Matthias returned from vacation this week, and when he arrived it made me think about all of the things that we were wrapping up in preparation for his departure late last month. I remember the Thursday before Matthias left, it became clear that there was no way we could get all the work done we needed to before he left, so Matthias and I made the decision to come in and work on a Saturday.The day’s major project was to work on the layout for the main gallery for our upcoming exhibition: The Ideal (Dis)-placement: Old Masters at the Pulitzer. Matthias hopes to realize this exhibition by borrowing old master works from two major art collections (I’m not allowed to say yet who). The main gallery will be arranged with groupings of paintings on both the east and west walls. With this decided, the next step was to figure out a way to organize the selected works into medallions. Issues of size, shape, color and theme all needed to be taken into consideration.

This is where I came in, as neither Matthias nor the two curators from the partnering collections were able to work independently with Photoshop. Using dimensions for the main gallery spaces, I created wall mockups for the different Pulitzer galleries and inserted scaled images of selected artworks. Once that was finished, we took the digital paintings and arranged them on the digital walls. This was what we spent the bulk of our time doing on Saturday. We arranged endless combinations of artworks: Check out this mockup of the east wall:

(sorry, but I can’t show you specific images yet either - are you intrigued yet or just annoyed?).

I was surprised upon talking to a couple of museum people that the idea of using digital gallery spaces for the curatorial process is still relatively new. Virtual Gallerie is a company that has developed software that creates 3-d mockups for galleries and museums. Its pretty fascinating stuff, especially considering some museums still use something similar to a doll house (they would probably call them “scaled mockups”) to create their exhibitions, with mini reproductions of artwork - something Barbie would probably love - but doesn’t seem very efficient to me.

Regardless, I was thrilled to be sitting in while the exhibition was taking shape. It was very exciting to see how the curatorial concepts developed and I considered it to be a worth-while experience to give up my Saturday for more productive pursuits besides watching weekend movies on channel 6.