This thesis is a meditation investigating the ways that domestic display tactics permeate the space of the encyclopedic art museum in ways that affect its framing of art.
The integration of increasingly hybrid and elusive contemporary art into a comprehensive museum structure has resulted in the spectacle of the temporary exhibition, "museum fatigue" caused by the enormity of the encyclopedic collection, and a problem of access to the many objects that live in a typical museum's storage.
My study proposes to overlay art spaces with the processes and patterns of everyday American life, looking to the structures of display evident in contemporary domestic environments for opportunity to make the art of our times more comfortable and accessible physically and intellectually.
A designed space, as a prototypical neighborhood branch location is proposed for two recent developments affecting the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum: a donation of a collection of contemporary craft and a new member group devoted to contemporary art.
Parallel to the writing in this document is a creative investigation, in which I’ve made a series of objects that pursue the architectural design by splicing typical and familiar architectural representations, such as a site model, with everyday domestic objects, such as a coffee table.
This work questions the hierarchy in which the art museum’s contents are exhibited within, while reorganizing the typical experiences of architectural representations.