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!

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.