How the retrospective was hung.

The brief: a second photo-led site for Kemi Osinibi, fundamentally different from her magazine-cover concept. The idea: if the editorial puts her on a cover, this one puts her in a museum — a dark gallery wing where every artwork is an AI study of the same single photograph.

The collection

All four portraits in Room I were generated with Higgsfield (nano-banana-pro, ~2 credits each), each using her real photograph as the identity reference so the likeness — braids, pearls, white linen — survives every medium change:

• The Founder, in Umber — oil on canvas with gold-leaf squares set like ledger entries.
• Order, Cast — a bronze bust with marble pearls under a museum spotlight.
• Adire Meditation — indigo ink-wash with Yoruba adire patterns dissolving through the silhouette.
• Dusk, Kept — a double exposure, her profile holding a golden evening sky.

The living portrait

Room II's centerpiece is the original photograph animated by Kling 3.0 into a five-second breathing loop — a blink, a breath, a breeze through the braids (7.5 credits). It hangs in the same gilt frame as the paintings, autoplaying muted; the wall label reads "Do not be alarmed — she has always been this calm." The entire art program for both photo sites cost under twenty credits.

Hanging the show

• The frames are pure CSS — a gold-gradient border with an inner shadow bead, a hover "picture light" (radial gradient) that brightens each canvas, and a gentle 3D tilt toward the cursor.
• The torch: a soft pool of lamplight follows your cursor across the dark wall (one fixed radial gradient, eased at 8% per frame).
• Dust motes drift up through the light — 26 animated specks, random size and period.
• Wall labels in DM Mono give every piece a title, medium and provenance line — the museum's voice; Marcellus (a Trajan-column roman) does the room titles.
• Everything respects prefers-reduced-motion, and the whole show is one HTML file.

The catch worth telling

The build had exactly one bug this time: an unclosed IIFE — the page's entire script failed silently, and the gallery hung in darkness. The agent noticed its reveal classes never fired, proved the script hadn't run (zero dust motes in the DOM), found the missing })(); and turned the lights on. Self-review isn't decoration; it's how the show opens at all.

Do it yourself

Pick one photograph and treat it as a subject, not an asset: generate the same person across media (paint, bronze, ink, motion) with the photo as reference, then build the smallest possible room around the work — dark walls, good frames, honest labels. Restraint reads as curation.