Ashley Bryan & Langston Hughes:
Sail Away
2022
The Morgan Library, New York City
Cultural (Completed)
1750 SF
Curator: Sal Robinson
Fabrication: South Side Design & Building
Photography: Janny Chiu © The Morgan Library & Museum, 2022.
Artwork © 2022 The Ashley Bryan Center. Used with Permission. All Rights Reserved.
An exhibition of prints and ephemera from artist Ashley Bryan’s illustrated children’s book Sail Away shown at the Morgan Library and Museum.
2022
The Morgan Library, New York City
Cultural (Completed)
1750 SF
Curator: Sal Robinson
Fabrication: South Side Design & Building
Photography: Janny Chiu © The Morgan Library & Museum, 2022.
Artwork © 2022 The Ashley Bryan Center. Used with Permission. All Rights Reserved.
An exhibition of prints and ephemera from artist Ashley Bryan’s illustrated children’s book Sail Away shown at the Morgan Library and Museum.
The book illustrated poems by Langston Hughes with vibrant cut-paper collages all depicting scenes of maritime life and watery landscapes—a long-time passion of Bryan’s. Here, the original collages were shown alongside paintings, prints, photographs, recordings and the artist’s unforgettable puppets made of materials and objects collected from the beach.
After looking at the collages, we were struck by the geometries of the cut-outs, which are both polygonal and curved, aquatic and sharp, fragmentary and curvilinear. Tracing over the lines and shapes we centered the exhibition on a single wall—curved on one side and flat on the other, that divides the space into two smaller galleries with different characters. We drew from Sail Away’s inimitable color palette to highlight key moments in the gallery that would reflect and reverberate across its otherwise white surfaces.
After looking at the collages, we were struck by the geometries of the cut-outs, which are both polygonal and curved, aquatic and sharp, fragmentary and curvilinear. Tracing over the lines and shapes we centered the exhibition on a single wall—curved on one side and flat on the other, that divides the space into two smaller galleries with different characters. We drew from Sail Away’s inimitable color palette to highlight key moments in the gallery that would reflect and reverberate across its otherwise white surfaces.