Project brief: Located on the second floor of the new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, “Dreams of Freedom” is an installation that focuses on the numerous factors that combined to motivate one quarter of Europe’s Jewish population to immigrate to America at the turn of the century. The major method through which these decisions were made and discussed among families was mailed letters, a poetic interpretation of which provides the content for this installation.

Approach: “Dreams of Freedom” uses a signature projection system that blends projected imagery with physical sculpture. Instead of a flat projection screen, the surface that receives the projection is a custom-fabricated white, Corian, 18-foot-long, 3-dimensional sculpture. This never-before-seen approach offers the unusual opportunity to mix the undulations of the physical form with projected illumination.

We worked with the museum’s curatorial team to review hundreds of archival letters, then interpreted the letters’ content into a series of five films based on historical accounts, and used the actual aged and curved letter forms as the basis for the sculpture’s model through iterative 3-D scanning and modeling.

For visitors watching, letters float and fall from the sky. The letters, which are read in English, Yiddish and Hebrew, relate what the new world will bring, describing the good and bad that await immigrants in America. Integrated into the media are small-stylized period animations of the scenes described. These were designed and animated from paper cutout postcards, drawings, old family photographs and imagined period landscapes.

Effectiveness: The main goal of this installation is to convey to visitors what people in Europe were dreaming of, imagining and sacrificing for. It shares people’s personal histories with the hope of engaging and educating visitors on the broader importance of the history of Jewish immigration to the United States.

Sculpture (made of paper?) story is projected on it. Creates a beautiful sense of space and motion. Dreamy, very evocative of topic and memory. Very unique way of telling a story.