Treasure hunt

Over the weekend, I visited the Saint Louis Art Museum and saw their current exhibition by Yinka Shonibare MBE, Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play. Enough has been written about him, including this June 2009 piece in the New York Times, that I'm not going to try to review his work here. I liked the art, but I was equally interested in the format of the exhibition itself.

If you were paying attention when you entered the museum, you would have seen signage about the show going on, but unless you stopped to read it, you might not have been able to find the exhibition at all - it's an installation of Shonibare's headless mannequins dressed in Victorian costumes, placed in SLAM's period rooms:



And if you missed the exhibition information when you came in and were touring through the decorative arts section of the museum, it might have taken you a while to figure out the deal with the headless kids playing in the period rooms. Only one of the rooms, that I noticed, had a sign outside it mentioning the Shonibare exhibition.

I like that. It's obviously intentional - the museum's website describes the installation as "akin to a treasure hunt," and the visitor is encouraged to look for, or puzzle over, the "mischievous, playful children" hidden in the period rooms. I think there probably were a lot of baffled responses like the one I overheard from one visitor: "Well, there's another one of them things!" I like that this exhibition bends the rules about how museums present information to their visitors. There's no attempt to obscure anything, but neither is it very upfront about what you're seeing or why it's there. As you start to figure it out and, maybe, discover one of the brochures explaining the exhibition, you begin to understand the larger themes Shonibare is playing on - but it initially engages you by not directly telling you anything. I think that process of discovery would work well in other exhibitions as well.