When visiting an exhibition, one usually just contemplates the artwork, but what about how it got there? Art exhibitions take an entire team to execute, and here at the Hilliard, our curator, collections manager, curator of education, and preparator all work together to make that happen.

After all of the planning, research, artwork selections, and shipping happens, the exhibition gets handed over to the exhibition team for installation. Exhibition installation is often intense and fast-paced and can be physically demanding with lots of lifting, bending, and climbing ladders. One of the demands of artwork installation most visitors do not know about is math!

Every piece of art that is hung on a wall gets its own personal equation. You might be wondering why artwork needs to be complicated with mathematical equations in the first place but hear me out. In most museums and galleries, it is standard to hang art at a 60” midline from the floor. This means that the middle of the artwork hangs at 60” which is the average person’s eye level. Some institutions opt for a slightly lower midline around 57”, and this height rule is sometimes broken for extremely large works.

Now the equation for hanging artwork at the optimum height goes like this: first, measure your artwork from top to bottom. This includes the frame it is in. Divide that number in half and add to 60.

Then, measure how far your hanging mechanism is from the top of your artwork. If you’re using a wire, you would pull up on the wire a bit to stimulate it hanging and measure how far it is from the top of your art. Likewise, d rings would be measured from the top of the ring to the top of the painting. The resulting measurement is where you should place your hanging device on the wall. While hanging artwork is just one small part of what happens during exhibition installations, knowing how the art got on the wall can make your museum visit a little more interesting.