals (just for example).

Also 8,000 square feet in size, the older (circa-2012) exhibition, Earthquake: Life of a Dynamic Planet, explores the seismic science of Earth’s geologic transformations through installations such as a 25-foot-wide, walk-through model of Earth, and the immersive “Shake House.”

Other sections of the Earthquake exhibit focus on the diverse life forms that evolved and spread as Pangaea split up, and earthquake preparedness.

There are mini-exhibits throughout the museum, including a show of Andy Warhol’s Endangered Species series of silkscreen prints, from 1983. In 2007 the bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list; the other featured animals remain.

Other mini-exhibits focused on variation, in ladybugs and in humans. 

Rounding out my visit, I strolled through the Human Odyssey exhibition, an exploration of the origins of humankind, and the African Hall, home to classic, stuffy, stuffed-animal dioramas (and live penguins).

I highly recommend this museum — it’s beautifully designed, fascinating, and educational. I also recommend you consider picking up a City Pass if you plan to visit more than one museum. They are expensive in San Francisco — said from DC, where the museums are mostly free.

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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 3 October 2016.

California Academy of Sciences, part 1: rainforests and reefs

I wrapped up June — oh, wow it’s August! — with a trip to Yosemite (happy birthday, National Park Service) and San Francisco, where I spent a day parade-watching and a couple days museum-going.

One museum that filled nearly an entire day was the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Below is a photo of the museum’s exterior and its brilliant Living Roof, as seen from the de Young Museum.

There are so many exhibits within “the Academy” (and so many photos to show) that I’ve broken this post into two parts. Part 1 here covers the Aquarium on the lower level, designed by Thinc Design, and the Rainforest on Level 1.

After entering the museum I was swept up with the crowds heading to the 4-story, 90-foot-diameter Rainforest Dome. Inside, the rainforest visit begins on a Bornean forest floor, winds upward through a Madagascan mid-story and a Costa Rican canopy, then ends on the lower level in an Amazonian flooded forest.

As a designer, I liked the dome’s juxtaposition of glass and steel and abstracted jungle motifs against living flora and fauna, and the changing vistas as I moved further up the dome. As a nature enthusiast, I enjoyed its subject matter; as a weary museum visitor, I appreciated its delivery: not too much, not too little; brief, interesting, and useful.

The bright, straightforward graphics make use of vivid photographs, and the occasional illustration of an animal signals your arrival in a new area of the jungle. Bamboo- or vine-like vertical posts give a stylized–naturalistic element to exhibit tanks. The light touch with exhibit elements gives the rainforest dome a feeling of exploration and discovery (just ignore the school groups).

At the top of the dome, look out over the three stories you’ve just visited, and down, through a 100,000 gallon tank, to the flooded forest floor. Take an elevator down, then enter the tunnel you were just looking through from afar. Everyone says “oooh.”

The aquarium level felt jam-packed and massive; it’s where I spent most of my time during a 3 hour + visit. There were many exhibitions to see: Amazon Flooded Forest, Water Planet, California Coast, Coral Reefs of the World, Twilight Zone, and more.

Down here, animal identification is found on digital touchscreens. They were intuitive and fun to use, and had just the right amount of information: an animal’s common name, its scientific name, diet, and a one-sentence fact about it.

Below are some photos of the Water Planet exhibition, which groups underwater animals by adaptations. Projected blue and green lighting casts an underwater glow on the sculptural wave walls (similar material here). In the center of the room are curvilinear tanks. (I was reminded of the Van Cleef & Arpels traveling exhibition, circa 2012. It must be the bubbles.)

The highlight of the Coral Reefs of the World exhibition is the 25-foot deep Philippine Coral Reef tank (above). The exhibit graphics in this area are large image-based wallpapers.

The exhibition Twilight Zone: Deep Reefs Revealed had just opened on June 10. It’s memorable for its tanks filled with the most incredible jellies and vivid deep sea fishes.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 23 August 2016.

Weekend in NYC: the Cooper Hewitt, Jewish Museum, more

I went up to New York City a couple weekends ago. My time was packed with museum visits, including my first to the Tenement Museum, at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I took their Shop Life tour. The museum’s sixty- and ninety-minute-long tours are docent-led through restored tenement apartments. Most tours focuses on one apartment, one period in time, and one actual family; the Shop Life tour is slightly different in that it highlights multiple families, across time periods, who lived and worked in the basement-level shops. I highly recommend the museum for an engrossing, educational experience. (Summertime hint: the Shop Life tour is the only one air-conditioned!)

