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Shedd Aquarium Presentation Frame to Illinois Senator

Our client brought in two glass name plates that had been used, in an earlier era at Chicago's John G. Shedd Aquarium (on the Chicago Lake Front Museum Campus), depicting two fish that were residents of the aquarium, at the time. Once they were replaced with more modern signage, these went into their archives. They were brought out to be used in a framing project that was to be presented to a federal legislator from our home state of Illinois. This senator has been a benefactor for a number of Chicago's museums and this frame was being presented as a token of the museums' appreciation.

We settled on an American Walnut by Larson-Juhl in their Cranbrook collection, together with a blue suede mat with a black-core black liner mat underneath. We also used matching Walnut fillets to surround the framed objects to give them more emphasis. We put white mat board behind the plates to allow the viewer to read the copy painted on the glass plates. Anti-reflective glass was used overall to allow all the detail to come through without any glare getting in the way.

A plate was engraved for this frame that gives some historical background to the glass name plates for the fish shown. Here are a few shots of the project (one of which is not fully in focus):

The finished frame as presented to the Illinois Senator. The mat borders on the top and sides are the same width.
Note the walnut fillet that surrounds the whole window. We cut a reverse bevel in the top mat layer so that you do not see the mat core.
The plate is attached to the black mat layer in this window, so the only opening that we cut, here, is in the blue top layer..
We put this glass plate on the right so that the 2 fish would face each other within the mat composition.