Changing Course: Trinity Goes Online

ROBERT RECK

Changing Course

Trinity: An Exhibition Premiers Online

IT IS FITTING THAT an exhibition about a world-changing event should open amid an unprecedented global pandemic.

For the past several years, curators Joe Traugott and Josie Lopez and the exhibitions team at the Albuquerque Museum have been preparing for Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb. These artworks illuminate artists’ responses to the detonation of the first nuclear weapon at the Trinity site near Alamogordo.

Enter COVID-19, and the Albuquerque Museum had to change course. Now, Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb is groundbreaking not just in its treatment of this subject matter, but also as the first online-only exhibition in the Museum’s history. It displays more than 50 artists’ responses to nuclear issues and the detonation at Trinity on July 16, 1945, and marks the 75th anniversary. More than 50 artists are represented, including Tom Joyce, Will Wilson, Nicola López, Emil Bisttram, Karsten Creightney, Elaine DeKooning, Leigh Anne Langwell Jack Garver, Raymond Jonson, Bea Mandelman, Enrique Montenegro, Patrick Nagatani, Bruce Nauman, Anne Noggle, Horace Towner Pierce, Tony Price, Meridel Rubenstein, and Hideo Sakata.

Since its closure in mid-March, the Albuquerque Museum has been rethinking how to present this exhibition, originally curated for a physical gallery space. This required research and a team effort building on the strengths of the Museum and City of Albuquerque staff. The team included Curators Lopez and Traugott, Assistant to the Curator Lacey Chrisco, who managed the Herculean task of finding images of 300 objects and gathering usage permissions; the marketing and coordination skills of Foundation Communications Director Denise Crouse to organize the flow of the website, the graphic design

Left: Image composite featuring Meridel Rubenstein, The Meeting,1993, palladium prints, glass, steel, video,each steel grid frame: 79 x 122 ¼ x 2 in. Lent by the Tia Foundation, © 2020 Meridel Rubenstein. Above: Eve Andree Laramée, Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions, installation as exhibited at MASSMoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.

Right: Yukiyo Kawano, Fat Man folded (The 1945 Oregonian) Floating Lanterns, 2019 newspaper, kakisibu-dye, adhesive, bamboo grass, wire, fabric (polyester), Polyethylene rod, nylon rope, 10 x 5 x 5 ft. (Fat Man) lent by the artist, © 2020 Yukiyo Kawano.

skills of Robin Hesse to build “wayfinding” online graphics, and Stephen Hutchins, curator of exhibitions, who developed a digital walk-through based on the how the exhibition was conceived in the original gallery space. The City of Albuquerque Department of Technology and Innovation developed the website that housed it all.

The challenge was to put the exhibition online in a way that would honor the original concept but take advantage of the space and interactive possibilities of the internet. “The online version of the project provides an opportunity to present this exhibition to wider national and international audiences,” says Curator of Art Josie Lopez.

The team researched other museums’ internet-based exhibitions but chose to develop its own take on the online experience. Although they had more space to work with in a virtual setting, Lopez says they stuck to the original image list. “This project was conceived entirely as a physical exhibition. It’s different to work outside of constraints of exhibition costs like shipping and limited physical space; it becomes a different kind of project. Still, we’re sticking to objects and content conceived for the original exhibition.”

Determined to honor the artists’ and curators’ vision, the Museum chose to offer an experience that would combine educational resources, interactive walk-throughs, and more details on the objects themselves. “The city is hosting it on its powerful platform, and we will be able to share all the academic and scholarly content, as well as share the images in a way that people can get in close and see the details,” says Communications Director Denise Crouse.

ON VIEW ONLINE

CABQ.GOV/TRINITY Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb

While the curators chose not to add object images to the exhibition, some artworks can now be shown in their entirety. Eve Laramée’s Apparatus, for example, is an enormous and complex installation of which only a small piece could be shown in the gallery. The installation resembles a vast biochemical laboratory, made of hand-blown glass, snippets of etched text, and various colors of solutions and wires attached to flowers. “Now we can show what the artist’s original installation had intended,” Lopez says.

Crouse notes that while online exhibitions will never replace the in-person Museum experience, Trinity has the potential to reach many more people online than it would have in the gallery. “We’re excited to share this with our community, the state, and to the world.”