"Self, Made" Exhibit
I assisted one of the senior designers and a number of other curators at the Exploratorium with the launch of their summer ‘19 show, “Self, Made", an exhibit dedicated to “exploring you in a world of we”.
The “Immigrant Student Objects” exhibit
One of the museum curators, Allison Roach, helping me stage the objects for illustrating.
This exhibit was of special objects that immigrant students from the ESL class at SF City College had brought with them from their country, with translations of why they were special in their native language and English. We needed to make the exhibit ADA friendly but didn’t have room for large type in the display case, so we created a book of large type instead. I illustrated each of the objects so the book would accompany the physical objects. These types of illustrations of museum objects are, oddly enough, one of my favorite things in museums. The ultimate pay-off for finishing this book was seeing the ESL students interact with it when they came to the exhibit launch.
The finalized ADA compliant book I illustrated & typeset for vision-impaired visitors to the Exploratorium's "Self, Made" exhibit.
The ESL students whose objects were on display.
The “Digital Dress-Up” Exhibit
I photoshopped the people/ backgrounds out of these photos of kids posing in their finished garments from a fashion design class. The outfits were then displayed on a wall screen where people could flip through the images and resize them to look like they were wearing them.
All of the outfits, as they’re displayed on the exhibit’s screen
My parents visiting and figuring out the controls for resizing the images.
The “Henrietta Lacks” exhibit
This exhibit was about Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical cancer cells were the first cells to be immortalized for scientific study without her or her family’s consent. The exhibit dealt with showing Henrietta as a full human being rather than reducing her to the cells that continue to be studied.
The curator, Melissa Alexander, asked me to help illustrate the cells, a uterus, and the full anatomy for the exhibit. Senior designer Ray Larsen hand-lettered the final version, seen below.
This was the design brief handed to me by the curator, Melissa Alexander.
My first pass at the illustration, later finessed by one of the science writers.