Exhibition Designer, Lana Hum: Hi, I’m Lana Hum.
Exhibition Designer, Montana Gray: And I’m Montana Gray, and we’re two of the designers for the Brancusi exhibition.
Lana Hum: We wanted to evoke Brancusi’s studio. So this ghost studio is based on 11 Impasse Ronsin. We laid it out pretty faithfully to the documentation of the space.
Montana Gray: The first room was the display space, where he had a lot of his larger works. In the back of the space, there is a tool room, and two spaces that were more like working spaces. And one of them had a small mezzanine above it where he had a bed.
Lana Hum: We wanted to give a real physical sense of the space but also to transport rather than recreate.
Montana Gray: The ghost studio is mostly made of framing and gauze. We picked the gauze material, partly because we don’t want this to feel like a recreation, but we want it to be more like an impression of the studio. There was a real airy, dusty, light-filled feeling in the studio, and I think the gauze sort of gets at that.
Lana Hum: We talked about color a lot, and what kind of colors would be luminous, that would give you that sense of light. But we also wanted the kind of dusty and the other material things in the studio.
Montana Gray: There’s a doorway that leads from the display space in the studio to the tool room that Brancusi had sculpted a doorframe for, and we have that doorframe in the studio, and it’s located in the same spot that he did.
It was such a happy surprise to notice that the footprint of Brancusi’s studio fit in our gallery.
Lana Hum: I thought that was kismet, because we were centering our whole exhibition design around the studio, and the fact that it fit into the central gallery of our studio was amazing. So Brancusi’s ghost was alive and well in our museum.