A few steps outside the Rembrandt exhibition in East Building is another exhibition, titled Self, Observed. Conceived and organized by our Education Department, this exhibition is a juried college art competition. Over 160 online submissions of original self-portraits in various media were received from all over the country. The jury, made up of college students from the Curatorial Projects class at UNC–Chapel Hill, selected 41 works for display, plus two video entries. Other entries can be viewed on a video screen.

This project is unique for the NCMA in several ways. It is our first juried college art exhibition. I will admit the suspense was thick over the summer as the entries seemed slow to arrive, but as soon as the fall school semester started, the whole thing went viral. The entries poured in.

Another twist is that the jury was made up of college students. The Curatorial Projects students (under the leadership of professor Elin o’Hara Slavick) selected art for the exhibition and wrote label copy. They provided not only enthusiasm and thoughtful perspectives, but also another layer to the outreach programming for which our Education Department is known. That reaching out and taking the Museum experience into different communities creates connections and partnerships that enhance the art experience for us all.

As the designer for this project, my original challenge was to design a room with only 18 works. By the time final entries were received, the challenge was to design a room with so many. The curatorial students wrote what we call “extended” labels, which take up more than the usual amount of wall space. I felt it was important to allow each work to have enough space to be seen on its own and not simply as part of the whole. I believe a good balance was created between the individual self-portraits and the groupings of works.

Self, Observed is an inviting and contemporary companion exhibition to Rembrandt in America. Congratulations to those students whose work was selected. Between these students and Rembrandt, there really are masters among us!

Image above: Mark Wroblewski, I’m Trying to be Serious, 2011, Charcoal, 13” x 19”. Self, Observed is on view on Level B in East Building at the Museum.

For the first time ever at the North Carolina Museum of Art, all four volumes of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America are currently on view.

Believe me, this has been a long time coming. From the transfer of the portfolios from the State Library to the Museum in 1974 to the five-year conservation and restoration program of 2002–2007, this migration has been worthy of a National Geographic documentary.

In the past the Museum has had the ability to show only one volume at a time, in a single case, because of a variety of physical, spatial, and conservation–related restrictions.

The Restrictions

1. Size of the books: really big. Each page is 40 by 26 inches. Not for nothing are they known as the Double Elephant Folios.

2. Size of the case: again, really big—73 inches long x 53 inches deep x 40 inches tall, including the protective glass hood.

3. Limited viewing. Only one page in one volume could be displayed at a time because of light restrictions.

4. Turning the pages—once each quarter—required:

• 8 people from 3 departments.
• 8 suction cups used by 4 strong people to remove the protective glass hood.
• Constant repair of the protective glass hood due to seam breakage during each opening.
• Extreme difficulty in closing the case due to a less-than-precise closure mechanism.

5. Size of the room: tiny. Less than 100 square feet—and it was really just a passageway between contemporary art galleries. In sum, there was no real gallery for the birds to roost in.

The Solutions

1. A dedicated gallery! The new 700-square-foot space allows all four volumes to be shown simultaneously. There are new in-gallery education panels and a reading area, and we can control light levels because the space is not a passageway.

2. New cases—four of them!—one for each volume. They’re each the same size as the old Audubon case, but with greatly improved construction. Pneumatic lifts allow art handlers to open the glass hoods with the greatest of ease (no more suction cups). Pullout decks give greater physical access to the books for safe page turning. And the cases close with a one-handed gentle mechanism and a self-locking system.

That’s right. Thanks to modern technology, what used to take eight people now takes only two or three. Our new cases, made by Glasbau Hahn of Germany, are the crème de la crème of museum casework and a capital investment that will last a lifetime. Unlock with a key, lift open the hood, pull out the deck, turn the page, add a new label, and close the case. It’s that easy. It now takes more time to coordinate the three people with a key than to get access to the book. Our work is more efficient, and the Museum can show more birds than ever before.

One word of caution for visitors to Audubon: you’re being watched. The new gallery is under surveillance by a few feathered friends on loan from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, so be warned—unless you foresee an Alfred Hitchcock moment in your future, please don’t touch the birds.

Not only did we create an Ethafoam mummy to support the various pieces of  the Gilded Mummy Covering, but we also had to make a special mount for the mummy so it could stand upright. This mount for the mount—Golden Boy’s guts, if you will—is hidden inside the Ethafoam body and was made right here in the carpentry shop (just like his mummy body was made in the conservation lab).

