Changing an art exhibition is never an easy business.

Done in a series of meticulously planned steps, the change includes taking down and setting up sometimes priceless works of art and making sure everything looks exactly the way it should.

And it's no different for the Nicolaysen Art Museum and Discover Center in Casper.

Just ask museum curator Lisa Hatchadoorian, the woman in charge of everything from colors of the walls to temperature of the room to "giving an atmosphere to the gallery itself."

Step one: prep the room's stationary and moveable walls. After removing and packing paintings from the last exhibition, Hatchadoorian and her five- to six-person team patch holes in the walls and repaint every square inch before anything else can be done. Gallons of "gallery white" paint are always on-hand, and the moveable walls are painted with colors that compliment the artwork.

"I don't know quite how I pick it. It just depends," Hatchadoorian said of the wall colors. "It's something that will enhance the paintings, maybe it's a color within the painting itself, or whatever the work happens to be."

Next, she said, all of the artwork is brought in and laid out so that she can really look at it and decide where to hang everything in the new exhibit.

"That's the meat of the process, where you want to find relationships between the different pieces and how it all relates as a show, and then it just goes up on the wall or gets hung up to the ceiling, depending what it is," she said. "It takes an enormous amount of time and teamwork."

And in a wide open space like the Nic's main gallery, placement of color and artwork is essential to getting every piece seen by visitors.

"You try and make people move through the space a certain way. That's another thing you have to think about is how your audience is flowing through the exhibition and how you want to move them toward certain areas," Hatchadoorian said.

Everything is hung on a center line at 56 inches from the ground, and a team of lighting specialists then use the gallery's lighting grid "to compliment the paintings, and to highlight each particular piece," she said.

While some people go to school before becoming curators, Hatchadoorian said she learned mostly on-the-job.

"You can have a position where you see how a curator does it," she explained. "I've been using intuition to do it ever since, and how I feel and how things relate and the best way to make the works talk to each other."

Some museums have their own exhibition design teams, she said, particularly when they're more interactive, like in natural history or science museums.

"We don't have the budget for that, so we try and give a different feel to each exhibition depending on lighting and how we're moving the walls around and paint color," she explained. "Each one has a different flavor."

About 90 pieces will be hung in the gallery for the museum's upcoming event, "Cirque du Nicolay," or "Circus of the Nicolaysen," based on the popular "Cirque du Soleil" performance art.

The event will take place Sept. 27 and will consist of a fundraising dinner and "lots of surprises," said museum director Holly Turner.

"It's a great gathering," she said. "We're bringing the people of Casper together to celebrate the arts."

The evening will include a meal, a silent auction of all of the art in the exhibition, and a live auction for some artworks.

"We really wanted to celebrate creativity and expression, and innovation of the arts bring all of that to the community," Turner said.

And, she added, in true Cirque style, the museum is presenting the usually-formal dinner event with a twist.

"We're asking people to dress to express themselves. It will be whatever people want to wear to express themselves and their creativity," she said. "We want people to be fun and to have fun."

Contact reporter Megan Lee at (307) 266-0589 or megan.lee@trib.com