Nick Adam

Exhibition Design for Poetry Foundation’s Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home

Design Studio

Span

Client

Poetry Foundation

Community

Cultural, Civic

Services

Branding, Environmental Signage, Exhibition Design, Print

Credits

Nick Adam
Design Direction

Kevin Moreland
Design

Project Partners

Poetry Foundation
Fred Sasaki & Katherine Litwin
Curatorial Team

Constance Jaeggi
Photographic Artist

Angelina Sáenz & ire’ne lara silva
Poets

Diamond Clay,
Navy Pier Print and Installation

A choreography of identity, history, and design. Escaramuza: The Poetics of Home is a collaborative exhibition between photographic artist Constance Jaeggi, poet Angelina Sáenz, and Texas Poet Laureate ire’ne lara silva. Their work explores identity, ancestry, and resistance through contemporary Mexican American women’s equestrian performance and, by extension, the historical soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution.

For its first-ever satellite exhibition, the Poetry Foundation invited Nick Adam’s team at Span to design a public installation that did not merely frame the work, but extended its meaning—transforming space into a living composition of movement, memory, and cultural identity. Working closely with Creative Director Fred Sasaki and Jaeggi, Span explored how photographic sequencing, spatial composition and rhythm could embody the precision and grace of Escaramuza itself.

Escaramuza—meaning “skirmish”—is Mexico’s only all-female equestrian event in charrería, where riders perform synchronized formations at breakneck speed. Span’s design echoes this dynamic interplay of control and expression through layered visual strategies. Photographic selections, framing devices, and pattern compositions evoke signature maneuvers: el giro (the spin), el abanico (the fan), la escalera (the staircase). Diagonal cuts and caesura-like interruptions build a sense of controlled momentum, while bilingual text placement ensures a lyrical, measured pace.

On the exhibition walls, the identity system amplifies. Custom pattern languages, inspired by the hand-embroidered traje de adelita, become both framing devices and structuring elements. The exhibition’s logotype, designed within the same sacred geometric proportions, reinforces a balance between structure and fluidity, discipline and expression.

At its core, Span’s design for Escaramuza translates movement into form, transforming the exhibition into an active field of visual rhythm, poetic resonance, and cultural storytelling that operates simultaneously as an assertion of identity, a defiance of erasure, and a continuation of history.

Nick Adam, Design Director
and Associate Partner at Span.Studio

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