A WORTHY ART FORM
History Museum exhibit honors evolution of exhibition design
Good museum exhibition design is often intended to “disappear” from the vision of visitors, acting as a support system to the stars of the show: the artifacts and information presented alongside.
“We want it to be invisible so that the visitor gets a great experience, but they may not necessarily know why they get a great experience,” said Matt Celeskey, a designer in the state Department of Cultural Affairs’ Exhibit Services.
A recently installed New Mexico History Museum exhibit seeks to break through that wall with a meta “exhibit about exhibits.”
It’s a behind-the-scenes look that Celeskey said he hopes will provide museum-goers with “an extra layer of depth,” prompting them to think about what aesthetic choices go into exhibitions to effectively tell different stories.
“On Exhibit: Designs That Defined the Museum of New Mexico,” an homage to the evolution of exhibition design at Santa Fe museums and different aspects of the craft, will be featured in the museum lobby until July 2019. After it leaves the History Museum, it will be installed at the Exhibit Services building across the street, at 120 Lincoln St., indefinitely and shown by appointment.
The show focuses on the institutions that make up the Museum of New Mexico system: the New Mexico History Museum and the Palace of the Governors, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Museum of International Folk Art, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, and other historic sites across the state. David Rohr, division director of Museum Resources and unit director for Exhibit Services, pointed out that exhibits come and go from these institutions. Visitors may forget about how the exhibits were staged once they’re gone.
“But we don’t forget about them,” he said, adding that a museum team will often discuss and reference past shows as they’re working on a new one.
“It was always in my mind that this is something that might be worthy of looking at as an art form, as something people would enjoy seeing historically.”
A century of design evolution
The exhibit on exhibits has two focal points, Rohr said. One is to recognize all of the important elements of “design in the public space.” There are displays featuring various artifact mounts, old invitation designs, work tools, drafts and schematics, labels and even the evolution of museum dioramas — including a self-analytical, custom diorama showing all the stages of creating an exhibition. Rohr’s staff were the models for the figures inside the diorama.
The other focus area, according to Rohr, was the history of design in the state museum system, starting in 1885, shortly after the railroad came to New Mexico, when the newly formed New Mexico Historical Society started displaying collections in the Palace of the Governors.
Pointing to old photographs of several shelves of pueblo pots lining the exhibition space, he likened the look of the Palace to a “cluttered antique store.” In the 19th century when museums began to take shape across the U.S., Rohr said, there wasn’t much thought about presentation.
“It was widely thought that just having collections of things was the way to do it,” said Rohr. “So why show one pot when you can show 15, 20, 25 pots, just lined up? And you’ll see cases full of collections of many of the same type of things, and the museum provided very little context. It was enough, the visitor would just be awed by, ‘Wow look at that.’”
But as society has evolved, so have visitors’ expectations. According to Rohr, new forms of entertainment, like movies, changed how museums wanted to engage their audiences.
Today, almost every exhibition has some kind of digital or technical aspect to “enliven” the show, he said. For example, with this one, there are video interviews with old and current staff members, as
well as a time lapse video of “On Exhibit” being installed. Other types of displays, like World’s Fairs, also had an impact over the years.
“They needed to provide more than just big, impressive collections,” said Rohr. “They needed to provide educational opportunities. That’s how curators started to write text and explain — because they couldn’t be there every time someone walked through to give a personal tour. They had to rely on text panels and allow the visitor to be selfguided.”
“On Exhibit” goes into how exhibitions changed following the establishment of the Museum of New Mexico system in 1909.
After the School for American Archaeology (now known as the School for Advanced Research) began to share the Palace of the Governors space to show off finds from northern New Mexico digs, there was a redesign of what was known as the Puye Room. Inset wall cases were built and the first Museum of New Mexico Director, Edgar Lee Hewitt, hired an artist to paint scenes of the Puye Cliff Dwellings. Rohr referred to the installation as an “early version of video and multimedia.”
He said Hewitt understood the importance of design and implementing art into exhibition spaces.
The Hall of Ethnology, built in the 1940s in the old Armory Building behind the Palace of the Governors and which stayed open until the 1980s, moved design forward again.
This “forgotten” space dedicated to displaying then-contemporary Native American ways of life had locked darkwood cases that visitors could get up close to. There were labels identifying the artifacts and diroamas in the middle of the room, and, possibly for the first time, there was lighting inside the cases. “It was probably the first attempt they had made to say, ‘We have this space, how do we make it work as a unit?’ ” said Rohr.
But the “milestone” for local exhibition design, according to Rohr, was in 1953. It was the inaugural exhibition for the Museum of International Folk Art, “Costumes of the World on Parade.” The show featured about a dozen wooden mannequins placed on platforms and covered in the folk costumes. In one of the old images of the exhibition, it shows one of the mannequins arranged to look like it’s tipping its hat to the visitors.
This show was also a good example of the different venues from which designers can find inspiration, said Rohr. The idea for the raised platforms, he said, came from the team seeing a striptease show in New York City. “The designers saw this ramp at a burlesque show and how the performers were elevated above the audience, and so they based it on that,” he said.
“On Exhibit” pays homage to “Costumes of the World” with recreations of the wooden mannequins, placed on a raised island and surrounded by gravel, just as they were in 1953.
“For the first time, they were really trying to break out of doing the cases and the dioramas, and things that put glass between the artifacts and the visitor,” said Rohr. “I call this a breath of fresh air design-wise for the system and I think this exhibition influenced everything that came after.”
He said that from the 1950s to today, the museums have tried to add more engagement and fun to the exhibitions. Professional designers who had experience at other institutions were brought in.
Visitors can see the progress via a video compilation of about 75 shows that have come and gone over the past 25 years. Some shows that viewers may recognize include the Museum of Art’s “Nicholas and Alexandra” about the Russian czar and czarina, MIAC’s “Comic Art Indigene” that highlighted Native American artists’ adaptations of popular culture, and MOIFA’s “Recycled Reseen” show from 1996 that featured recycled art from around the world.
Exposing the process
So how do you design an exhibition about exhibition design?
“It was an interesting challenge, for sure,” said Celeskey. He and his fellow designer, Trilby Nelson, explained that they wanted to make the space look like a work in progress to give it an “X-Ray,” or behind-the-scenes, feel.
They did that by intentionally leaving wooden structures, such as stands holding artifacts, exposed and unfinished. The screws used to put the pieces together were also left uncovered and text was printed right onto the wood instead of placed on plastic or metal and laminated onto the structure.
“When you look at it, you fully see how it’s made and put together, and what we used to do that instead of using MDF (medium-density fiberboard) and painting it, and then hiding the interior structure; we expose that process,” said Nelson.
When asked why design is such an important aspect of the learning process, Rohr explained that the idea is to take the intended message and find a way to “amplify” it.
“If something is well-designed, it’s something that will take a visitor through, they’ll be delighted by it (and) they’ll want to see more. A good exhibition design allows people to explore, it spurs their curiosity, all … the reactions we want. It facilitates learning.”