Artwork Galleries

The themes on the following pages emerged from the collected body of artwork during the two-day exhibition design meeting, which our Exhibition Manager Emily Chase hosts every January. During this two-day meeting, a group of PCAP staff, faculty, students, and volunteers came together to view all of the art at once, identify themes that emerge from the body of work, and plan the installation of the art in the gallery. 

This is the first time that we see all of the art together in one place. Since it is collected facility by facility, it is difficult to imagine how all the work will look when it is together. The day before the design meeting, Emily works with volunteers to display all of the art in a conference room at U-M. Emily leads the Exhibition Design group in a process called thematic analysis–identifying ideas present in the artwork, seeing how those ideas emerge among multiple pieces, and analyzing the themes and stories that these ideas will tell to viewers in the gallery. We spend several hours identifying subject codes, brief descriptions of content or ideas that are present in the art. To do this, everyone looks closely at the art in the room and makes notes about the subject codes that emerge. Sometimes these codes are descriptive, like “portrait,” “abstract,” or “sports.” Others might be about the artistic process, such as “experimentation,” “repetition,” or “repurposing.” Some codes are interpretive and speak to what meaning the viewer sees in the pieces, like “loneliness,” “care,” or “belonging.”

After the group identifies subject codes on their own, we collect all of the codes and make a long list of them on the whiteboard. It is always really interesting to see what other people saw in the art and where it overlapped or didn’t overlap with what you saw. Often there are pieces that viewers see very differently and these differences of perspective often yield really interesting insights into the art. Once we have collected all of the subject codes, we analyze the list together and identify themes that emerge from the codes. These themes will be highlighted in the gallery and will help visitors to the exhibition to understand the body of artwork. We also ask design meeting participants to write brief descriptions of each theme that are featured on the digital exhibition and in the gallery booklet that visitors can read as they look at the art.