Don’t get me wrong, the majority of artwork that visitors make goes home with them, but a percentage always gets donated. Often visitors will make more than one piece, so that they have one to take home and one to add to the collection. We didn’t start out asking people to leave their work, but it always happened. Now, we build it into the consideration of the activities that will be offered in the space. It isn’t really like the formal artist-displaying-work model that is in evidence throughout the museum…the work is typically anonymous and individual pieces aren’t highlighted.

When you walk into the space during the last month or so of an exhibition you experience the visitor-created artwork as a single, room-sized installation first, and only later do you focus on individual pieces. I think it is closer in some ways to the urge behind street art…the sort of private joy to be had from making something great and then leaving it behind for others to discover. I sometimes see visitors coming back to find something that they left behind a month or two before, not to reclaim it, just to see where it is now. The current show, Squares-Folds-Life: Contemporary Origami by Robert J. Lang opened in mid-February, and it will close on July 20th. We’ve been making paper ducks and sparrows with visitors since the show opened. I don’t know how many ducks we have in our flock currently, but I know that we’ve used somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 sheets of origami paper so far during the show. A colleague recently described walking into the drop-in studio by saying that it was like standing in a bag of jellybeans. Sometimes it makes me think of a really cheery version of The Birds…

After the show closes, we’ll shoot some photos of the space, and save a small number of the ducks and other paper sculptures that were made during the show, and eventually the rest of them will be recycled. The drop-in space will be cleaned and painted…a blank slate for the next collaborative installation.

In the gallery, the finished work is shown alongside an 8’ x 4’ graphic panel that depicts the 113 steps developed by Lang to transform a square of paper into a realistic lobster with articulated legs and spindly antennae without making any cuts to the paper. I included the large print of the folding instructions in the design of the exhibition with the idea that it would help visitors understand how Lang coaxes such forms from the paper while adhering to the “rules” of origami. The step-by-step instructions are the same as those that would appear in any of the multiple books that Lang has published, and the implication is that if you possessed sufficient origami folding experience and skill you could follow them and make a lobster of your own. I am sure that a skilled origami artist would respond to the instructions in that way, but for most of our visitors, the effect is altogether different. Seeing exactly how the lobster was made does not demystify the process. Looking at each step makes the final piece seem more astounding and improbable, not less.

One of the great things about working in a museum with a large and varied collection is the way that dialogues between works of art sometimes appear unexpectedly. If you are standing in Star Studio, near the instructions for the lobster, and you look directly across the main hall you can see Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing No. 652. Thinking about the impact of displaying the instructions for the production of a work of art along with the finished piece while LeWitt’s mural is in your peripheral vision, some conceptual links between the two artist’s practices begin to emerge. Lang composes and diagrams the origami sculptures that he creates, and gives them titles that include an opus number, like a musical composition would. On his website, Lang describes the folding diagrams for each of these compositions as “…serving the same purpose that a musical score does: it provides a guide to the performer (in origami, the folder) while allowing the performer to express his or her own personality through interpretation and variation”. There is a parallel here with LeWitt’s practice of providing instructions for the production of his wall drawings and accepting the idiosyncrasies of the execution of those instructions by different hands. I’m not arguing that we should think of Robert J. Lang as a conceptual artist, but it is worth considering the ways in which some of Lang’s instructions, like those pictured here wouldn’t seem out of place in LeWitt’s body of work.