Projects and organisations
This is a live page that showcases projects and organisations related to museum exhibition design history. If you have any additional recommendations, please let us know via the ‘Contact Us’ page.
Centre for Design History (CDH), University of Brighton
CDH applies a cross-disciplinary perspective to understand how design in all its forms has shaped things, spaces and actions across time. CDH contributes to an expanded field of design history that embraces the conjunction of professional and non-professional practices; digital and analogue artefacts; the de-centring of design practice away from singular object to complex ecologies, objects and systems, and the embedding of design thinking into management and organisational processes. One of its four main research strands focuses on ‘Museums, Archives and Exhibitions’.
University of Brighton Design Archives
The University of Brighton Design Archives is an internationally significant research base with a curatorial team that initiates and promotes collaborative activity through a programme of projects. Founded on a scholarly resource focusing on British design and global design organisations in the twentieth century, we have been contributing substantially to the research profile of the University for over 20 years. The Design Archives welcome scholars and students from many academic disciplines researching the designed environment, the design profession and design practice.
American University, University Library, Archives and Special Collections
The manuscript collections include project files from 1971 to 2017 for Staples & Charles, design firm specializing in museum exhibitions. Depending on the project, the files may include designs at various stages and final fabrication drawings, graphic designs, photographs of work in progress and final installations, final object notebooks and texts, catalogues, press kits, correspondence, the initial response to the solicitation, and notes. In time, the files for about sixty per cent of Staples & Charles projects will be at American University.
Center for Puppetry Arts, Nancy Staub Research Library
The Staples & Charles design files for Puppets: Arts & Entertainment (opened 1980 and toured through 1982) are on file here, together with the other records of this exhibition, which were developed for Puppeteers of America, in conjunction with the 13th quadrennial Congress of UNIMA, l’Union Internationale de la Marionnette.
Heidelberger Historische Bestaende – digital
A database for a great variety of historical resources, among them art history journals from 19 th and 20 th century as well as exhibition and auction catalogues.
A research project of the Department of English at the University of Texas and Austen under the supervision of Professor Janine Barchas introducing two famous historical exhibitions in London, which were evidently visited by the Author Jane Austen. The website presents very accurate virtual reconstructions of the exhibition rooms.
“You are invited to time travel to two art exhibitions witnessed by Jane Austen: the Sir Joshua Reynolds retrospective in 1813 or the Shakespeare Gallery as it looked in 1796. These two Georgian blockbusters took place, years apart, in the same London exhibition space at 52 Pall Mall (it no longer exists). When Austen visited in 1813, the building housed the British Institution, an organization promoting native artists. On her earlier London visit in 1796, it was the first-ever museum dedicated to William Shakespeare.”
(Description from the website).
Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME), European Paintings and Drawings 1905-1915
A project of the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna supervised by Professor Raphael Rosenberg.
“This open-access database enables detailed researches into info extracted from exhibition catalogues. Currently the dataset includes around 1.000 exhibitions and 150.000 artworks (only paintings and drawings, no sculptures, prints, etc.) from over 11.800 artists.”
(Description from the website).
A site for those in the museum trade – a cross-disciplinary environment to share knowledge.
Image Archive of the ETH Library :
When Attitude Becomes Form (Harald Szeemann), Bern, 1969 . Very good for world fairs, including Swiss National Fair, 1964 , and Osaka World’s Fair, 1970 .