James Porter is the art exhibition designer at the Ulrich Museum of Art. He says the scale of the new “Bare It All” show is massive.
“Well, in a normal turnaround,” Porter said, “you have two weeks to take everything down and put something new up. We've been going for almost two and a half months, so it's like doing 100 shows at one time.
“I mean, downstairs that was four days' worth of work in the hallway alone, and we're doing more up here now. “
According to Porter, the “Bare It All” exhibit, which will showcase nearly all of the museum’s 7,300 works, is his largest assignment yet. This exhibit is meant to expose work in the collection that rarely, if ever, gets seen.
“Most museums hide their work, right? You only see one or 2%,” Porter said. “It just gives you an idea of what's in the vault that people never see. How do you get 1200 pieces of paper onto a small gallery wall, right? Unframed. So everything's in an archival bag, sealed, and we hung it like shingles, so you know they're overlapping. Oh, there's easily probably 1000 pieces in this room that nobody's ever seen.
There is more to the story than just exhibiting rare works from the collection. This show is meant to house the work on its way to new long-term storage.
“We're building a new vault,” Porter said, “and this gives us a chance to transition the work out of our current vault, work on it and get things into the new vault. So when this show is done, we can just move all our work to the new vault.”
The planning for the show was faster than normal. Porter said a show like this should have taken years to plan, and they did it in the last year. After being with the Ulrich for 16 years, it feels instinctual to Porter.
“I knew the work well enough that it's like, ‘Well, this piece will fit here. This piece will fit here.’ It's it's like a palette for me,” Porter said. “Like, ‘what can I use to paint this wall? Oh, I need that. I need that.’”
His experience gives him the confidence to try some new forms of exhibition, which includes positioning large bodies of work.
“Frederick Wall is one of the larger artists in our collection,” Porter said. “We have a huge count, right? So the way I started this whole show was this wall right in front of you, and if you notice, none of the frame tops match. None of the center lines match. The waterline matches. The horizon line on every piece around the corner. So if you stand at to the side, it looks like you're standing in the water.”
Porter is in phased retirement and looks forward to working on his own art. This exhibit is not his last hurrah, but it’s been a fun ride.
“I don't look at this as some kind of capstone to anything,” he said. “This is one of the funnest shows I've ever put together.”
