Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
Start at the bottom, in the center, and work up and out. Don’t center the biggest piece of art.
“I love trying to find pieces that dialogue — either in terms of textures, in terms of colors, in terms of what is represented — so that they feel connected with each other,” says Anne-Laure Lemaitre, an art adviser who has recently curated shows at Swivel Gallery and Kapp Kapp in New York. “You can have an abstract piece that is super-textured and a very precise drawing, but they both have something that connects them, like green and orange tones.” Or two portraits might be very different in feel, yet “they kind of talk to each other.”
But if you mix all types of media, like painting, photography or sculpture, or all types of framing, there’s a risk that the group can look a little confusing and be “a little rough on the eye,” Lemaitre says. She suggests trying a group of all black-and-white artworks or of pieces that are body-centric, that include, for example, a hand or profile.
After choosing the pieces you want to hang, shuffle them around on the floor until you like a composition. Start at the bottom, in the center, and work up and out. Don’t center the biggest piece of art. “It can create a massive focal point and everything else becomes almost peripheral,” Lemaitre says. One way to organize a cluster is by keeping the spacing between pieces consistent; another is to line up the tops, bottoms or sides of several pieces.
Once you’ve settled on an arrangement that you like, cut out pieces of brown paper that match the sizes of the things you want to hang and tape them to the wall. This, Lemaitre says, lets you “get a feel for the pieces” — that is, check the layout before you put them up.
If your space is limited and the cluster includes a wall-mounted television, make sure it is not at the center. “It can really participate in the hang, and not be a disservice to the hang, as long as it’s included in a way that doesn’t crush everything around it,” Lemaitre says. Ultimately, though, what you display, and how, depends on your own personal feeling, she says. “It’s a little bit like composing a painting and should be seen as one artwork made of multiple works.”
Photo: Alexander Laurent Rubalcava
Anne-Laure Lemaitre is a curator, writer, and producer based in New York, Paris, and the Nova Scotia wilderness. Her practice begins by questioning a territory: its physical and emotional dimensions, its history, its context, its belonging, before turning to the art it calls for. This orientation has shaped a body of work spanning the most experimental corners of the emerging art world and leading corporations and public institutions.
Many artists she has worked with early in their careers have since gone on to significant critical and market recognition. Those relationships rarely end with the exhibition. For several, she remains a resource: someone to think with, exchange with, workshop with.
For nearly twenty years, she has worked across scales and contexts: from intimate solo exhibitions at artist-run spaces to permanent public commissions, from single-artist career conversations to cultural programs spanning five continents. Her practice is built around the specific rather than the repeatable, treating the space, the institution, the sidewalk, and the online environment each as curatorial material in its own right.
Lemaitre writes regularly about art for catalogues, publications, and for herself. Her writing, whether commissioned or not, tends toward the felt rather than the prescribed: a belief that how we speak about a practice, and what it does to us, shapes how it is seen and received.
Intentional art programs · Site-specific commissions
Curatorial strategy · International practice
Art In Context is a curatorial production practice whose work ranges from international public commissions, corporate collections and multi-venue cultural strategies to ongoing collaborations with artists, brands and cultural institutions.
Every project begins with the same questions: what does this place need, what story belongs here, and who should tell it. That orientation shapes everything from artist selection and fabrication to the logic of how a program holds together in one location or across multiple sites.
Drawing on nearly twenty years of work, Art In Context has built the infrastructure to operate anywhere and at any scale. An extensive network of creative partners allows it to move from a single commission to a coordinated program spanning dozens of sites without losing the specificity that makes a project land. Art In Context works worldwide.