<aside> 🔨
What is exhibition design?
Exhibition design is the practice of shaping how artworks, objects, stories, and ideas are presented in space. It is a system of intentional display that merges spatial thinking, critical inquiry, audience interplay, and social context. It involves decisions about layout, architecture, materials, narrative flow, and visibility that directly influence how meaning is made. Exhibition design is also a site of speculation, dreams, futures, and possible world-building.
</aside>
Each student will be assigned an exhibition to research and present in a 5-7 minute presentation. Contextualize the project, its curation, design, and impact. Consider the artist, the curator, the institution, the audience, the form, and the discourse. Your case study should include visuals, documentation, curator/artist statements, public criticism and your own read on it (do you like it, dislike—why?). Additional readings are available upon request.
This list of exhibitions was compiled by Troy and Jess specifically for this class. It is a subjective list, not a comprehensive one. These exhibitions were selected for the ways they challenged conventions of exhibition-making: shifting paradigms, pushing formats, inviting new publics, staging radical aesthetics or politics, or fundamentally reimagining the relationship between space, audience, and artwork. Each one set a new standard. It also acts as a document of oral history, we have added recommendations from friends and colleagues.
Categories: Artist as Curator / Curator as Artist Institutional Critique Alternative Sites and Spaces Identity and Political Ideals Publics and Participation Historical Precedents and Foundational Exhibitions Performance and Time-Based Media.
[Following this, all exhibitions are organized within categories (e.g., "Artist as Curator," "Archive as Medium," etc.), but sorted chronologically within each category. Each exhibition entry is formatted with:]
Title
Date:
Location:
Curator(s):
Artist(s):
Significance:Â [Concise description of what made it seminal]
đź“Ś denotes a student-assigned presentation.
<aside> đź’ˇ
</aside>
Date: 1957
Location: ICA London
Curator: Richard Hamilton & Victor Pasmore
Significant Artists: Victor Pasmore (Installation/Spatial Design)
Significance: Dematerialized hanging exhibition with no labels, emphasizing viewer navigation and challenging traditional display conventions. It had wide-reaching impact on the canons of curatorial practice, questions of artist as curator, notions of display and artistic practice itself. The show featured vertical and horizontal, parallel and perpendicular groupings of Perspex sheets that contrasted with the ICA's ornamented Georgian interior, creating a radical new approach to exhibition design. By eliminating conventional labels and wall texts, Hamilton and Pasmore forced viewers to navigate the space intuitively, fundamentally challenging how audiences experience and interpret contemporary art exhibitions.