Permanent Collection

Permanent Collection, designed by Tony Cisek, directed by Timothy Douglas.  Instead of filling the museum walls with impressionist art, the walls themselves were painted with two large impressionist paintings.  A Cezanne on the left and a Renoir on the right.  The empty frames suggested the rest of the artwork.

The frames hid lightboxes built into the walls.  As the lightboxes were lit up, the portions of the wall inside the frames disappeared, becoming instead a block of light.

The wall were constructed with blank holes for where the lightboxes would be.

The two large images were painted onto scrim, and the scrim was glued onto the walls, covering over the holes for the lightboxes.

When the lightboxes were dark, the artwork appeared solid.

But when lit up, the lightboxes allowed the designers to compose different rooms of the museum with different blocks of light.

The lightboxes were all individually controlled and dimmed.  This gave a lot of flexibility for composing looks.