“I know the photographs pretty well. What I didn’t know was what the room was going to ask from them.”
After several visits meeting with museum staff and beginning to conceptualize the show I really wanted to start coming back with some of our creative circle.
Graig and I went up to the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum to walk the galleries, take measurements, and start thinking through how The Lowriders: From Detroit to L.A. and Back might live in the space.
Graig is co-founder of Young Nation, a board member of Inside Southwest Detroit, and has been part of my design education since the first project we worked on together in 2003. He brought so much to the participatory design process when we bought and renovated 8869 Avis, and now runs Proxy By Design, providing owner’s rep services to his clients.
So walking the gallery with him was the best possible company and his felt like the right set of eyes to have on the opportunity. At this point I know the photographs pretty well. What I didn’t know was what the room was going to ask from them.
I have been up to Saginaw several times over the past few months and shared photos of some of the exhibitions with him. We started talking about scale, sightlines, sequence, and how someone might move through the exhibition. Some photographs could work differently depending on what came before them, what they sat across from, or how much room they had around them.
A few of the ideas started affecting how I thought about final selection and sequencing right away!
I don’t want the exhibition to just feel like the book blown up and hung on the walls. A book has its own rhythm and feel. The gallery works differently. You’re standing inside it and you get to see more than one thing at once… you can be pulled across the room in a different way than across the page and through a book.
Our visit was less about figuring out where everything would go and more about how the space should feel, how a visitor can move through it, and what standing next to the work could add to the storytelling. It was a big step toward the show becoming its own thing.