THIS STAFFER HAS AN UNSEEN HAND in your gallery experience.
When it comes to displaying art at home, there isn’t that much involved. If you have a painting, you frame it, then put a nail or some other hanging apparatus on the wall, and—voilà!—it’s displayed for maximum appreciation. But in the lofty and transitional environment of an art museum, displays take a bit more planning.
Just ask Philip Atkinson. His job is to put an object in the best possible light—literally. But that’s only part of it. For a little more than a year, he’s been the exhibition and installation designer at the Saint Louis Art Museum. “On the simplest level,” Atkinson explains, “I design environments for people to interact with.”
His job is to make sure that while you won’t touch the painting, the painting will touch you. And he doesn’t deal just with paintings; he designs installations for everything from sculptures to the current African Ceremonial Cloths exhibit. “There’s a level of stewardship,” he says. “I’ve got a responsibility for keeping the object safe, as well as creating a dynamic environment. We usually do three temporary exhibitions a year. That requires a great deal of forward thought.”
Atkinson’s installations must support the art without becoming a distraction. And though he’s creative—he’s worked on myriad projects from D.C. to London to Paris—his current job is to think inside the box of the museum. Regardless of the type of exhibition, Atkinson works in a way that ends up bringing us all closer to the art.
“I get a lot of information upfront about the work, and about what the curator is trying to convey,” he says. “Then I build a base on that.”
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