Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Made in California: Art, Image and Identity 1900 - 2000

To address the challenges posed by this 47,000 square foot exhibit’s scope and complexity- the largest exhibition ever mounted by LACMA- the design team developed organizational systems incorporating architecture, information design, and media to assist in spatializing the layered concepts of this themed exhibition. The show included 850 works by California artists with related ephemera.

The primary subject of Made in California is the relationship of California art to the many images, both fact and fancy, of California across the last century. The thematically arranged show is divided into five sections, each representing roughly a twenty year period and each occupying an entire floor of the museum. A primary goal of the design was to provide orientation, both in the content of the exhibit as well as in the complex physical layout of the show.

A three-story structure of lightweight mesh links the two separate buildings in which the exhibit is housed and creates a space that introduces the subject, scale, and the tone of Made in California. The mesh is printed with images of California landscapes which represent both the physical place and begin to identify and complexify the multiple stereotypical ideas of a California known for a romantic iconography of sunsets, deserts, palm trees. This exterior “room” relates to a series of rapidly changing images in the Exhibition Entrance, which focuses on the more specific images of each section.

The notion of a complex image of California, one that is multiple, simultaneous and changing, is carried through the show in the use of carefully chosen imagery as well as through an evolutionary design language based on surface, transparency and lightness. At the introduction to each section, for example, an inflected, lightweight structure informs the circulation of the space and holds a three-dimensional, interactive timeline which sets the context for the art in the galleries. Each section is also identified with a color palette drawn from images of California landscapes and with a material selection which subtly contrasts the natural and the technological frontiers of the state.

in collaboration with Louise Sandhaus

photos by Joshua White