What’s the best way to get people through the door to view an exhibition? Is it a good ploy to intrigue your potential audience with a mysterious flyer? Should you plead and implore, shout, order, amuse, coax or just sell it straight? Engaging with a potential audience is a skill and an art form, and it’s the topic under consideration by David Senior in his book Please Come to the Show, out now from publisher Occasional Papers.
Senior, who is bibliographer at the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, has selected a wide range of exhibition-related ephemera – invitations, flyers and posters – from the 1960s to the present. In the book he considers these first points of contact with the audience as an historically overlooked but integral aspect of exhibitions, and the collection, reproduced in full-colour, is an interesting point of reference for graphic designers, curators, and anyone involved in event management. There are also new essays by Gustavo Grandal Montero, Will Holder, Antony Hudek, Angie Keefer, Clive Phillpot, Suzanne Stanton and Senior himself. The book is available to order direct from the publisher.
