Unexpected Exhibits
When you visit a museum you expect to see exhibits in the usual spaces — in galleries. The galleries could be large or small, spanning multiple floors, wrapping around corners, and the like. Sculptures, paintings, and interactive hang on walls, sit on platforms, hang from ceilings, and have homes in all types of cases whether free-standing or attached to walls in some way. What you don’t expect is to take a back stairwell down to another floor and see mini exhibits living between the exterior windows or sitting against the windows themselves. At the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), you do.
Today, our docent, Robin Hersz, took us down the stairs precisely for that reason. When the museum acquired the 2 Columbus Circle location, the then derelict former Huntington Hartford museum building was completely redesigned with a textured façade of glazed terra cotta and fritted glass to reflect MAD’s craft heritage. While I noticed that on the inside, exhibit walls covered many of these windows, in the stairwells they were used for two purposes that we saw. The first was to backlight a collection of goblets that were part of the museum’s large goblet collection. Brilliantly colored and varied typed of goblets were housed on shelves with a text panel on a nearby wall (in between I’m sure there were humidity and temperature controls in place). These goblets are rotated on a regular basis. The second purpose was to backlight a stained glass piece by artist Judith Schachter commissioned specifically for this space. The stairwell, a necessary part of the architecture of any building, was not wasted space but seen as yet another location to feature objects from the collection and as a perfect place for a commissioned piece of work. I loved the surprise that awaited us in the stairwell, and am sure other visitors do a well. It makes me wonder what other types of necessary spaces are underutilized in museums for this purpose.
