New York City Marathon Exhibit

This exhibition was a celebration of the community that comes together to run the New York City Marathon. The Museum of the City of New York in conjunction with the New York Roadrunners held an open photography competition and invited people to submit photos of the Marathon with the promise that the winning photographs would be featured in the exhibition.

The conceptual driver for the exhibition design solution was the idea that photographs represent a snapshot in time and place. Taking this idea to the extreme, we generated a design solution that consisted of a photo “cloud” that occupied the gallery and hovered over a full-bleed floor graphic of New York City. Each photograph was positioned on a frame above the map so that its position corresponded to where it was taken on the day of the marathon, effectively “drawing” the marathon course through the placement of images. Visitors experience the marathon through the photos in a manner similar to what the runners experience as they move through the city.

A series of bent aluminum tubes were created and mounted to hanging struts. The tubes allowed the photos to be cleated onto the structure at any location. This custom aluminum armature was designed to be both lightweight, stable, and to provide curators with the flexibility to move photos around and manipulate the densities within the cloud.

Project Details

Location: Museum of the City of New York
Design: Corey Yurkovich, William Watson, MGMT
Production: New Project
Photography: courtesy MCNY