Cover image by the author.
Unless you’re lucky enough to have your own personal art collection, you probably encounter art mainly through exhibitions in museums. While you might assume that these exhibitions are just neutral vehicles for presenting art, that’s not at all the case. In reality, each one has its own point of view that influences how you perceive the artworks within it. However, museum exhibitions as a whole usually fit into a few general categories according to their size, scope, and intentions.
Museum exhibition basics
Art museum exhibitions primarily belong to one of two very broad categories. Permanent collection exhibitions (sometimes called long-term installations) present works from the museum’s own collection. As such, they’re the majority of what’s on view at any given day. The word “permanent” is a bit misleading, though, since these installations do change over time – mainly through gradual changes though sometimes through massive overhauls. By contrast, special exhibitions generally last a few weeks to a few months and often include artworks loaned from elsewhere. Most of the ideas below apply to both categories, though special exhibitions tend to feature more innovative concepts than their longer-lasting counterparts.
Mini exhibitions
Let’s start small, because it only takes a single interesting piece of art to make an exhibition. Museums sometimes choose to highlight a singular artwork to order to celebrate a new acquisition, exciting loan, or particularly significant work from the collection. The curation is usually pretty simple, with a few text panels to explain major features and importance, but on occasion it can be quite complex and informative. (Here’s a good example.)
Other small-scale exhibitions juxtapose a few (about two to four) artworks that are often members of the same series, depictions of the same subject, or works by the same artist. The idea is usually to suggest connections and invite comparisons between them. Such comparative exhibitions often bring together related works from different museums around the world, making the short-term opportunity to see them all together a special occasion.
Single-artist exhibitions
Single-artist exhibitions (sometimes called solo shows) can feature anyone from obscure artists to blockbuster favorites. Solo exhibitions may aim to introduce an artist to a broader audience (potentially a career-maker if you’re an upcoming contemporary artist), explore themes within their life and work, display recent pieces by a living artist, or accompany new scholarship, among other possibilities.
A retrospective is a type of solo show that encapsulates the career of an historical or established living artist. It generally aims to include art from every period of the artist’s career in order to survey the themes, subjects, and styles the artist has used over time. Because of this broad scope, retrospectives can be large exhibitions.
Single-artist exhibitions are not always so comprehensive, however. In general, the more popular and prolific the artist, the more inventive curators get in finding new angles to explore. Some recent examples include Van Gogh’s Cypresses, which looked at a single motif that recurred throughout van Gogh’s career, and Fashioned by Sargent, which considered John Singer Sargent’s paintings through the lens of the clothing depicted within them.
Multi-artist exhibitions
Multi-artist exhibitions are almost certainly the majority of what you’ll see in museums. After all, most permanent collection installations contain works by many different artists, and group shows are popular for special exhibitions as well. Within this category, however, there is plenty of variety.
Contemporary
Contemporary group shows are often organized around one or more (sometimes fairly loose) themes, aiming to highlight the varied ways that artists have engaged with or responded to said themes in their work. Curators either select relevant artworks or invite artists to submit them for consideration. In a juried exhibition, a committee chooses which artworks will be included, but this behind-the-scenes detail doesn’t make much difference for the viewer.
Historical
Though also usually thematic, multi-artist exhibitions of historical art tend have more overt educational or scholarly viewpoints than their contemporary counterparts. For example, an exhibition might focus on a style’s development over time, suggest new ways of interpreting a motif, or use art to explain historical or cultural phenomena. Take these two special exhibitions at the Met as examples: Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 argued for Siena, Italy’s key role in the development of Renaissance painting, while Africa & Byzantium used artworks to demonstrate the close relationship between two geographical regions at a particular moment in time.
While the possibilities are nearly limitless, exhibitions usually feature artworks united by at least one common element. These can include time period, location, or culture of creation, style, techniques, materials, themes, subject matter, function, and type of object (such as fashion, manuscripts, or armor). In permanent collection exhibitions, time and place are almost always the main organizing principles, while other elements work as sub-themes within the whole. Museums can also use art to illustrate historical, political, religious, or cultural concepts; we see this a lot in archaeology museums and shows of ancient art.
That said, exhibitions don’t have to limit themselves to these categories; they can also select objects from varied background that nevertheless all relate to a shared theme or concept. The Brooklyn Museum’s Solid Gold exhibition is a great example of this, because it drew on all different cultures, eras, art forms, and traditions in its survey of gold throughout history. It’s also becoming more common to juxtapose historical and contemporary art within both short and long-term shows.
How to understand these exhibitions
If discovering the main types of art exhibitions makes you want to become a more sophisticated exhibition visitor, you should check out my book Be the Critic: Your Guide to Art Exhibitions. This article explained the most common forms of exhibitions, but Be the Critic teaches you to identify, explore, and even critique the major ideas within them. By taking you behind the scenes to see how art exhibitions actually work, the book will guide you towards a fuller understanding of exhibitions’ themes, messages, and narratives as they’re developed through objects, text, exhibition design, and more.