When Stacey made the mummy form, she carved a long, narrow space in the middle of the body, from Golden Boy’s feet to his chest. A long, threaded rod (7/8-inch diameter) was inserted vertically in the body (think of it as Golden Boy’s spine) and secured underneath the base. This keeps the mummy upright and stable. However, this was not enough. A 5-by-5-inch cavity was created in his chest so that the rod could be attached to a brass plate with a flange that had also been inserted in Golden Boy’s body. From this flange, two thin brass threaded rods (3/8-inch diameter) were screwed horizontally to the backboard of the case. You can imagine those as Golden Boy’s innards. Or maybe his heart.

The hole in Golden Boy’s chest is cleverly hidden by his gold pectoral. When we installed the Gilded Mummy Covering, we simply removed the pectoral and, just like a character in a Frankenstein movie, I stuck my hands in there and screwed the rods attached to the flange into the backboard. It was a delicate operation, almost like heart surgery, but it was all for our boy’s well-being.

(See full size image)

And here are some of Stacey’s awesome mummy-making photos with captions on Flickr:

So, once Team Golden Boy had decided on an abstracted “mummy” mount for our Gilded Mummy Covering, and we had a scale model to show us how that mount might work (we call him Mini-Mummy-Me!), we looked around to see who else might have had the same idea. We discovered that the Brooklyn Museum of Art has a mummy covering in their collection that is displayed just the right way, and we got in touch with them to see how they did it.

Conveniently enough, I was making a trip up to NYC to visit a friend right around the time we discovered our mini-mummy’s bigger cousin, so I convinced my traveling companion to stop by the BMA to take a look. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to see the object outside of its case–the conservator’s schedule did not align with my time in Brooklyn. Nonetheless, the BMA allows non-flash photography, so we took some photos that (I hope) were helpful in developing our final design for the faux mummy mount.

(Also, I like to think that Mini-Mummy-Me had a good time traveling around NYC–he got to fly with me on the plane, and meet some long-lost relatives, and he even got to cross the Brooklyn Bridge!)

The staff at the BMA was also very generous in sharing information about their process and materials, so with our photos and their expertise, our ingenious Conservation Tech, Stacey Kirby, was able to formulate a plan of action for making our own mummy mount.

(Check out earlier episodes from the Adventures of Golden Boy, and be on the lookout for more, as Golden Boy prepares for his debut in the new building.)

Rather than list the attributes (nimble but bold, graceful, playful, flexible, with a strong presence… oops, couldn’t help myself!) of the graphic identity system designed for the North Carolina Museum of Art by Michael Beirut and team at Pentagram, I’d rather start with an insider’s view of the experience. We can talk more about implementation later.

How could anyone who was described as the design world’s Don Draper not be a pompous a**?

I’m not saying Michael Beirut doesn’t have chutzpah or the encyclopedic knowledge to back it up but surprisingly, the typography nerd you saw in the movie “Helvetica” is the real thing. Darned if he hasn’t read every book, seen every play, visited every museum, and lived to tell all about it on the ambitious blog about design that he cofounded. He’s a creative force…but he’s also a disarmingly approachable guy. Is it a coincidence that the current designers whose work I most like to look at, from Beirut to Bantjes to Niemann to Sagmeister, all sound a lot more like my favorite soft-spoken geek from physics class than a designer from on high? Michael and his team captured the distinctive and spirited nature of the people of North Carolina’s art museum with intelligence and grace.

How do these Pentagram partners keep getting all the good work?

I recently saw Malcolm Gladwell give a talk about his theory that there are two kinds of creative thinkers, the conceptual and the experimental. He thinks that today, most creative thinkers have to be experimental. They go down blind alleys, they start and stop, they try new things and then, voila! His example was the fact that Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” album became the biggest thing on the musical planet only after sixteen previous Fleetwood Mac records. Practice, practice, practice. This makes me wonder when Dale Watson will make the Billboard list, but that’s another story.

Both Michael and Yve Ludwig, the designer from Pentagram who worked on this project with him, never stop designing. Listen to them talk with Dave Rainey and me about the process of developing our custom alphabet. You’ll hear that they did their homework. They listened, asked questions, studied our Museum, sketched ideas, and worked to create an identity that reflects the richness of our collection, the transformative nature of our new building and grounds, the enlightening experiences visitors can have in our Park and our amphitheater. You don’t find good design projects. You make them. But capturing the versatility of the North Carolina Museum of Art experience was a good project.

What’s next?

For over a year, Dave Rainey, Jennifer Blackman and I (the in-house graphics team) have been working closely with the rest of our marketing/communications department and the exhibit design group to implement the Museum’s brand architecture. We’ve started the transformation in anticipation of our April 2010 re-opening. We’re working hard to build something lasting. Every detail counts, from case label to letterhead, postcard to catalogue. Our goal is to communicate consistently while using the flexibility of our system in exciting new ways. Long after the excitement of our spring 2010 opening, we’ll continue to grow and evolve with the Museum, doing our best to capture the Museum experience in a visual way.