It’s never just “hanging a show”

This morning, a friend said “I spent all day getting one pair to behave and play nice.”

He wasn’t talking about children, though. He was talking about his photographs. Like me, he was in the midst of putting together a solo art exhibition. We commiserated for a moment on the challenges we were facing.

There’s a reason a solo art exhibition is called a solo show. It really is a show, like a TV show, movie, or a stage play. Paintings, drawings and other artworks are the characters, each with their own motivations and intentions.

Like movies, art exhibitions can be comedies—like the fun exhibition of New Yorker cartoons at the Morgan Library a few years back—or dramas—like Picasso’s Guernica at the Paris World's Fair. They can be quirky indie projects or big sweeping sagas. Romances or thrillers. But whatever the genre, designing an exhibition isn’t about just matching the sizes, colors, and making pretty arrangements on a wall.

Things like scale and color do matter, of course. Just as the physical appearance of an actor in a show matters. But how boring would it be to watch a show where the characters looked right, only to find no authentic dialogue happening between them? It would be lifeless.

When the works are mounted on the wall beside each other, they communicate, tell a story and become something bigger. Sometimes, however, it’s just plain awful. They kids won’t “behave or play nice” wherever you put them. Sometimes it’s magic. Sometimes they express things you didn’t intend. Sometimes you know it’s right.

Take these two drawings, for instance. Each is a narrative work. It’s only when they are viewed side-by-side that the story about outsiders and insiders is complete.

Other. Graphite on archival paper. 20x30 inches. Not My Problem. Graphite on archival paper with red ink. 20x30 inches.

So that’s where I am with my fifth solo show, Borders and Boundaries. Most of the art is finished. But the show? No way. Putting together a show, I’ve learned, is a completely different job. And as of today, that work is just beginning!

I’m happy to see Borders and Boundaries is already getting some coverage and the art is being described as “a tapestry of narrative drawings, paintings, textiles, and found objects.” The key word in that sentence is “narrative.” The characters in this show each have a story to tell. It’s an ensemble performance and not merely a cast of characters.

As my friend observed this morning, when you create a solo exhibition, you become a screenwriter and a director. It’s your job to move characters around, to adapt the “script” with tweaks of color and line, to ruthlessly cut out characters that don’t pull their weight in this particular script, and to find last minute replacements. All the while, you’re trying to build a cohesive story with enough interwoven subplots to keep it interesting.

So once all these decisions are made, what comes next for this show? At that point, I’ll have to move on to the role of producer. It’s a role that has been humming in the background since the beginning, but this will be when it comes center stage. And I’ll also oversee crazy logistics, that will go beyond packing, shipping, and nitty gritty questions like “Do we have enough chairs for the special programming?”

Today, however, I’m standing alone in the studio, looking at my artworks—babies that I created with so much loving care—deciding which of them will end up on the cutting room floor, and which will make their way to New York. That’s enough for one day.