National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Reopening Advertising Campaign & Building Signage

Over nearly 10 years, we have done a lot of different things for the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Most often, we develop exhibition advertising campaigns for special exhibitions. These are often very serious in keeping with the artistic substance of the exhibition being advertised.

Our brief this time, for the reopening advertising campaign, was to celebrate the art and the newly renovated building. The key word is celebrate, which the campaign does as it highlights both the collection and the historic triangular building.

The reopening after a top-to-bottom renovation is getting a lot of good press and that’s well deserved. The building is also looking better than ever, and the new interiors are more spacious and thoughtful thanks to the hard work of Vicky Vaccario Architects and her team, who were a pleasure to collaborate with. As part of that effort, Tronvig designed all the signage: new ground-level building identification signage, new oversized exhibition signage along New York Avenue, static and digital way-finding throughout the building, as well as new digital donor recognition signage.

The advertising campaign lent itself to animation so we have these running on the Metro and on social with a fun original score by our own Joyce Kwon. Putting all this together and rolling it out smoothly with no added stress to the client was a huge team effort.

Thanks to Esmee Lim for the winning concept tossed out at the last minute of the design phase and winning the day. Thanks to Anne Mieth for getting it all worked through and fully realized both on the advertising and the building signage fronts of the project. And thanks to Mark Davis for following through all the complexities of overhauling all the museum’s signage systems. Finally a special acknowledgement for Monica Carinio and the crew at DCW Media for all the planning and spreadsheets that resulted in a worry-free deployment of the campaign.

For more on the reopening, check out the press coverage, which includes: Vanity Fair, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, ArtNet, NPR, DCist, Washington City Paper, and the White House. Or watch a CBS Sunday Morning segment on the reopening below.