Isometric Studio

Ethiopia at the Crossroads

Ethiopia at the Crossroads

Visual IdentityExhibition, Architecture

 

Exhibition architecture and graphic design for a wide-ranging presentation of Ethiopian art and culture

A contemporary lens on Ethiopian culture

Isometric designed a monumental exhibition for Toledo Museum of Art’s iconic presentation of Ethiopia’s artistic traditions from their origins to the present day. Presented across three galleries and 8,765 sq. ft., the 225 historic and contemporary works span 1,750 years and tell the story of an uncolonized African nation that was the crossroads of the world’s major religions and cultures. The exhibition architecture draws inspiration from the monolithic forms of the churches of Lalibela, carved from red volcanic tuff. The exhibition visual identity similarly abstracts the Ge‘ez script to form a custom typeface, giving a visual voice to the story of the artifacts in the show. Together, they create a public forum within the gallery, a place of gathering and collective learning for museum audiences.

Making history legible

We worked closely with Sophie Ong, the Toledo presentation’s curator, to help create a visitor pathway that felt intuitive and inspiring. After seeing the same artifacts displayed at Walters Art Museum and Peabody Essex Museum, Ong holistically reorganized the objects into thematic sections, and the exhibition design further made this sequence accessible and legible for audiences with diverse backgrounds. The custom title typography—based on the Ethiopian Ge’ez script—creates moments of entry for the audience into various parts of the story. It also activates the full height of the monumental gallery walls in the form of quotations above eye level.

Constructing context for exhibition artifacts

The exhibition architecture evokes the weight and volume of the historic rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia, and reddish-brown clay color provides a visual context that surrounds and honors the artifacts and their place of origin. We took the elevation of a traditional arch and abstracted it into the gallery floorpan, with walls rising tall to be in harmony with the gallery's scale. Large-scale openings, both regular and whimsical, punctuate this extruded form, creating visual connections between the works as well as many potential trajectories of flow through the exhibition.

Honoring the past, charting a future

Each section of the exhibition features contemporary artworks that substantiate, question, and speculate on the historic artifacts, adding depth to their stories. In addition, the curator invited the Brooklyn-based Ethiopian art collective Yatreda to create and present original works as artists in residence. Their featured work, House of Yatreda, draws from the iconic Queen of Sheba and presents slow-moving digital portraits of futuristic Ethiopian protagonists, dressed in royal garb. We worked with Yatreda to design a monumental, immersive, multi-sensory experience for this presentation.