Portraits of People on the Move- Gallery Prints

While the one main part of the Portraits of People on the Move project was the book of life stories, the other half was 14 large panels that were hung in the gallery space at Crane Arts. At 58 by 34 inches, these were easily the largest prints I’ve ever put together. While making these panels was not as involved as creating the Portraits of People on the Move book (a lot of the work was just creating the template), they had to be much more exact because they were so large. Jennifer put a lot of time into spell checking and editing the stories while I worked on the layouts.

One of our hardest struggles with making these panels was picking which 14 stories out of the 52 to be shortened, enlarged, and put on the gallery wall. I think in the end we did a really good job of picking 14 that were interesting and also very varied in location/age/occupation. Going into the picking process we knew we wanted to use Adrian and Maria’s stories because they were two dancers in the Supper, People on the Move performance. We also wanted to have at least three artists in the gallery (we ended up using a sculptor, painter and animator). In order to fit as many stories as possible, we decided it would be cool to use one of the families that was interviewed and combine them onto one panel. We put the husband and wife on one and their three daughters on the other, fitting five stories instead of only two. This was great because we fit more content into the gallery, but it created a bit of a challenge for me. I had an interesting time fitting the three stories onto one panel along with the daughters' names and where they were from, but in the end it was totally worth it.