Animation as Art:
The Installation

The institution collaborates with Texas Tech researchers along with regional and national communities to showcase exciting and engaging exhibitions. An important collaborative partner is the University's School of Arts.
The Museum has hosted many exhibitions that include moving-image arts and audiovisual elements. Still, Animation as Art: A Multi-Sensory Experience was the first exhibition devoted to a specific time-based moving image art form. The exhibition was accompanied by a strong community outreach program consisting of lectures, hands-on demonstrations, and workshops by renowned national and international practitioners and specialists in animation studies.
An exhibition thematically devoted to exploring time-based media presented many challenges because of its nature, focus, and intent. Animation as Art offered a variety of completed works, as well as objects illustrating artists' processes and showcased examples of multimedia, interactive, and stationary objects. Exhibiting pre-production materials allowed the public to better understand how animators create cinematic illusions of movement out of phenomenal objects thereby problematizing their perception of reality. Moreover, this approach illuminated the craft and fine art base of animation as an art form.
The installation aimed to maximize visitors' experience to generate an appreciation of animation as an art form, its evolution, and its processes. The use of backlit devices (6 monitors and 12 mini tablets) with excellent image-resolution display and a wide color gamut allowed good quality screening conditions without the dimming of the gallery lights. In this way, the animations did not compete with the objects on display. There were also several interactive works alongside 2D and 3D works displayed within 18 showcases of different sizes.

Four projectors were used for the installations (Robertson,Hosea), and the projection mapping projects (García Moreno, Meador).
A selection of facsimiles of pre-cinema optical devices on display upon entry into the Museum's Main Gallery enticed the visitors towards the featured exhibition. It consisted of four showcases containing 19th century predecessors of contemporary animation technology such as thaumatropes, phenakistiscopes, zoetropes, praxinoscopes, and magic lanterns as well as examples of their 20th-century offspring, phonotropes, and magic viewers.
On display from this sightline were models of dinosaurs, historical objects, and 2D artworks. From this vantage point, visitors could see contemporary works inspired by pre-cinematic devices (Veras-Devadder; Veras) displayed at the entrance to the exhibition. Horne's installation piece, which included a series of laser-cut images hanging from the ceiling above the main introductory wall text, was at the center of the installation. To the left of the entrance were several works that highlighted the materiality of the pro-filmic artifacts and materials. Bansal's work was both patently physical and immaterial as it configuration changed with each visitor's interaction.
Other animators worked with found objects and materials (Álvarez Sarrat, Koning, Leeper, Rivkin) or created their props (Everest, Leeper, Torre).
Woloshen's display made visually palpable his method of working directly on film. Culminating this series, Lee's work consisted of the transformation of painted images into animations through QR codes.
Also on display were two works inspired by insects from the Museum's collection (Mudassani, Dolphin). The lateral entrance allowed the public to access the exhibit Tiny and Mighty Creatures where examples of these specimens were on display. Location was important in the works of García Moreno and Meador as examples of the dematerialization and resignification of landmark buildings through projection mapping. The animations by Rivkin, Soulikias, Del Rosario, and Schlittler evoked particular places through memory and poetic intervention. Mahoney's work was inspired by the exhibition's location, whereas Hosea's incited reflection on the most primal interaction between human beings and the ground that supports them.
Works around the exhibition's middle axis entailed animators' reflection on emotional suffering (Reeves), maternity and care (McGowan), social trauma (Cogua), and the experience of being in the world (Robertson). Leaving the exhibition through its main entrance, visitors could again enjoy works inspired in 19th century optical devices (Leeper, Veras). In the Main Gallery, visitors encountered another example of projection mapping art (Meador) paired with photographs of the work by García Moreno.