The art of the exhibition

PROVO — Paul Anderson is a bookish, pleasant-looking fellow — average height and build, thinning hair, almost frowzy in an intellectual way, with glasses.

But don't be fooled by his appearance. Anderson is the Clark Kent of Utah museum-exhibition designers, and during a recent interview at Brigham Young University's Museum of Art, he allowed the Deseret Morning News a peek at his cape.

"Ever since I was really young I wanted to be an architect," Anderson said. So much so that after earning a bachelor's degree (with honors) from Stanford in 1968, he went on to secure a master's degree in architecture from Princeton in 1972 and began working in an architectural firm in Pasadena, Calif. By 1976 he was a licensed architect.

"I came to Utah in 1973 on a fellowship with the LDS Church Historical Department to study Mormon architecture from a historical point of view." After completing his project, he went back to California for a year, then returned to Utah to stay. In 1976 the Church Historical Department gave Anderson a full-time position working on the restoration of historic buildings.

"Later," said Anderson, "when the new Museum of Church History and Art (of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) was announced, I moved into helping Florence Jacobsen with the planning of the building, and then designing its exhibitions."

For the next 10 years, Anderson spent most of his time designing exhibition spaces through which inquisitive people wandered as they discovered and rediscovered church history.

"When the Brigham Young University Museum of Art at BYU was under construction, its founding director, James Mason, gave me the opportunity to come here and help launch another wonderful museum." Anderson's been the head of design at the museum since 1992. His responsibilities include general direction of design, fabrication and installation of exhibitions, space planning and graphic design.

A man of many interests, Anderson is a big fan of education; he makes certain the MOA marries design and education extremely well. "You try to make a beautiful setting for art and artifacts, but you also try to make them mean something, make them understandable to people, dramatic and fun to see."

"Paul," said Christine Howard, until recently the manager of marketing and public relations at the museum, "has the unique talent to make what may seem like a very ordinary, or uninteresting object, appear to be the most incredible thing you've seen. It all comes back to his ability to incorporate the past, the history of an object or work of art, to the present day."