well, fabric tape, to be a little more precise.
The 2009 edition of Eye of the Beholder is up in our research area in A&SC and we think it looks pretty good. Most of our exhibit flat panels are in use down in the Library Great Room through the end of the month for the 50th anniversary of AMU/APU celebration, so we had to get creative. Especially with an exhibit that we knew was going to be fairly text-heavy. And with the space available to us being pretty much a flat table. What to do?
First view of exhibit
So the first thing we did was hang our exhibit sign right over the table. Then we took our two remaining flat panels and set them up in an a-frame shape. Some decisions were easy: the big image to the left on the panel is a photographic montage created by Deborah Tharp, a photography professor in the Arts department. We knew we didn’t want to hang it since it was big and we didn’t want to glue it down to backing. Deborah had provided some information about the image on the back of it. So that was put on foam core backing with photo corners and that was attached to the panel by velcro. The piece of realia submitted by Anne Freitag had to go on the table and so her description went on the panel just behind it.
side view of the exhibit
You can see Anne’s piece in the picture to the right, bottom center. And we put down some notebooks and pencils and copies of the original image and scattered those around the table so visitors can see the original image that inspired all these people and maybe even contribute some thoughts of their own.
We then took most of the text pieces, printed them out, and mounted them onto a foam core backing. Punched holes in the corners, took some fabric tape, and hung them from the ceiling. This is definitely the shoestring part, and that’s not so much a joke. See we have this odd wood-paneled ceiling, not a typical acoustic tile dropped ceiling like you might expect. It’s gorgeous, but not really built for hanging items off of it (especially if you’re trying to avoid drilling into the wood). But the wood panels are spaced between 1/4 and 1/2 inch apart so we took binder clips, clamped those on to the edges of the wood panels making up the ceiling, and then tied our fabric tape to those and tied the other ends of the fabric tape to the exhibit text pieces. And voila! We had a visually different exhibit with a bit of a 3-d effect not typically associated with such a text heavy exhibit.
Well, we like it anyway. If you’re around next Friday (10/9) at 9:00 am and want to stop by, we’ll be having a little celebration for the opening of the exhibit and to celebrate Archives Month. Come visit. And have fun reading the panels and looking at the other pieces. It really is amazing how so many different people will view that single image. And if you can’t stop by, we’ll put most of the exhibit online eventually. We’ll tell you here when it happens.
And a couple of more photos of the exhibit from different angles. For your viewing pleasure.
One more angle on the exhibit.
and a last angle on the exhibit