The Anatomy of an Exhibition
All the Details You Were Never Meant to Notice
For a very long time, I had absolutely no idea how art got into a museum. If you had asked me, I probably would have smiled and said “magic.” I would have only been half-joking (*cue the nervous bead of sweat making its way down my forehead*).
The idea that anything other than the mystical appearance of art was involved would have genuinely astounded me.
It wasn’t until I started my career as an exhibition designer that I understood the sheer volume of thought, time, work, and resources that go into putting a show together. So grab yourself something to drink, find a snack, and buckle in, this is a long one! Let’s break it down together.
Art Placement
Let’s start with the obvious: the art itself, and where it goes. This is the curator’s domain.
Curators shape the overall vision, meaning, and experience of a show. The selection and placement of works tells the story they want to tell, signaling relationships, relevance, and narrative within a collection of work. Art placement happens early, in close collaboration with the living artist and exhibition designer (hey, that’s me!), right at the very start of the planning process.
Curators either are, or become, deep experts in the work being shown. Hearing them talk through an exhibition is breathtaking. Curators speak about art like old friends, with intimacy, precision, and affection. I have to actively stop myself from gawking every time.
Floor Plan & Traffic Flow
The floor plan is a collaboration between the curator, living artist, and the exhibition designer, and it typically happens in tandem with art placement in the early design of a show.
Circulation, sight lines, and the highlighting of key objects are all mission-critical conversations. You want visitors to move through a show naturally and intuitively. You want them to be comfortable, curious, and never confused or claustrophobic. Nobody wants to feel crammed while contemplating a Picasso or feel lost in a hallway when there’s a Rothko around the corner.
The Art Handlers
Yes, there is an entire profession about art handling. And no, I cannot do it. When I first started working at a museum, a few friends excitedly asked this. Lolz, absolutely not - the liability alone!
Art handlers have a highly specialized skill set. They wear gloves, unpack pieces with extraordinary tenderness, are fluent in reading art manuals (yes, some individual works come with entire manuals dedicated to their installation), and install each work with a precision and care that is genuinely beautiful to watch.
Wall Color
I’d be willing to bet you can’t tell me the wall color of the last exhibition you visited. And I’d also bet that your experience would have been substantially different if it had been painted another shade.
The era of the all-white modernist cube is fading (for the most part!). Wall color is a powerful tool in setting the atmosphere of a show. It’s subtle but transformative. Think of it like a wine pairing: the color is chosen to complement the work on display. Wall colors can also function as wayfinding, guiding visitors through different areas without a single sign.
Wall color decisions involve the curators, the artist (if living), the exhibition designers, and sometimes the graphic designers. Every curator and exhibition designer I know has a favorite color to use in a show (mine is purple, because I am, unabashedly, a regal girly). I’ve also heard a rumor that the MET does not like to use green paint, but you did not hear that from me!
Temporary Walls
Walls go hand in hand with the floor plan, and temporary walls are built all the time for exhibitions. That perfectly proportioned wall a work is hung on? Almost certainly constructed specifically for this show.
But walls can do more than hold art. They can direct circulation, divide a space to support a narrative, or carve out an entirely new room for a video installation, say, or an immersive environment, etc. They are, quietly, one of the most versatile tools in an exhibition designer’s kit.
Pedestals
Ah, pedestals. An exhibition designer’s claim to fame.
Pedestals elevate and protect works, and allow objects to be enjoyed from all angles. They are designed with the viewing height of most visitors in mind, and critically with wheelchair users in mind too. We want art to be accessible for all!
Vitrines
Think of vitrines as the pedestal’s slightly hypochondriatic cousin, except the hypochondria is a little warranted. A vitrine is a pedestal with a glass enclosure, used to display more fragile or precious objects. The glass defends against touching, dust, humidity, theft, and damage.
And these things are sealed. How sealed? During the art heist at the Louvre last year, the thieves used angle grinders to get inside the vitrines. Angle grinders!!!
Platforms
Platforms are another member of the pedestal family. They create a stage for taller works. A platform’s purpose, however, is less about comfortable viewing height and more about establishing a subtle yet elegant boundary to create distance between the object and the visitor.
