Outside Walls Alive With Art
Pictures of a 5-year- old girl from suburban Seattle, dressed up as her heroines — Angela Davis, Rosa Parks and other African-American women who fought for freedom — were shown at the International Center of Photography in New York recently. They were followed by images of displaced migrants in a Tunisian refugee camp.
Where the museum chooses to display these powerful shows — on the facade of its building, from dusk to dawn — is a sign of a global trend among institutions that are trying to make an artistic statement while attracting visitors, both returning and new.
Jurien Huggins, a 24-year- old graphic designer and photographer who was walking by, praised the museum for bringing “its knowledge out into the world and making something like this more accessible.”
Joshua Sandoval Garcia, a 22-year- old abstract artist who strolled by, was struck by the young girl’s face and took his own photos, which he said he would use as a reference “when I have an artist’s block.”
The museum’s executive director, Mark Lubell, said the projections are “consistent with our mission to con- duct a dialogue with the world we live in today.”
To commemorate this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Lower Manhattan, commissioned a series of black- and-white photographic portraits of some 30 Holocaust survivors, called “Eyewitness,” that it is displaying in the ground-, secondand third-floor windows on the fa- cade of its building on Battery Place.
Even before the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, opened, it projected a seven-minute video on its facade, depicting markers in black history to celebrate completion of its exterior construction.
Michael S. Glickman, the president and chief executive of the Museum of Jewish Heritage — whose survivor portraits, by the photographer B. A. Van Sise, have been digitally reproduced on vinyl and measure as much as 1.5 meters wide and 4 meters high — said this series represents the museum’s desire “to be a fully accessible site of public testimony.”
The Vivid Festival in Sydney was established in 2009 to stimulate tourism during a slow winter season; according to Ignatius Jones, its artistic director, visitor numbers have skyrocketed from 165,000 in 2009 to 2.3 million last year, which the founders partly credit to their use of innovative lighting and projections. This year, from late May until mid-June, the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, also in Sydney, will be decorated with “Organic Vibrations,” a collaboration between the Australian artist Julia Gorman and the Paris collective Danny Rose (which created “The Matter of Painting” in 2016).
Cincinnati, Ohio, will host its first Blink festival this October. The event will feature large-scale media and interactive art that will animate buildings throughout 20 city blocks. Brave Berlin, a local design studio, is overseeing the creation of animated installations for the facades of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and the Contempo-
Projections that turn the facades of museums into displays.
rary Arts Center.
Raphaela Platow, the director of the Contemporary Arts Center, said she hoped its installation would draw viewers from outside the city and allow the museum’s building, by Zaha Hadid, to “be perceived maybe in a different light.”
Not all facade projections are authorized or institutionally approved: In 2014 and 2016, Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction, a group that fights for the rights of workers in Abu Dhabi, where a branch of the Guggenheim Museum is planned, projected messages like “Ultra luxury art, ultra low wages” on the facade of the Guggenheim in New York. Since 2008, the museum itself has projected artworks by Jenny Holzer and Agnieszka Kurant, among others, on the exterior of its Frank Lloyd Wright building.
Mr. Huhtamo said that he believed that authorized museum projections would continue to proliferate, “as the embrace between the urban and media environment gets more intense,” though he warned that they should not “become a permanent presence, because they would then start to lose their appeal.”