Studio Museum in Harlem
Who writes the canon, and who gets to keep rewriting it? Since 1968 the Studio Museum in Harlem has answered that question by collecting, exhibiting, and championing artists of African descent through times when few institutions would.
Two hundred years of Black artistic production represented by over 800 artists and nearly 9,000 works of art, this is a collection that holds within itself the present, past, and future of black thought, culture, and presence.
Collection in Context is a rotating thematic installation drawn from that holding. It hangs iconic work beside newly acquired pieces, rarely exhibited and recently returned from the conservator's bench. We approached the collection thematically, avoiding a linear chronology, our themes offer breadth and depth, from Love, Pride and the Everyday Considerations of a life, to Diaspora, Literature, Refusal and the Ghosts of Black Wall Street, through Allegory, Abstraction, Bodies, Thresholds, Landscapes and the Text-Based. Thirteen ways into one undeniable and expanding collection.
We worked closely with the museum team and gathered voices from across the institution and beyond, Connie Choi, Habiba Hopson and Jayson Overby Jr. among them, to speak to the works in their own terms and bring to life the multitude of histories that come to form the collection.
Client
Studio Museum in Harlem
Project
Collection in Context
Services
Concept Development - Production - Interviews - Post Production
Voices
Chet Gold, Habiba Hopson, Jayson Overby Jr., Madison Smith, Connie Choi, Timothy Stockton, Yelena Keller, Chloe Hayward, Adria Gunter, Kiki Teshome, Cecil Jones
Share:
Our Process
Thirteen themes, many histories, one collection.
Opportunity
Few collections carry the weight and responsibility of the Studio Museum's. The opportunity was to bring that collection, and the depth of thinking behind it, into its new home with an audio experience as plural and alive as the works themselves.
Insight
A collection built to resist a single narrative wasn’t going to be explained by one, and a non-linear approach allowed for a continuous evolution as the collection grows. Organizing the guide by theme rather than chronology let a nineteenth-century painting and a work acquired last year sit in the same conversation. The listener hears a canon in conversation rather than a canon handed down.
Outcome
A thirteen-part thematic audio guide with seven voices, available on Bloomberg Connects. It accompanies the Studio Museum's permanent collection into its new home on 125th Street, and it's a companion to one of the most significant collections of art by artists of African descent in the world.