If platforms could speak, they’d probably say something like: “Hey. Cool object. You can admire it, but preferably from over there.”
Walls, pedestals, vitrines, and platforms are all designed and placed by the exhibition designers, again, in close collaboration with the curator and/or the living artist. Once the design is finalized, shop drawings go to the fabrication team to be built (most large museums have an in-house fabrication team!). Then, walls are constructed and built elements are installed by the exhibition construction crew during installation.
Many museums keep a stock of pedestals and vitrines which can rotate across shows. At the Guggenheim, however, because our building is so beautifully handmade, our floors are ramped, and almost nothing is a straight line, approximately 95% of our pedestals are built from scratch for every single exhibition.
Object Mounts
If you ask me, object mounts are the real hidden gems of any exhibition: an art form in themselves.
The most visible example of object mounts are from works hung from the ceiling - the object mounts are created to attach the hanging element to the museum ceiling. But the less obvious cases are everywhere: almost every freestanding object in a show is secured to either its pedestal or the building structure. Object mounts protect artworks from art pick-pockets (have any of you read The Art Thief?! Unreal) and against what we call “walking off.”
Here’s something wild: visitors experience exhibitions by moving through them, but every footstep sends tiny vibrations through the floor and structure. The vibrations aren’t strong enough to be felt by humans, but objects can. Over time, a sculpture can slowly shimmy itself out of position, inch by inch. Object mounts exist to stop the chaos: no drifting, no wobbling, no theft, no dramatic plunge to the floor. MVP!
Audio/Visual Components
Whenever you watch a video or listen to an audio piece in a museum, know that an entire team made that experience possible. The A/V team handles the invisible essentials: monitor specs, projector choices, speaker placement, cable wrangling, troubleshooting. Simply put, they make the experience feel seamless instead of cursed.
There are also dedicated A/V conservators, which I find fascinating. Their job is to preserve, update, and maintain time-based media works for future generations, ensuring the artist’s original viewing and listening specifications survive alongside the piece itself. Those works on VHS tapes, Floppy Discs, and CD-ROMs are not going to convert themselves!
Benches/Seating
Oof, this is getting long. Let’s do what any good museum would do and take a seat for a minute.
That is, quite literally, the purpose of benches and seating in museums. Now, there could be an entire substack publication on museum seating alone, but I will keep this short (for now!).
Lately, there has been a lot more conversation about museums’ relationship to the human body, and a welcome push toward more humane spaces - and I’m here for it! Nobody wants to encounter a Salvador Dalí painting with aching feet and a tired mind.
More on this another time, but if you can’t wait, here is a piece by my former colleague Aubrey Knox, now Director of Exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts, who is an advocate for more humane museums.
And my final note: benches don’t just magically appear. They are selected, designed, and placed by exhibition designers ;)
Wall Text & Oject Labels
The namesake of my Substack. :)
Except it’s a little ironic because my only role in wall text and object labels is deciding where they go. Curators write all the text for the exhibition, shaping the interpretation and voice of the show, and also provide all information for each object label. Then graphic designers step in. They create a visual identity to show then do the work to format it all: hierarchy, typography, readability… everything.
Exhibition designers just help figure out where it lives on the wall.
Lighting
Arguably the most important element of any exhibition and, based on your comments, the thing you’re all most curious about.
Good lighting is make-or-break. Like the wall color, it sets the entire atmosphere of a space. It can make a work sparkle or make a space feel intimate and moody. It needs to illuminate pieces of art without blinding the audience. Lighting designers also navigate color temperature, contend with natural light from windows, and carefully maintain appropriate light levels to prevent works from fading over the run of the show.
More, much more, on this soon.
Now, the truly invisible players of an exhibition.
Registrars
Remember the “magic” I mentioned at the beginning? The art that just appears in the museum? That magic has a name, and it’s the registrars.
Registrars manage all internal art logistics. They are the keepers of the art manuals, the holders of detailed records tracking where every collection work is stored and in what condition. Most visibly for an exhibition, they are also the heroes who locate works from around the world and orchestrate every inbound and outbound shipment and truck delivery with military precision. Absolute heroes. Every single one of them.
