Raven and the Box of Daylight - Traveling Exhibition Ends Tour

After first debuting at the Museum of Glass in 2018 the Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight traveling exhibition has made its last museum stop at the Figge Art Museum.

This exhibition was organized by Preston Singletary and the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA. It was guest curated by Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD, and the multisensory visitor experience was designed by zoe | juniper.

As Singletary notes, "now that the Raven and The Box of Daylight has finished its traveling exhibition run I am grateful to everyone from the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, to Juniper Shuey and my main team at my Studio. To Fireart Studio in Portland, and all the glass makers and fabricators that helped me along with this show. 

I’m happy that it was seen and enjoyed by so many people across the country and I’m humbled and honored that so many museums agreed to host the show starting with the Museum of Glass, the Wichita Art Museum, Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, Chrysler Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, the Eiteljorg Museum, the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and lastly the Figge Art Museum. 

Walter Porter was my original inspiration to create such a show. We’d been working together for several years making presentations, and I was learning about his insights to the Tlingit mythologies. He had spent years analyzing the symbolism and metaphors within the story. We had just begun making plans when he died suddenly in 2013.

Soon after I wanted to find someone to work with to help curate the show and help me with the task of tying together all the knowledge that I’d gathered from Walter. Had I paid close enough attention? Was I retaining the knowledge? Walter didn’t write anything down. He was a traditional orator, and he held everyone’s attention just through speaking. I on the other hand need my objects to help illustrate what I’m thinking and seeing.

Miranda Belarde Lewis is a Tlingit colleague that I had only met briefly a couple of times. I reached out to her to see if she was interested in serving as curator for the show. To my good fortune she was very open to the idea and so we set about gathering more information from different versions of the story and working toward figuring out what pieces we needed to place the viewer inside the story.

Juniper Shuey also helped shape this vision. I wanted to create a video backdrop that would help transport the viewer into an Alaskan landscape. Each museum we worked with we’d have to redesign the show to create a similar experience".

Stay tuned as Preston Singletary announces what the next adventure for this special collection will be.