If you looked closely at the Fantasy of the Middle Ages exhibition last summer at the Getty Center, you might have spotted Beyoncé.
She wasn’t in the artwork. She was painted right on the wall, a royal purple, princess-like silhouette created from a photo of Queen Bey. As Jessica Harden, Getty's head of design, says gleefully, “If you looked at it, you couldn’t un-notice it. It was really subtle, but so good.”
Clever details like this are just a few of the ways designers bring exhibitions to life for contemporary audiences. Harden leads the team that designs exhibition spaces, a job that includes deciding where to place objects, what color to paint walls, and which fonts to use for explanatory wall labels. You may not ooh and aah over these elements—but without good design, you may not understand how to navigate a gallery or fully absorb a show’s themes.
“Art is about expression, and I think we should do as much as we can to create environments that engage and allow people to explore and express,” says Harden. “A show isn’t going to be fun for a visitor if it’s not fun for us.”
Harden, who joined Getty in 2020 after more than 20 years of working in galleries, design firms, and museums, recently broke down the steps Getty staff take to conceptualize an exhibition—from initial brainstorming to opening day.
Getting Started
Harden and her team start their work about six to 18 months before an exhibition is scheduled to open—after curators have mostly finalized the checklist of artworks, but before they’ve fully developed the show’s narrative.
Usually, two designers team up for each exhibition. They then kick off the design process by asking the curators a few key questions: What story do you want to tell in the space? What messages do you hope visitors will take away? What are your other goals for the display? What parts of the story being told through the show should be emphasized? The designers also pore over the list of objects, experiment with how to group them, and discuss which should be highlighted—keeping in mind not only the curators’ answers to the above questions but also their own sense of aesthetics and spatial storytelling.
A design concept then begins to emerge and usually follows a set of tried-and-true precepts, Harden says. The designers will attempt to draw visitors’ attention to the most dynamic, essential objects by placing them prominently in the space. They’ll organize the pieces and information so that visitors understand what path to follow and not accidentally miss parts of the story being told by the artworks and explanatory texts. The size, color, and placement of the accompanying panels, labels, and graphics can help visitors “scan” the room to understand what the exhibition is about and which items and concepts are most important.
“In some ways it’s like setting up a video game where you’ve got your next goalpost, but you’ve also got these little things that you want people to do along the way,” Harden says. “How do you pull them from this point and this point? How do they know where to go next?”
Deciding on the Details
To help the designers zero in on an overall tone and style for the exhibition, they ask the curators, “What do you want people to feel when they come into this space?” Curators suggest all kinds of words, from “ethereal” and “fun” to “dynamic” or “respectful.” This helps inform details such as font choice, lighting direction, scale, and color.
“Say a curator really wants purple, but there are so many different types of purple,” says Harden. “If you really are keying in on that feeling, you can make purple dark and somber or you can make it bright and playful. We often ask a lot of ‘why’ questions to make sure we understand the underlying visitor experience goals beyond the direction—why purple? What are you trying to say with that purple?”
Designers will offer their expertise to make sure the aesthetic elements remain cohesive with the artworks. “We might say, well, the purple doesn’t seem to be serving the object as well here, maybe we substitute a gray with some purple undertones,” Harden says. Color preferences are often very personal to individual designers, and their choices may change depending on the lighting and other hues in the gallery. Bold colors can grab visitors’ attention, while subtle ones allow the art or graphics to pop. Certain tones may also help invoke memories or associations with specific times or trends.
Designers must also take practical factors into account, such as how high to hang paintings and wall panels so that they are accessible to the widest range of visitors. Museums traditionally operate under the assumption that an adult’s average eye height is 60 inches, though objects can be placed higher or lower for emphasis. The font for texts can enhance the style and character of the show, but it must also be legible.
In The Fantasy of the Middle Ages, for instance, the team pursued a highly ornamented font reminiscent of medieval lettering and decoration. But after testing at various scales, they found that having both upper- and lowercase letters in this elaborate font was hard to read. So, they opted to keep the elaborate font for the uppercase letters and using a simpler, quicker-to-process font for the lowercase ones. This noticeably improved the gallery texts’ legibility while still creating an ornate, medieval atmosphere.
The design must also accommodate objects' special requirements, such as earthquake isolators for sizable, fragile sculptures like those from antiquity. Most exhibitions at the Getty Villa include isolators for such vulnerable works. Smaller items, meanwhile, often need showcases; they protect the pieces from damage that might occur if a visitor touches them, controls the surrounding climate necessary for conservation purposes, and deters theft. Larger artworks, like paintings or sculptures, also may need some sort of barrier, such as a rope, railing, or glass. These protective measures may be required to keep the works safe from possible damage.
By the time the objects are safely installed, the paint is dry, and visitors arrive, the feeling is “either great relief or giddiness,” Harden says. “Like, ‘Oh God, we pulled it off—we don’t know how, but we did it!’”
