Reorganizing Cultural Categories at Denver Art Museum's "Blue & White: A Ceramic Journey"

There is a sense of comfort in familiar categories.  They enable us to perceive and organize our world without surprises.  As designers, the familiar is powerful - it can make learning simpler or allow us to present more meaning in simpler forms, because we can use familiar categories as part of our design vocabulary - birds mean this, bears mean that.  Blue is trustworthy, orange is exciting, green is go, red is stop.  Sans-serif is modern, serif is traditional.

But there is also design power in subverting the categories, reorganizing them, and creating new ones.  New organization structures stretch our minds, encourage examination of our assumptions, and restructure our cultural understandings in new and unexpected ways.

This is what happens at the "Blue & White" portion of the "Marvelous MUD: Clay Around The World" exhibit at the Denver Art Museum.  The museum generally divides their exhibits by culture: Asian Art is on the 5th Floor, then Japanese is separate from Chinese, etc.  This exhibit, however, is united across cultures by color.

From classical Chinese Blue and White ceramics, to Mexican, Vietnamese, Korean, Islamic, etc. the exhibit moves through multiple cultures and eras based on their common love of this color combination.  In one small room, you can compare the colors, the patterns, the shapes, etc across cultures and times in ways that wouldn't be possible across the culturally-based exhibit halls.

One of the most amazing exhibits I ever saw was John Cage's Rollywhollyover A Circus at the Philadelphia Art Museum in 1995.  Because each piece was placed randomly (on the wall, in time, in context) the juxtapositions were the heart of the meaning.  For example, one day the a picture of Stravinsky's foot from a music museum was set next to the painting from a painting from a podiatry center.  I've never forgotten either one, not because they were extraordinary on their own, but because their pairing was so absurd that it made them each more memorable.

In taking these leaps out of categories, a museum puts the work on the observers.  It asks them to find the connections and notice the differences, to create the patterns and find the value.  It doesn't dictate meaning, and in doing so, it creates a more interactive and conversation art experience.

Art isn't only about the piece, it's also about the context.  So you have to appreciate when a museum goes out of its way - and out of its categories - to design a new context.