Hello all,

We have hung an art exhibition salon-style with works grouped about 6" apart.  The works are on the walls about 2' up from the floor at their lowest point and reach up to just over 11' high at their peak.  We have standard 25 degree E-26 base PAR38 floodlights in our light tracks, which are about 14' up from the floor.  The lights are set back about 16' from the wall in the tracks so that they flood the walls evenly with light from the lowest to highest point, with as many fixtures as needed to evenly cover the spread down the width of the wall.

The issue we have is that many of the paintings have a glossy varnish on them and there are problems with glare on the works that are up highest.  The lights are only a few feet higher than those works.  The angles make it so that you can see all the works from one position or another in the gallery but in some spots the glare completely obscures the work.  This can be fixed if you just look at the work from another location and different angle (by walking a few feet in most cases) but quite a few people are complaining about the "crappy lighting."

I curate and light the exhibitions but am not a lighting expert--having only "picked up" what I know from experience.  This was a new problem and the best solution I could come up with for what we have in fixtures, bulbs (we have no deflectors of any kind) and other parameters.

If there are lighting specialists out there who could suggest anything I'd love to hear what might work better.  We've also exhausted many of our fixtures so I don't have the room to add many more if that's the suggestion.  I'm especially wondering if there is any way around having to grapple with some sort of glare because of that max height of the artworks being just a few feet below our light-tracks.

Thanks and any advice is appreciated.

Jodi Lundgren
Coordinator / Curator of Exhibitions
South Dakota Art Museum

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