The grand vista of the Grand Design exhibition gallery under construction. Photograph by Dan Kershaw
Exhibition Designer Dan Kershaw is the mastermind behind the stunning gallery spaces in Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry. I recently spoke with Kershaw about his vision for the show and to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the design and construction of the exhibition galleries.
Sarah Mallory: Many people have remarked that the Grand Design exhibition adopts a nontraditional approach to the display of tapestries. What informed your vision for the show's design?
Dan Kershaw: This particular exhibition design went through many permutations. Part of the fun of a project like this is that the scale of the work presents certain limitations. There are only so many places you can put things that are quite as large as many of these tapestries. Working very carefully with curators on this exhibition was important in understanding how I could comfortably pace the exhibition and how many tapestries we could place in the gallery itself. At some point I realized that because of the width of the tapestries, there was no way we could turn the gallery space into a traditional series of rooms. If I had made rooms, it would have been difficult for people to both see the works and move freely. This show forced me to think in new ways about the artworks and the space, and made me realize there are other ways to present this material.
Sarah Mallory: What did you conclude?
Dan Kershaw: Since we really want people to look at the chronological sequence of Pieter Coecke van Aelst's life, it seemed to me that a grander presentation, using the Tisch Galleries in a way that I don't think we've used them before—a way that I haven't seen in my twenty-five years at the Museum—was necessary to really exploit the vast scale of the Museum's largest temporary exhibition galleries and give people a sense of the sweep of these tapestries in suites. It required a kind of breaking from the box of rectilinear design.
Construction plan for the exhibition gallery
Sarah Mallory: How do you feel you broke the box?
Dan Kershaw: When I designed Tapestry in the Renaissance, curated by Thomas Campbell in 2002, we hung the tapestries in a traditional way, which was in rooms; these rooms were the boxes that grouped particular pieces together. But we really struggled with how to relate drawings, studies, cartoon fragments for tapestries, and the tapestries themselves in a way that you could make the connection between the works of art. With that in mind, as well as the realization that the pieces in this show are too large to fit across a series of rooms, I started playing with the idea of walls, and envisioned the tapestries not so much hanging on walls as floating on a series of panels. I realized that I could play with the angles of those wall panels, and that led to an exciting plan comprised of large open spaces with grand vistas. Using the angle of the walls, I was able to imply groupings of tapestries instead of lining them up monotonously on a wall or containing them in a smaller room.
Installing the angled walls that line the grand vista in the exhibition gallery. Photograph by Dan Kershaw
As a result, you will see that amongst the walls, there is a collection of complex angles that makes you aware of the scale of the palaces where these pieces would have hung, but it also make you aware of progress and gives you a sense of the groups. My favorite part of the exhibition is the enormous grand vista where you can view ten tapestries, all on angled walls, at once. It's a jaw-dropper, and I think it has a little bit of a Richard Serra look to it. You just don't usually see tapestries like that, and it's a way of letting people look at art objects that—despite the fact that they are awe inspiring—aren't something we are acquainted with seeing on a daily basis.
Sarah Mallory: How do the show's other types of art—paintings, drawings, prints—relate to the tapestries in this exhibition space?
Dan Kershaw: When I opened up the space, I found that the areas in the center of each large gallery provided the perfect home for the drawings and cartoons. I liked the idea of creating a place where you could stand in the middle of a gallery and pour over the details of a drawing, then look up and see how that piece relates to a tapestry. The central placement of the objects in cases also give the galleries a social element—a place for people to discuss what they see. At first I thought a Renaissance-style easel might be a good way to display the art, so I did some research and discovered that the easels had too much flavor and would have drawn attention away from the art they were intended to display. So, I paired down our display cases, mirroring the almost modernist, simple approach we took to hanging the tapestries. I built simple lectern-style cases with heavily weighted base and tops set at a forty-five-degree angle.
Design for Grand Design manuscript case
Sarah Mallory: The exhibition does have one small, intimate space that stands in great contrast to the scale of the rest of the show's design. What was your approach to this particular gallery?
