Signage & Artistic Poster Installation Design for ‘Your Story Has Touched My Heart” Premier at Harvard Art Museum
Creative Direction & Design
Melissa Marshall
“Your Story Has Touched My Heart” was a video installation at the Lighbox Gallery at the Harvard Art Museum during May of 2016 by Sarah Newman & Matthew Battles of metaLAB (at) Harvard that explored the Harvard Art Museums’ remarkable American Professional Photographers Collection. The objects in this collection—nearly 20,000 negatives and prints—were carefully selected by sociologist and pioneering photo-historian Barbara Norfleet who collected them from small hometown photography studios across the US. “Your Story Has Touched My Heart” combines these photographs with new video footage, sound, and fragments of text from the collection’s captions, that put the work in dialogue with memory, individuality, ephemerality, and the meaning of visual abundance as these images find their way in the digital realm.
Gallery graphics and marketing pieces were designed and produced, as well as an artistic poster experience for the premier at Harvard Art Museum.
Poster Installation
Inspired by the notion of the collection itself being curated by Barbara Norfleet, I curated 500 unique images from frames of a three-minute 4k video shot during the making of this short film. These 500 frames became an edition of 500 unique posters for the exhibition. The audience was invited to quietly take a poster from the top of the pile while the rest remain. The title and edition #/500 lives quietly on the lower right corner of each poster.
No picking-and-choosing: In the gallery space, the posters were presented as a single stack of all 500 posters. Visitors were invited to take a poster but were asked to only remove the poster from the top of the stack.
