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Smithsonian Storyline

By Ellen Ryan

If your image of a Native American exhibit involves a tiny, buckskinned Owen Wilson behind glass in Night at the Museum, it’s a bit out of date. In fact, in their own way, real museums offer almost as many surprising complexities as the movie these days.

Just ask Andrea D’Amato ’01 — or better yet, take a walk through her work for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, where she’s been senior exhibition designer since July 2020. “Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains,” which has moved from New York to Washington, D.C., juxtaposes historical hides and muslins with takes on contemporary topics (motorcycles, Afghanistan) in new media, even incorporating cartoon figures.

A typical review celebrated the show’s structure, presenting Plains native art as a continuity, “without strict chronological progression … emphasizing the lived connection with tradition and the past that Plains narrative artists embody today.”

Pointing out the deerskins, painted dresses, and colored-pencil art, Andrea says, “I tell my daughter: Artists, no matter who they are, use the tools at their disposal. It’s relatable. Indians don’t just live in the past, but they are inspired by it.”

The girl who all but lived in the Richmond Art Center at Loomis Chaffee immersed herself in then-faculty member Linda Fellows’s printmaking class and guest artist Sol LeWitt’s mass wall-drawing of silhouettes in the Sue & Eugene Mercy Jr. Gallery. Now she plays with more professional tools and collaborates on bigger walls — and floors and ceilings and beyond. 
 

Artifacts in the “Unbound” exhibit. Photos by Skip Brown.

Artifacts in the “Unbound” exhibit. Photos by Skip Brown. 

The National Museum of the American Indian
The NMAI developed out of the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act to “establish a living memorial to Native Americans and their traditions.” The name was decided through conversations with many native and tribal consultants, Andrea says, though there were and are varied opinions about the name among native communities. This is especially the case, she adds, because NMAI seeks to represent cultures not just in the United States, but also through Mexico and into South America as well as “the past, present, and future.”

 

A designer’s toolbox

Take Andrea’s first major exhibition site job — shifting several Alexander Calder mobiles from the “kind of dark” subterranean level of the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art, where they’d been for decades, to a rebuilt space just below a broad skylight. This included the massive untitled mobile commissioned for the building’s opening. The months-long project involved working with the Calder Foundation and curators on how and where to place paintings, displays, and explanatory materials.  

“I loved giving it new life and letting it all breathe and move in natural light,” she says. Now the world’s largest display of Calder’s works is “a fun surprise at the top of the tower in the East Building.” Her favorite part was watching “Finny Fish” rise at last and hearing its glass pieces clinking. 

Sound, light, tactility, even the movement of air — these and other elements of the visitor’s experience, more than just the visual, are part of a museum designer’s toolbox. A designer works with a wide range of fellow experts, from those in collections and conservation to curators; project managers and professionals such as architects and engineers; graphic designers, lighting people, perhaps muralists and interpreters, and production experts and craftspeople, among others. 

“Often a designer comes up with several options to present to a larger group,” Andrea explains. These fall into general categories of a conceptual design, design development, and the phase of final construction through installation. 

The throughline on a D’Amato project — what she aims for and what pulls all her creations together — is “communicating the passion and the story, taking people on a journey where they come out having learned something.” 
 

Challenges and solutions

The goal of “Wild Designs,” one of her favorite exhibition projects, for the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, was to “explore bioinspired innovations in design, technology, and art that either model or engage nature to generate more sustainable solutions.” Andrea used a series of curved, open-slat walls to mount illustrations of the concepts and challenges to visitors; people could see through them, but they had to go to the other side to learn more. 

“I gravitated toward the pattern of tree rings,” explains Andrea, who earned a master’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. Whether or not visitors realized it consciously, “overall your sense of your surroundings was in forms of nature and biomimicry.” The “walls” were “light and airy and natural, using materials in alignment with the exhibit’s theme.”

Andrea’s sketches and inspirations for the “Wild Designs” exhibit.

Andrea’s sketches and inspirations for “Wild Designs: Innovations Inspired by Nature,” an exhibition Andrea designed for Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts in 2018.

Completely different walls were necessary when Andrea came up with “Exploration Starts Here,” an orientation exhibit for Washington’s National Geographic Museum, a relatively tiny space displaying the work of National Geographic explorers, scientists, and photographers at no cost to the public.

“With Jane Goodall to Robert Perry to explorers on every continent, their collection is not as deep as the Smithsonian’s but important and exciting and reflecting everything you see in the magazine,” Andrea says. Fitting all that into an interactive timeline in less than 2,700 square feet was a challenge in itself — let alone having just open floor to work with.

She and her colleagues hit on repurposing metal piping of the sort used as handrails in sports stadiums. They could hang and support materials on these and move them around easily. 

“A good chunk of this job is about creative problem-solving, and I love that part,” she says. 
 

A collage of three exhibit designs

Top Left: An element that engaged the senses in the “Wild Designs” exhibit. Top Right: Metal piping formed the framework for free-standing displays in “Exploration Starts Here,” an orientation exhibit for Washington’s National Geographic Museum. Bottom: The “Wild Designs” exhibit space.
 

“A good chunk of this job is about creative problem-solving, and I love that part.” 

Andrea D’Amato ’01

Ideas and insights

Inspiration comes from anywhere and everywhere — from stadiums to theater to, unsurprisingly, other museums. One thing Andrea likes to do is watch visitors interact with exhibits: what they stare at, what they touch and spend time with. What does her family enjoy? Can smaller people and those of different abilities take in the messages? 

“Universal design is important,” she notes. “When you conceive for different senses, when you add audio for blind people or sensory elements for people to feel, you’re enhancing the experience for everyone.”

In off-hours, Andrea occasionally has brought the lessons of an architecture degree from Roger Williams University — including a semester in Florence — to the Little Theatre of Alexandria in her Virginia hometown. 

Inspired by Broadway’s Wicked, she designed and built for A Christmas Carol a 21-foot arched clockface that spanned the stage, ticking off the hours until Scrooge’s doom or awakening. For Dirty Blonde, about iconic filmmaker and actor Mae West, a reviewer described her “breathtaking set that uses both rear projections and marquee projections through a large-screen television.”

Set design for a community theater production of A Christmas Carol

Top: Andrea designed the set for a community theater production of A Christmas Carol in 2014. Inset Left: The preliminary set design reflects the concept of time as a theme. Inset Right: Using a computer-controlled milling machine, Andrea created the giant clock frame for the set. 

Andrea is grateful that Loomis Chaffee “gave me a worldview larger than most high-schoolers got,” which in turn has informed her work for the public. As for where that might go, “I dream of making an exhibit on sustainability, native plants and so on, that travels and teaches people beyond the museum walls.” Goodbye dioramas!

 


 

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