Project Description

NEW MUSEUM
LIGHTING FOR 5TH FLOOR ROTATING GALLERY
NEW YORK, NY | 2017

“Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a leading destination for new art and new ideas. It is Manhattan’s only dedicated contemporary art museum and is respected internationally for it’s adventurousness and global scope of it’s curatorial program” (from the New Museum website, 2019)

The Fifth Floor of the New Museum houses the institution’s rotating gallery, education center, with classroom spaces, a Resource Center, a space for the institution’s revolutionary Museum As Hub intra-institutional outreach program, and a video editing room. Dwaal Lighting Design specified a new set of dynamic, wireless and tuneable LED art-gallery lights for the rotating gallery space. The gallery features new and eclectic artists and requires an extremely flexible system to accommodate the many types of possible installations in the space. The LED lights selected for the space are exceptionally powerful, tunable, track lighting fixture that are also programmable and can be easily modified by the artists or curators.

The first artist to exhibit work using the new lighting was Anna Craycroft, with her show ‘Motion into Being‘. About the show: “Craycroft’s residency includes an exhibition and public programming considering the rights and ethics of personhood. Questions of who and what qualifies as a person have become increasingly contentious as the agency of all beings—from nonhuman animals to corporations, and from ecosystems to artificial intelligence—has fractured legal and theoretical discourse. To chronicle these controversies, Craycroft has transformed the Fifth Floor Gallery into a site for producing an animated film, which she will develop over the course of the exhibition; visitors physically enter the stage where Craycroft shoots new footage every week for the duration of the residency. Drawing on traditions of folklore and fables, which often use anthropomorphism to narrate moral tales, the animated film confronts the physical and philosophical lenses used to construct and qualify personhood.” (from the New Museum website, 2019).

Anna Craycroft: Motion into Being”, 2018. Exhibition View: New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/ EPW Studio taken from New Museum Website

Anna Craycroft: Motion into Being”, 2018. Exhibition View: New Museum, New York. Photo: Kate Sweater