"Light Touch" Installations & Placemaking
Designing with Light and Shadow
In honor of yesterday’s total eclipse, the soundtrack for today’s post is George Harrison’s Hear Comes the Sun. With that earworm unleashed on you, I thought I’d share a some sun and light-related inspiration. (I originally wrote about the first two projects for FreeTheMuseum.org, back in plague-times.)
Setting the Sun Scene: Placemaking for the Planning-Curious
One of the classic intersections of museum and planning practice is placemaking. You’ve probably heard this term tossed around in museum conversations, especially art museums, but placemaking has a long-recognized (ahem) place in urban and regional planning.
As Leonardo Vazquez, executive director of the National Consortium for Creative Placemaking explains it, creative placemaking uses “arts and cultural activities [in public spaces] to become the vehicle and fuel of comprehensive planning.” 1 A 2010 National Endowment for the Arts white paper amplifies this point. “Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together.”2
A fantastic example of museum placemaking is the work of the Exploratorium’s Studio for Public Spaces, led by the incomparable Shawn Lani. In case missed it, I wrote a post about the Studio’s exhibit “Middle Ground: Reconsidering ourselves and others”, which sets out to change human to human interactions in a public plaza in San Francisco. Super inspiring project with some great transferable lessons.
I will also put some educational and artful stormwater management projects into this same category. Plenty of infrastructure projects are going to do unsexy but important things like carry traffic across a river without collapsing into said river or treating stormwater to keep that river healthy. But when that infrastructure can double as a beautiful and engaging public place, that’s a worthwhile flex. I always think of capital project money as “metabolically expensive” to raise, so it should do double duty when it can.
But back to the sun. Here are two artists who “write” with the sun, taking advantage of its illumination - and its motion across the sky.
Jiyeon Song's Poems of Sunlight
I can’t improve on Song’s own description of her “One Day Poem Pavilion”:
“Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice. The time-based nature of the poem–and the visitor’s time-based encounters with it–allow viewers to have different experiences either seeing a stanza of the poem or getting the whole poem.”
Daku’s Poem of Shadow
Working in the reverse, Daku's “Time Changes Everything” use thin metal lettering to cast poems in shadow that move across the face of a building. Both of these artists’ work immediately makes me wonder not just about their implications for placemaking, but also - what maker activities could be inspired by this use of math and solar science in service of art?
Steven Knapp’s Lightpaintings
Finally, though most of his work involved artificial light, I have to mention the work of the late Steven Knapp. Using dichroic glass and light, Knapp created a form of art he dubbed lightpaintings. (More STEM in art - yay!) Several years ago, I had the good fortune to tour his studio not far from me, and if you can find one of his stunning installations, indoors or out - please go see it. In the meantime, this documentary gives a good sense of his stunning work.
What About You?
Are you using light and shadow in your work? Using ephemeral phenomena like light in a placemaking project? Please tell me about it!
Interested in expLoring a collaboration with me? Let’s talk!
~ Betsy Loring3
The Planning-Curious Museum Person
Sharing stories and ideas for other Planning-Curious Museum People and for Museum-Curious Planning People.
Leonardo Vazquez, “Creative Placemaking,” PAS Memo, November/December 2016, American Planning Association. www.planning.org/publications/document/9115238/
Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa, “Creative Placemaking” (White paper by Markusen Economic Research Services and Metris Arts Consulting for The Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation, 2010), 3. www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/CreativePlacemaking-Paper.pdf
I am the founder of expLoring exhibits & engagement. I’ve got over 20 years’ experience in project management and exhibit development in multidisciplinary, indoor and outdoor museum settings. My services include exhibit master planning, content and interactive development, and writing, with a focus on hands-on STEM. I also offer staff training in exhibition planning, formative evaluation, and prototyping. My special interests include multi-institutional collaborations, peer-to-peer professional development, and of course – collaboration with municipal planning practitioners.