What does it take to truly immerse viewers in the life and art of French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir? Well, if you’re the Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L) in Manhattan, KS, in partnership with the global technology solutions provider Diversified, it takes 108 ceiling-mounted Epson projectors spanning approximately 37,000 linear square feet to produce about 188 million pixels of animated imagery. And that imagery is managed by the largest-ever U.S. deployment of Modulo Pi media server systems and bolstered by Meyer Sound immersive audio technology.
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Running through Aug. 31, "Renoir: A Luminous Evolution" guides visitors on an engaging journey through Renoir's life and art. It features digital images of some of his beloved works, as well as family photos and films, to help tell the story. The purpose of the Renoir immersive exhibition, which covers the walls and floors of the museum’s Mezmereyz display space, is to transport the viewers through the life and times of Renoir—not just his art, but the world in which he lived.
“You're seeing the story as if you are Renoir,” said Erin Dragotto, executive director, MoA+L. “This is why we have period film footage of Parisians moving in and around Paris, and why you travel with Renoir to Algiers and many other places through his paintings. What makes this exhibition different is that we’re not just putting oversized pictures on a wall. We’re telling an immersive story, one that gravitates you to the emotion and history of the time, and to the painter himself.”
Physically, "Renoir: A Luminous Evolution" covers about 25% of the MoA+L’s total exhibit space. “You have the first room, which we call the Cove, that is very cathedralesque, 38 feet high and 3,500 square feet in area,” explained Sydney Bouhaniche, creative director, MoA+L. “It is styled like an old Parisian apartment with lots of Renoir’s art on display. Then you go through a corridor with light boxes on either side with historical information about Renoir and his painterly cohorts plotted on a timeline. Adjacent to that is another room fondly known to museum staff as the "Sears Building," a retrofitted Sears and Roebuck appliance store. This space has over 18,000 square feet of projection area. This is where we start the storytelling beginning in Paris, to immerse the viewers in Renoir’s life and his world.”
Creating a seamless immersive AV world was not easy for Diversified’s AV design and installation team. “Unlike a corporate environment where equipment cabling and everything can be concealed, it's a public venue,” said Peter Jankovich, project engineer, Diversified. “So, a lot of things had to be taken into consideration, especially because aesthetics were paramount to them. Addressing this required really meticulous cable management, plus extensive planning and coordination with the construction team that went on for a number of months. We had to utilize special custom pathways so that all this would kind of blend in seamlessly with the building's architecture.”
Adding to the complications, “The 'Sears Building’ plans we had for this space were from the 1950s and outdated,” Jankovich recalled. “This included an 8-inch discrepancy between the room’s dimensions and its actual wall locations, which forced us to adjust the projectors’ ceiling placements to ensure precisely focused images.”
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Diversified managed to address these and other challenges in time for the exhibition’s opening on Nov. 8. Since then, the show has been well-received, welcoming more than 5,000 visitors. "The response has been amazing, actually," said Dragotto. “So many people have said things like, ‘I can't believe I'm in Manhattan, Kansas. I feel like I'm in Manhattan, New York.’”