From top left, clock-wise: volunteers pull weeds on the High Line; the entrance to the "Shop Life" tour at the Tenement Museum (no photos allowed inside!); Fly By Night at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; Goshka Macuga at the New Museum

I also stopped by the New Museum, since I was in the neighborhood for the Tenement Museum, and truth be told, I was mostly perplexed (I’m not that hip, apparently). I paid another visit to the High Line, which has expanded and its plantings matured since I was last there. And I saw a performance of Duke Riley’s Fly By Night, in which, “at dusk, a massive flock of pigeons … elegantly twirl, swoop, and glide above the East River.” The pigeons wear LED anklets and respond to whistles and waving flags, flying overhead as commanded. The performance pays homage to the mostly forgotten culture of pigeon keeping and — with just another week to go — is being held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, once home to the country’s largest naval fleet of pigeon carriers. I loved it.

At the Met Breuer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new home for modern and contemporary exhibitions (in the Whitney’s former building), I saw the exhibition Unfinished. There was nothing ground breaking in the actual exhibition design, but the premise was compelling and a lot of the artwork was fantastic.

And I took in the Nasreen Mohamedi retrospective. (Just closed, on June 5.) After the jam-packed Unfinished, the meditative exhibition was a welcome respite.

But hands down, my two favorite exhibits during this visit were at the Jewish Museum and the Cooper Hewitt.

At the Jewish Museum, I fell in love with Roberto Burle Marx. Burle Marx was a Brazilian artist who drew upon diverse cultural influences to reinvent the landscape architecture discipline. He incorporated abstracted, irregular forms, native plants (he was a passionate environmental advocate), and Brazilian modernism into his landscape designs. His work is incredible; visit this exhibition!

The exhibition design was spot-on, evoking the geometries and curves of Burle Marx’s landscapes and emphasizing the art on display. An interlocked massing of display cases in the center of the room dominated the exhibition space; an 87-foot-long tapestry (below, left), designed by Burle Marx for the Santo André Civic Center in 1969, provided a stunning focal point. His hand-drawn and painted landscape plans are wonderful to behold; some examples from the exhibition are shown below.

A few blocks north, Beauty, the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial was bustling. The wide-ranging contemporary design exhibition is a must-see for designers and artists.

The exhibition design was minimal, just the simplest of reader rails and small text panels. The museum encourages use of “pens” that allow you to interact with the digitized collection on touchscreen tables and to save objects from the exhibitions to be accessed later. A nice benefit of accessing your visit online is that for each object, museum curators have selected related objects for further exploration. For example, the online entry for Atmospheric Reentry, designed by Maiko Takeda (above, left), led me to this hat from Cameroon and this “hairy” garden pavilion.

Below is one of my favorite entries from the Beauty Triennial, Architecture is Everywhere, designed by Sou Fujimoto Architects. From the project description: “the project discovers architectural possibility in found objects and everyday materials. Simple artifacts such as a lottery ticket, an ashtray, or a ring of binder clips become intriguing structures when placed on pedestals with tiny human figures.” It was delightful.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 13 June 2016.

SEGD tour of National Museum of Health and Medicine

On Sunday I attended a tour of the very cool National Museum of Health and Medicine, now located in Silver Spring, Maryland. NMNH is a Department of Defense museum first established in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum, “a center for the collection of specimens for research in military medicine and surgery.”

The tour was organized by the Washington, DC chapter of SEGD (formerly the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, now the Society for Experiential Graphic Design) and led by members of the museum’s staff and the design team from Gallagher & Associates. (I used to be a designer at G&A.)

There was a crowd in attendance so we were split into two groups. My group was led by graphic designer Liza Rao (responsible for the museum’s fantastic colors and typography), and Andrea Schierkolk, NMHM’s public programs manager. It was a treat to hear reflections from both sides; what they love and what they love less; things that work great and things that didn't turn out as expected. It was also a treat to see some of my former colleagues.

The museum is divided into three major exhibits: Collection That Teaches (purple), Anatomy and Pathology (turquoise), and Advances in Military Medicine (brick red). Crisp white casework and glass shelves give the exhibit a “lab-like” look that I enjoyed, and the bold shots of color look great against the mostly tan, cream, and yellow objects on display — yes, most of those objects are corporeal remains. This museum is not for the sensitive of stomach.

