Responses by YuJune Park and Caspar Lam, partners and cofounders, Synoptic Office.

Background: Emily Hall Tremaine and her husband, Burton G. Tremaine Sr., amassed one of the most important collections of 20th-century modern art. In particular, Emily cultivated relationships with artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns and was one of the few pioneering woman collectors in the last century. Many of the works she collected are now considered icons of the era, including Johns’s painting Three Flags and Piet Mondrian’s painting Victory Boogie-Woogie.

In the late 20th century, the collection was sold prior to Emily’s passing to start the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation’s support of living artists and other initiatives, and her papers were donated to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. This website is an interpretation of a digital museum that virtually reassembles this historic collection to tell the fascinating legacy of the Tremaines and their impact on the world of art and design. Although aimed at a general audience, the site has a staggering amount of information that would interest art historians and artists alike.

Design core: Central to the site are two main parts—the collection and the stories. We really wanted to push the boundaries of how art could be displayed online and adopted a virtual space to show the works of art. Flipping through when the artworks were acquired and transferred starts to reveal how the collection grew and how the Tremaines viewed these works.

The Tremaines championed many young artists, and their friendships with these artists are integrated in the site with a collection of personal letters to artists, photographs and other archival materials that are a part of the Emily Hall Tremaine Papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. We wanted to capture the physical sensation of discovering archival materials. These images were stacked in a scattered manner to let users feel like they themselves were rummaging through the archival boxes and discovering new things about the Tremaines.

Challenges: The sheer amount of material about the Tremaines is staggering. We spent more than a year finding ways to organize information the family had about the artworks and trying to put a lasso around all of the varied materials in the archives, which was really difficult. In the end, it was appropriate for the site to be a gateway—a starting point to let others explore the materials on their own. Strictly speaking, the site is not an authoritative collection but does capture a small moment of time in the Tremaines’ collecting activities and gives context about their lives from the people that knew them.

Special navigational features: The site is really story driven, and this appears in the main navigation that includes a timeline of the family, interviews with Emily and books related to her history. The collection has its own navigation for sorting and filtering. As more data about the collection is amassed, more powerful options can be added to expand how one moves through this incredible body of work.

Technology: We adopted a headless CMS approach to the site, with Sanity for the CMS and Next.js for the front end. We really wanted users to explore the artworks in three-dimensional space and pushed the boundaries of what was possible, using three.js for the collection portions of the site.