Client

Corning Museum of Glass

AwardS

SEGD Global Design Award 2020

Opened

Spring 2019

Team

Graphic design art direction
by Cassandra Cortez Gerardo
in collaboration with
Studio Joseph (exhibition design)

Background

The third exhibition in a series dating to 1959, New Glass Now employs a democratic curatorial methodology. Just as in 1959, the 2019 show was curated from an open call for submissions by an international panel. For the 60th anniversary of New Glass Now, the Corning Museum of Glass wanted to showcase the 2019 winners in one gallery while New Glass Now Context paid tribute to the past exhibitions and jurors in the other.

Challenge

Studio Joseph worked on the structural design of the exhibition while I worked on the exhibition graphics. The New Glass Now gallery is stark white, curvilinear, and served as a blank slate for the exhibition team. The New Glass Now Context gallery is situated in an older building with built-in casework. The show’s budget went primarily to the New Glass Now gallery, while the New Glass Now Context gallery’s budget was supported graphics only.

Accomplishments

The curatorial objective differed between the two galleries — the 2019 gallery’s design was kept clean and minimal to let the new winners’ work shine, while the curator’s wanted visitors to be immersed in the past, the process, and the jurors behind the 1959, 1979, and 2019 shows.

Minimal labels with a black vertical rule brought consistency across the galleries and between the exhibition design and graphic design in the New Glass Now gallery.

Larger-than-life photographs immerse the visitor in the Context gallery accompanied by stories and ephemera from the previous shows.

Outcomes

The Corning Museum of Glass was so pleased with the transformation of their Context gallery that before the show opened they decided the make it into a permanent exhibition. The show was so popular that the Museum also decided to make the 2019 gallery a permanent exhibition and Studio Joseph was later brought on to create permanent fixtures. New Glass Now has won several awards for exhibition design — most notably a 2020 SEGD Global Design Award.