Assignment for Museum Exhibition Design, Fall 2025
SketchUp, LayOut, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign


This graduate-level class focused around a semester-long project for which we were given access to the object checklist from the National Gallery of Art’s exhibit Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World. This exhibit highlights paintings, prints, and drawings by 16th and 17th century European artists alongside specimens and taxidermy from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Together, the objects help the viewer consider how art depicting insects and other animals influenced the scientific study of these species, and how this paints a unique view of life and death. Using the same exhibit checklist, we spent a portion of the semester developing curatorial content for a hypothetical traveling exhibition that woul dbegin at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. As three groups, we developed general themes for three sections of the exhibit and wrote label and introductory text. We then traded this content with other groups, giving each group a new section to work with. The remainder of the class revolved around creating a design package for our assigned section. This included investigation of our individual objects, gallery layout, graphic design development, and diagramming our casework, interactive, and other physical elements within the space. Each student was responsible for one subsection within one of the three gallery spaces, but we collaborated in developing the gallery layout and interactive aspects.

The majority of students in the class were new to graphic design, so while they focused on learning design principles and applications, I expanded the project to focus on the whole gallery. I drew on organic forms and the hand-made textures in the prints to develop a pattern that could be used across the exhibit graphics. I also applied the texture to my casework, which uses glass panels to mimic the architecture of the central interactive greenhouse.