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Pastels in Pieces

I designed Pastels in Pieces, an exhibition exploring the practice and purpose of “piecing” together large pastel works, inviting visitors to take a closer look at how eighteenth-century pastels were made.

When eighteenth-century pastellists competed with oil painters for portrait commissions, they faced a challenge. Paper was manufactured in small sheets, and so, to create pastel pictures as large as oil paintings on canvas, artists had to join together multiple sheets of paper.

Disguising seams led to new techniques and opportunities for image manipulation. This installation, which pairs each pastel with a map of its constituent sheets, encourages visitors to consider how these works were created.

For this exhibition, I oversaw all parts of the design deliverables. From large-scale graphics and banners to label design. This exhibition had an interactive component and was participatory as visitors were encouraged to find the “seams” in large pastel drawings by referring to the object labels and then looking at the pastel works.