Dan Kershaw: As refreshing as the vast gallery spaces are, I also wanted to give an intermission to the largest tapestries. There is a fabulous, multi-part woodcut Customs and Fashions of the Turks that requires close looking, so I didn't want it to get lost on a large wall or in a case. I also wanted to give some life to the parade of figures depicted in the artwork by placing it on a curved wall in a chapel-like setting. So I built a small room, and it's a great hinge point before you get into the rapture of the scale of the rest of the works.
Sarah Mallory: As an exhibition designer, do you feel it is more important to consider the needs of visitors or the needs of the artwork?
Dan Kershaw: Both are equally important. This was a remarkably complex installation, and my goal was to make it look simple. When the public comes in, I want people to think it was easy to put this show together despite the enormous effort and many teams of people it took to make this happen. The role of an exhibition designer is to show the artwork and not the design: to bring life to things in a way that makes people gasp and stuns them.
Before this exhibition, Pieter Coecke van Aelst was an artist who was somewhat unknown, so I, as well as the exhibition's graphic designer, Sophia Geronimus, put a fair amount of effort into drawing visitors into that first gallery. Once a visitor is in the gallery, the goal is to let people pace themselves, communicate how much longer they have to go in the exhibition, to not make it monotonous, to make surprises, to communicate ideas, to begin with a bang and end with a grand statement.
Sarah Mallory: It seems like you really think about the visitor experience. What are some things you always keep in mind about visitors when designing an exhibition?
Dan Kershaw: Present the art in the most appropriate way, show people things that you want them to see about the art, and present art to people in a way that artists wanted them to see it. People should be able to easily see the work no matter what their height or how crowded the room. The other thing that most affects what I do is protection—that someone doesn't accidentally or purposefully touch or hurt the art. Understanding how people move through a space is important to what I do. There is the issue of ease of congestion in a space, trying to make narrow points easy to move through. Other than that, just making it as comfortable as possible to view the art so people aren't frustrated. You want people to feel a pull onward, to progress through an exhibition and view more things.
Sarah Mallory: What is your favorite part of designing an exhibition?
Dan Kershaw: I love sitting and learning. My art history education is continual... I'm always finding unfamiliar things about that which I thought I was familiar. I enjoy working closely with curators and trying to understand how to organize and shape the material so it shows the work in its best light. On top of that, it is the development process: collaborating with conservators, engineers, riggers, carpenters, painters, mount makers, lighting designers, safety officers, editors, and graphic designers is always very rewarding. But the most thrilling part is actually seeing everything come together, and that excitement leads up to this grand summation in the days and weeks in advance of the opening when the galleries are assembled. The art arrives and teams of people are swept into the installation. Seeing this magic moment of things coming together, after all that work—I've been working on this show for more than a year, but the curators have been working on it for at least five years—to watch it all happen in a brief period of two to three weeks, it's very dramatic. By the time of the opening reception, I'm onto my next fifteen projects!
Installing tapestries in Grand Design. Photograph by Dan Kershaw
Sarah Mallory: How many exhibitions have you designed?
Dan Kershaw: I have no idea! It's in the hundreds upon hundreds, maybe thousands. I've been at the Met for twenty-five years. Over the next two years, I have forty-two shows that I'm designing, so multiply that by about twelve. Before arriving at the Met, I designed exhibitions for a group of museums around the city, and it was a wonderful experience. I've found that no two shows are alike.
Sarah Mallory: How did you become an exhibition designer?
Dan Kershaw: By happenstance. It wasn't a goal; I just fell into this. I was always interested in art and I have wanted to be a designer since I was a teenager, but I never connected designing with museums. I always associated it with product design. I even designed musical instruments for a while. After I graduated from Cornell with a degree in design and environmental analysis, I went to work for the furniture designer George Nelson. Then I found my way into working for small museums that needed freelance designers, and the job met all my needs as far as being someone in love with art, and fascinated by architecture and furniture design.
A view of the finished grand vista