Information
exhibition design
Turn On, Tune In, Tap Out was a group exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, organized by Teen Council and featuring 26 Houston-area teen artists. On view from May 13, 2021 - August 8, 2021, the exhibition addressed the rapid shift of the world into a virtual space during the 2020 global pandemic, and the reprocussions this brought with it.
The process of curating an exhibition within a team truly introduced me to the concept of storytelling in design, specifically because the design became more than just a physical object: it became an experience.
process:
01 - Theme development: beginning in August, we spent around a month brainstorming ideas for our exhibition. We settled on the concept of the “Screen”, intending it to have both a literal and nonliteral meaning. The events of 2020 forced many behind physical screens in a technological sense, and brought to light how many were locked behind nonphysical screens in a figurative sense, due to discrimination and systemic racism.
Two vastly different interpretations of the promt:
03 - Curating artworks: Our open call was successful and generated over 120+ works, so began the process of sifting through each one, to narrow down to around 30. Together, we came up with a list of criteria each piece should achieve, in accordance to how well it answered our open call questions.
02 - Open Call: Questions provided to the artists to respond to were:
how do you define “the screen?”
how does “the screen” protect or hold you back?
how can you crack “the screen?”
04 - Creating subsections of themes and writing didactics: As a group, we agreed on 4 subthemes for the pieces in our exhibition: Physical Body, Addiction, Psychological Effects, and Connection Versus Loneliness.
Creating the sections of subthemes to allow people to experience the exhibition in a cohesive way, no matter how they walk through the space.
05 - Designing the physical gallery space: From choosing where a wall went to the color of the vinyl for our exhibition name, no detail went untouched.
As COVID-19 was still in full swing, a few of us were allowed to come into the museum each week, and I spent many meetings wheeling around a laptop on a cart in order to show everyone how the rest of the exhibition was coming together, and deciding where to put the next piece, until each one was in its rightful position.