In the Summer of 2019, I was a curatorial intern at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The DeCordova is a beautiful outdoor sculpture park with contemporary exhibitions and sculptural installations from artists like Andy Goldsworthy, Alex Calder, and Sol Lewitt. As a Curatorial Intern, I assisted in the exhibition design and oversaw the graphic design of one of their Fall 2019 shows, Truthiness and the News.
DeCordova Sculpture Park
— Curatorial Internship
Truthiness and the News is about tracing a history of truth in photographic news journalism. The exhibition questions modern origins of subjectivity in photography, journalism, and conceptual art to understand better how we consume and produce the news.
We began developing the visual tone of the show by working from the purpose, themes, and visual elements already apparent in the curation.
Historic newspaper fonts inspired my initial choices for the show's primary typeface.
initial vinyl mock-ups for the intro wall title and show description.
We then began to design wall labels and searched for wall and vinyl colors which could work with the themes of the show.
Initial mock-ups of wall labels played with capitalization, weight, styles, and optical sizes.
We went through dozens of colors for a highlight wall and all vinyl graphics.
Applying color choices to our current vinyl mock-ups helped visualize which direction fit best.
Another important task during this process was remastering archival images for exhibition use. We received three scans of the Pittsburgh Courier, a historic Black American newspaper, which featured three photographs from our exhibition in front-page spreads. The scans, however, were very poor quality and required intensive editing and remastering.
Here is an example of one of the unedited scans we worked with.
These images required cleanup and restoration to appear like original newspaper clippings.
After multiple rounds of edits and input from members of the curatorial team, we finalized all vinyl designs for the show.
This final title revision draws on original headline motifs and lies above the entryway to the gallery.
We prioritized legibility and practicality while still subtly referencing print news.
To aide the curation process, I also developed to-scale digital mock-ups of each gallery wall. This file allowed all curatorial members to arrange the pieces in the exhibition with much more fluidity and visual clarity.
This digital gallery worked in tandem with a physical "dollhouse" model of the gallery, used for all past exhibitions, which I updated with to-scale movable prints of each work.