When everyone went back home for a relaxing break or headed south to embrace the sunshine and sea breeze, I had to stay in my apartment to work on my thesis. One thing that I was excited about on this empty and snowy campus during the break, however, was the installation of The Crown in the Institute for the Humanities Gallery.

Although I have seen pictures of people standing under the paper crowns in the Harare show and imagined tripling the scale of the installation, I was still surprised to see so many crowns in the IH gallery on Thursday morning. They piled on the tables and the floor, along with four giant ladders occupying the room corners, leaving barely enough space for us to walk through. 

Our task was to hang the crowns up. There was a diagonal structure suspended from the ceiling, and we had to string the crowns up. After a few experiments, we decided on the ideal length for the strings to make the crowns about seven feet above the floor. Jaclyn and I started to cut the strings into four-inch ones. We could hardly keep pace with the speed of Shani, Amanda, and two other girls stringing and stapling the crowns to the structure. The morning passed by quickly as we strove to hurry up.

After I came back from an interview in the afternoon, a rough shape of the installation had already emerged. The black crowns seemed glossier against the greens walls when hung up. My job for the rest of the day was to string the crowns. I was excited about finally being able to handle the crowns. To avoid leaving my fingerprints on the reflective surface, I had to wear gloves, which were also handy to wipe the dust off the crowns. Different from what Shani told us in class, there were actually more than six types of them.

The installation was only halfway done when I left the gallery, so I am curious just like all of you and cannot wait to see the final installation during its opening reception next Thursday!

Yiyi Chen, Art History/Economics, AAS458