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About Project

One of the world's great collections devoted to the African American experience — and a donor wall that stopped in 2007. The Charles H. Wright Museum recognised its supporters on four acrylic panels in the rotunda. They listed a single capital campaign, and that campaign had closed in June 2007.

Fourteen years of generosity had nowhere to appear, and adding one name meant reprinting a panel. The museum asked for recognition it could keep current itself. What it got does a great deal more than that.

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Recognition Challenges

In May 2021 the museum's Friends Committee asked for a donor display board. The brief was simple. The building was not.

Key challenges included:

  • Recognition frozen at a campaign that ended in 2007, with fourteen years of giving unacknowledged

  • A listed-quality interior of cast stone, brass handrails and period sconces that would not tolerate a generic screen

  • An ADA limit of four inches on protruding objects, in a corridor that doubles as an accessible ramp

  • A museum audience including school groups, so any glass surface had to survive contact

  • Ambition that grew mid-project, from a single display board to a six-screen video wall

Before & After

The new wall didn't replace the old panels. It claimed better ground — the ramp corridor outside the Robert L. Hurst Research Center and the Louise Lovett Wright Library, on the Chrysler Hall level, where every visitor passes on the way to the galleries.

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Legacy Campaign Donors, July 2002 to June 2007. Adding a name meant reprinting a panel.

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Six screens behind a brass-finished enclosure, installed June 2022.

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Our Solution

Six 49-inch commercial displays in portrait, side by side, forming a single surface twelve feet wide. A hand-finished aluminium enclosure in brass. The museum's name above it in illuminated push-out letters. Nothing about it reads as a screen bolted to a wall.

Two removable shields with passive airflow slots protect the screens without hiding them. The Wright hosts school groups daily. The wall is built to be touched.

Design was developed in partnership with IKON.

Four Inches

The corridor is an accessible ramp. That capped anything mounted on it at four inches of protrusion — and a video wall, its mounts, its media player and a protective shield do not fit in four inches.

That one number shaped the entire design. A 100-inch display was ruled out because of it. So was a two-by-three video wall. We drew and costed three ways through: recess the enclosure seven inches into the stone, add an ADA kick plate beneath it, or work to the line already set by the adjacent column, which stands further off the wall than the cabinet ever would.

The finished wall looks like it was always meant to be there. That is what the constraint bought.

What the Screens Carry

Ten tiers, from $1,000,000 and above down to $250 — so a gift of a few hundred dollars shares a wall with the City of Detroit. Between them run impact stories about the families the museum serves, and events carrying a QR code that lets a visitor register where they stand.

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story
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Donor List

“[We] looked at several vendors across the U.S. [...] OmniAlly [is] the best at what [they] do.”

Annivory Calvert

Director of Donor Stewardship

Office of the President & CEO

What Changed

Fourteen years, closed. Recognition caught up with every gift since 2007, and it stays current. A name goes up in minutes instead of waiting on a reprint.

The threshold dropped. From one capital campaign to ten tiers starting at $250, putting far more of the museum's supporters on the wall.

Recognition became a channel. Impact stories, event promotion, and a QR code that turns a passing visitor into a registration — in a corridor everyone walks.

Built for the building. From first conversation in May 2021 to installation in June 2022, through an ADA review and a brief that grew considerably along the way.