Museum of Broadway, New York

Showboat is a permanent installation at the Museum of Broadway, New York. I worked with artist Rachel Marks to bring her vision to life using original pages from the showboat book. The installation recreates a scene from the famous musical and uses costumes from the original play, AR and informative frames to provide information about the show in a fun and interactive way.

Project Overview

The Museum of Broadway has teamed up with internationally renowned artists, designers, and theatre historians to create an interactive experience that highlights groundbreaking moments in Broadway’s history - the moments that pushed creative boundaries, challenged social norms, and paved the way for those who would follow.

I worked with Rachel Marks, an American artist and dancer living and working in Paris. Her work investigates the relationship between nature and humanity. Her practice explores how trees thrive together within the forest community primarily through site specific large scale installation and performance, as well as sculpture, painting and drawing.  Her materials consist mostly of abandoned books and paper, metamorphosing back to their natural source.  Her goal as an artist is to bring public awareness to nature’s complexity and beauty to promote preservation.

For the museum, I worked with a team on a permanent installation which recreates a scene from the famous musical Showboat, using the book pages from the original book. The installation is informative and interactive, using AR in a beautifully curated environment to educate the viewers about the show. We are conceptualised and implemented creative strategies for the making process of the installation, whilst also troubleshooting the obstacles that come in the way.

My role

Since the installation required a lot of hands on work, I went in everyday of the week to make sure that the installation would be complete in the short time frame of 3 weeks. In this time, I put up the pages on the wall to make the wall paper, made small tree rings by quilling thin sheets of paper, made waves out of wire and paper, created waves on the floor using foam boards, and also trained the volunteers coming in to be able to complete the daily goal.

A few of my suggestions played a crucial role in completing the installation on time:

• Staining the pages with coffee by suspending them with clips on strings tied across the room so that we could maximise the space and stain more pages at once.
• Applying glue on the walls and sticking the pages instead of applying glue on each of the sheets.
• Categorising the pages that were to be stuck on the walls so that we did not waste time figuring out where to place each page.

Rachel mentioned that these contributions cut the work time by at least 75% and were one of the reasons she was able to catch her flight to Paris on the day she planned to leave.

Process images