The Cave: Education Pavilion & Orientation Theater

The designers and the socially-inventive museum reached out to curators, made numerous visits to Art Basel, and sought out frequent collaborators to aid in their research of artists, whose voices became integral to Young At Art’s collaborative design process. Tracey Dear, a musician, artist with light, and frequent collaborator of the designers was soon commissioned as the Cave Artist. Meetings at the artist’s studio and former museum location included the designers, the museum director and staff, from education to facilities management. Conversations ranged from modern mark-making to child-appropriateness and from safety to forming beauty and relevance. Questions such as: “what would a child learn in the cave?” and “when you were a child, what were the first marks you made?” shaped the project. Due to the complexity of the structure and the openness necessitated by security, a full-size mock-up was created. The artist, design team, fabrication team, and museum staff participated in reviewing the cave experience. Multiple meetings with the entire team structured the timeline of imagery and accompanying soundtrack, while solving copyright issues. The clarity of experience at the cave is a result of a participatory process, one in which dreams and aspirations alongside museum goals became design informants.