I have no photos to share of the American Museum of Natural History‘s new exhibit Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World — though you can see some here and in the New York Times review — so you’ll have to take my word for it that it is fantastic. The museum invited in the NY chapter of SEGD for an exhibit open house on Friday evening. (I am in the Boston chapter, but they let me crash the party.) It was a really nice experience — I’d like to give a big thank-you to the museum’s in-house design department, who were all super friendly and welcoming.
See it now through the end of August, or if you somehow are able to wait for it, the exhibit will eventually travel to other museums. Silk Road has everything that I’ve come to expect from AMNH: an interesting theme, beautiful prop work, fascinating artifact displays, and lovely, compelling graphics.
Saturday, I had a less-than-pleasant experience at the Tim Burton exhibit at the MoMA. (Exhibit timeline, above.) It wasn’t Tim Burton’s fault (I love his work), and not entirely the exhibit’s fault, but I do think it was a mistake for the museum to put this exhibit in the gallery they did. The larger gallery space on the sixth floor might have been better able to handle the number of people. Granted, it was a Saturday afternoon when I went, but people were packed cheek by jowl, making it impossible to move, and it was unbearably hot.
I had trouble figuring out the intended navigation of the space, which seemed to be trying for a chronological arrangement. The placement of the walls, however, created human gridlocks as people came around walls from different directions and refused to cede any space in front of any of the art. Photos of the exhibit can be seen at the exhibit link.
Then, I was on to the exhibit Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity. I loved the work on display, which included everything from furniture to tapestry to poster design, from the Avant-Garde art school, and I really liked the entrance graphics. This post from the MoMA blog talks about the graphic design department’s process of designing the exhibit as a fresh take on Bauhaus graphic sensibilities.
Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been fixed or replaced. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 15 December 2009.