Conservation
Another more commonly known art profession - but for very good reason! Conservators have the beautiful, essential job of protecting art for generations to come. They ensure that your favorite painting is in pristine condition when you first discover it and that it is in the exact same condition when you bring your kids to see it twenty-five years later. The continuity of that experience? That's conservation.
Exhibition Managers
Without exhibition managers, our ducks would be absolutely everywhere.
They are the people who keep all of us chaotic creatives moving in the same direction and, crucially, make sure the exhibition actually happens. They manage budgets, track timelines, coordinate vendors, schedule meetings, solve problems before the rest of us even know they exist, and keep everyone on task.
They are the calm center of the storm, the leaders of the pack, and the reason ideas ever become reality.
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day but maybe they should say an exhibition wasn’t made by one person, because… oh my god?!
And that’s not even everything. This list doesn’t touch on the security personnel keeping our art safe, the docents and gallery guides who bring the work to life for visitors, the educators who organize programming, the visitor experience teams making the museum accessible and welcoming for all, or the lawyers writing all the contracts, our press and social media teams, our photographers and videographers, and on and on and on.
Ok, now that we are now all experts in reading an exhibition, let’s go through some examples together, shall we?
Let’s put everything we’ve learned to the test. Two views from MoMA’s Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start. Let’s break it down.
The art first. Works selected and placed by the curators, installed by the art handlers, secured by the mount makers. Let’s also not forget, before any of it arrived, the registrars had organized every shipment and the conservators had checked every piece.
Then the bigger moves. White walls, which are the right call for Calder’s delicate, intricate forms that pop beautifully against a clean background. A few newly constructed walls to guide the flow. Platforms for safe viewing distance, pedestals for elevation, and a small vitrine tucked around the corner in the bottom image for the more fragile works. Designed by the exhibition designer (hi!), built by the fabrication shop, installed by the construction team.
Finally, the finishing touches: the one that ties it all together. Lighting that makes Calder’s hanging sculptures feel almost alive. And the wall text, written by the curators and formatted by the graphic designers, gives visitors the context they need to go deeper.
Nothing here happened by accident. Nothing here happened by magic. Every single detail was someone’s job.
Now, let’s do more of a wild card example.
Below are two images from Role Play, held at both the Fondazione Prada at Osservatorio in Milan and Prada Aoyama Tokyo.
I’m going to leave this one open. You’ve read the whole breakdown. You know the vocabulary now: the walls, the lighting, the pedestals, the circulation, the color choices, all of it. So I want to hand it over to you.
What do you notice? What decisions can you spot?
How did you do? Whether you caught every detail or are now noticing things you otherwise wouldn’t, you are looking differently now. Welcome to the other side. :)
And that’s a wrap! Thank you if you are still reading along.
While drafting this piece, I realized I ended nearly every section with some version of: I have so much more to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post. So let’s just say… there is plenty more where this came from, and I am SO excited about it.
I also want to thank each and every one of you for every subscribe, follow, restack, comment, DM, like, and share. I have been overwhelmed (in the best possible way) by the response to this Substack. Never in a million years did I imagine there would be so many of you here so early in this journey. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’d also love for this to be a collaborative space. Tell me what you want to learn about. Tell me what’s confusing, fascinating, boring, or irresistible. Should I share more of what I’m reading and looking at? Would you enjoy profiles on museums or people in the art and design world who inspire me (Hello Peggy Guggenheim and Lina Bo BardI)? I have a lot of ideas, but I’d love to hear yours too. My comments and subscriber chat are always open. :)
One final note: I’m currently deep in work designing the next rotunda exhibition at the Guggenheim, Taryn Simon (opening September 18 and it’s going to be soo good!). To protect both my sanity and my sleep schedule, please expect my next post in 2-3 weeks (quality > quantity).
Also, my next post will be my first for paid subscribers (eek), and it’s going to be a juicy one!
Until then, have a great week, and thank you for being here.
-Alya
i’ve been paying a lot more attention to the design of spaces ever since i started using a cane, and it’s so fascinating to read about the design process! i’ve always loved museums and have noticed how the exhibition design has impacted me physically/emotionally, and i can’t wait to read more from you!
As a museologist, I drive my friends crazy when they visit exhibitions with me because I cant help but notice these things about the exhbit design lmao