JUNE 2005

The Wolfsonian Receives Planning Grants For Reinstallation of Permanent Collection

The $30,000 award from the NEA and $40,000 award from NEH provide funding for the museum staff to consult with internationally recognized scholars in the field of modern history and design to prepare for the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection, which includes industrial design objects, posters, furnishings, prints, paintings, and sculptures.  The reinstallation of the permanent collection is scheduled to be completed for the 2008-2009 season.

“With this funding, The Wolfsonian is perfectly positioned to design a better permanent exhibition, one that tells a more powerful and coherent story about the role of design in the modern world, in a more accessible way,” said Cathy Leff, museum director.  “We are very privileged to have consistently been awarded these high-caliber grants to help us continually provide visitors with engaging exhibitions and programs.”

As part of this planning process, The Wolfsonian will research and identify effective strategies in the fields of exhibition design and museum education for enhancing the visitor’s learning and aesthetic experience.  The Wolfsonian will also continue to work with the Institute for Learning Innovation, a not-for-profit learning research and development organization, to help shape both gallery displays and programs.  The museum staff will organize focus groups of audience members to respond to visual presentation about the overall exhibition narrative, and will also evaluate audience needs.

This funding builds upon the previously awarded 2003 NEH Public Programs Consultation Grant, which helped begin the development of a new humanities framework for exhibiting the museum’s collection. The reinterpretation-reinstallation project grows out of The Wolfsonian’s mission, which is to use objects to illustrate the persuasive power of art and design, to explore what it means to be modern, and to tell the story of the social, political, and technological changes that have transformed the world. 

Since The Wolfsonian mounted the permanent exhibition Art and Design in the Modern Age: Selectionsfrom The Wolfsonian’s collection at a very early stage in the museum’s growth, its staff has learned a great deal more about the collection, about its relationship to current scholarship in the humanities (as well as other disciplines), and about the audiences it serves.  Now, nine years after the exhibition opened, The Wolfsonian has a much deeper reservoir to exploit, a clearer sense of how to deploy its physical space, more knowledge about its audience and a better understanding of strategies for museum presentation.

Over the past 10 years, the museum and research center has mined a rich body of humanities scholarship that identifies design, in all of its manifestation, as a key practice in the modern world.  Through the years, the curatorial staff, sometimes working with other expert consultants has conducted research on the collections and has revealed new findings on various aspects of the modern experience, including:

• The important role of graphic design as an instrument of political and commercial persuasion
• The nature of government-sponsored public art and architecture programs, such as New Deal post office murals

• The responses by designers to changes brought about by industrialization, mass production, and mass consumption, expressed, for example, in the British Arts & Crafts movement
• The promotion of radical political and social ideas through design and architect, as in the work of Czech avant-garde artist, Karel Teige
• The strategies used by propagandists to mobilize populations during the world wars of the twentieth centuries

he reinstallation of the permanent galleries will be an important next logical step, one that allows the museum to strengthen its interpretative framework and present it in a more compelling manner.  The planning project consists of three components: refinement of the interpretative approach, planning for exhibition programs and enhancements, and audience evaluation.