The exhibits were designed precisely for the current objects on display, yet they are still changeable — graphics can be slid in and out as objects are rotated or stories are updated.

Thank you to our new DC SEGD chairs, Liza and Chris, for the great program — keep them coming, please!

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 16 March 2016.

On view now! New York City: A Portrait Through Stamp Art

New York City: A Portrait Through Stamp Art opened — today! — at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. I was delighted to design this temporary art exhibition.

… Along with some printed pieces: a postcard booklet (free for museum visitors) and special postal cancellation (available in the museum’s post office).

The thirty pieces of original artwork on display are part of the Postmaster General's [extensive] Art Collection, and are arranged in six categories: Baseball, Broadway, City Life, Icons, Politics, and Music. The artwork was selected to “celebrate important citizens, events and iconic buildings that have defined New York City as one of the greatest cities in the world.” Who knew there were so many New York City-themed stamps??

The exhibition will be on view through March 13, 2017. If you want the distinct pleasure of seeing TWO of my exhibits in one museum, Freedom Just Around the Corner is also on view at the National Postal Museum for two more months, until February 15, 2016.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 10 December 2015.

Lazy Love at the Biodôme

I was in Montréal for just shy a week and spent a few hours at the Biodôme — it was so much fun! I have plenty to share of the rest of the museum, but to dip my toes back into blogging after (ahem) plenty of time away, here are some photos of the temporary exhibit/art installation, Calme Aimant (Lazy Love).

Within the low, glass-walled enclosure, sloths slept inside their cocoon-like nests, hanging from artistic interpretations of trees — the trees were wrapped in braids and painted in monochrome — while a couple tortoises tottered around. Sheer white fabric panels hung from the ceiling, rippling slightly as people passed beneath them.

The exhibit invited guests to have a seat and enjoy a few moments of quiet contemplation. A quiet soundscape played from speakers hidden within the sofas — the speakers are the balls with red felt flowers — and fabric books told the sloths’ story.

Lazy Love was our last stop at the Biodôme, and it was a lovely, relaxing, quiet moment to end on. I am sorry to report that the exhibit closed last week, so a bientôt, sloths.

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 18 September 2015.

Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design

Back in November I took a trip to Warren, Vermont for a shoot with photographer Michael Tallman at the Archie Bunker House. When you hear “Vermont” and “architecture” your thoughts might not wander much beyond old red barns, but look up Prickly Mountain — the “anti-establishment utopia” of contemporary architecture. The Archie Bunker House is in that neighborhood of modernist homes, and really incredible. The shoot was a blast, and I promised David Sellers, the owner and architect of the house, that I would visit the Madsonian, his industrial design museum up the road.

I ran out of time during that trip in November, but a few weeks ago I made good on the promise, returned to Vermont and paid a visit to the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design in Waitsfield. The temperature outside was somewhere between 0 and 5 degrees, and inside, the museum wasn’t much warmer, but still my friends and I had a great time touring the museum with Mr. Sellers himself as our tour guide.

The museum has an Industrial Designers “wall of fame,” an assortment of chair designs, vintage advertisements torn straight from magazines and pinned to the walls …

… lighting, a Mason and Hamlin organ, and a 1934 DeSoto Airflow coupe …

… an automatic pencil sharpener, Polaroid cameras, and many, many more examples of vintage and antique industrial design. Most everything on display had a personal story attached, such as this menu from the ocean liner SS Normandie. A couple donated it to the museum after their visit — they had honeymooned on the ship in the 1930s and kept the menu as a souvenir.

The layout of the exhibit was strictly utilitarian, with minimal to no explanatory text or graphics and the bones of the building which housed it on display. One bit of clever exhibitry I liked was the use of retractable extension cord reels for spot lighting. Need to move something around? Just screw in a new hook.

The Madsonian currently has an exhibit of classic toy designs, featuring model airplanes and trains (including the two biggest model trains built), an original Mr. Machine, and a toy cement mixer which a kid could use to mix actual cement. The toy’s fatal flaw was user error — most surviving examples are welded inoperable by dried cement.

If you go, be sure to grab a sandwich and a Sip of Sunshine afterward, at the Bridge Street Butchery (now closed) across the street.

Thank you to Michael Tallman for all photographs and to Dave Sellers for the museum tour!

Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 1 March 2015.