A Poet*hical Wager

What began as a commission to design a graphic identity, interpretation materials, and catalogue for a museum exhibition transformed into a close collaboration with the show’s curator, Andria Hickey, to question how we experience and interpret artworks in a museum gallery setting. Together we developed a spatial and textual strategy for the exhibition that built upon our collective research, Hickey’s desire to explore the relationship between the viewer, an artwork, and its wall label/interpretive texts, along with my research into museum visitor experience.

We conceived of three narrative pathways for experiencing the show, the informational, the art historical, and the fictional, and developed a content/editorial strategy for each type. Three types of interpretive content were created for each of the twenty-one artworks in the show—a text by the Hickey, an image essay of art-historical references, and a newly commissioned piece of short fiction by one of three authors.