Steven Friedlander writes about art and artists for Compass. He is a book and magazine editor, writer, and communications and marketing consultant.

Lou Gauci is an architect, museum gallery and exhibition designer, and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA). His words are not for wasting — and reflect a decency that does not demand to be noticed but is felt all the same.

For Gauci, every step of exhibition design every step is choreographed.

He lives with rigor, embracing a disciplined, iterative and contemplative creative process of searching and researching, canceling and exploring, as he pushes against the boundaries of what is possible. One senses that Gauci tries to do what is right because that is the only way he knows.

He speaks in the metaphors of design. “Sketches are probings,” he says. “They’re not answers. They’re ways of asking better questions.” 

Gauci will do thumbnails, cancel them, start again. He knows when it is right and when it is not — and he continues until it becomes right.

Rethink. Rework. Repeat.

Gauci presents the quiet, intentional posture of someone who has spent years learning how to bring the invisible into form. His broad forehead and strong cheekbones give him a wise and commanding presence. He evinces a studied manner that augurs the highest professional standards — and a

tangible moral commitment — in his work.

His thick eyebrows arch slightly and his expressive eyes twinkle with confident, knowing resolve as he sits in his home studio and reflects on his more than four decades as an architect and a museum exhibition designer.

He speaks with a vocabulary that is both exacting and inspirational. “I believe my confidence has been earned through repetitive demonstrations of success and meaningful accomplishments,” he says.

Measure. Model. Modify.

Gauci was born in Malta. He was not quite 3 years old when his parents moved the family across the Atlantic to Detroit, then an American city powered by industry, immigration and the steady conviction that reinvention was possible.

His parents were intrepid people looking toward a future that would not likely be possible had they remained on a small island that had been among the most heavily bombed places in Europe during World War II. (Malta’s strategic position in the Mediterranean turned it into a target.) 

America offered a brand-new start. A maternal uncle in the Detroit area — successful enough to sponsor the family — helped make the decision practical.

Gauci remembers a childhood lived near a constellation of cultural institutions. Within blocks of the apartment building that his family helped manage were Wayne State University, the Detroit Public Library’s main branch — “a beautiful building,” he remembers, designed by Cass Gilbert — and the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) across the street. As a boy, he would climb the library steps in awe with his mother.

He speaks about coincidence the way some people speak about weather: not mystically but undeniably. There is a continuum, he suggests, if you are attentive enough to notice it. 

Years later, Gauci would teach design at Wayne State. Years later still, the DIA would become a central axis in his professional life — where the abstractions of architecture and the physicality of art objects, light and human perception would fuse into something else: an ethic.

When Gauci describes exhibition design, he does not frame it as décor; he frames it as responsibility. “If something affects someone’s life or memory,” he says, “I can’t be casual about it.”

When he worked last spring on Knoxville’s Violins of Hope exhibit — a collection of historic instruments connected to the Holocaust — he found himself awake in the middle of the night, turning over a problem he could not leave alone.

Several violins had been mislabeled, and in cases where identifying details are subtle, any wrong pairing is not simply a logistical error but a betrayal of the story.

“I’m not a good candidate for dealing with high anxiety in these conditions because I’m not in control of everything,” Gauci says. “But when I have to be in control, I want to make sure it’s accurate. Not with some precision. With precision.”

Exhibition design, he insists, is intensive and tedious; every step is choreographed, and the sequence cannot be disrupted without consequence. When interruptions fracture concentration, doubt creeps in: Did I miss something? Did I? Did I?

Handle. Honor. Hold.

After graduating from architecture school — seven years at Lawrence Technological College and the University of Detroit threaded through constant work — Gauci stayed briefly in Detroit and then made a deliberate decision to go west. Opportunity, he sensed, would come not from waiting but from motion.

Denver offered both — and Gauci began to test himself against larger scales and higher stakes. He won two design competitions, and he was soon earning commissions for buildings with increased responsibility.

Gauci became a breadwinner for his firm, but the sudden death of his older brother shook him to what he calls “the void” — a reckoning that reordered his internal compass. With his family’s encouragement, he went to Europe, then to Malta, reconnecting with the place of his birth and meeting the island’s leading architect, Richard England.

When he returned, something had shifted. The work mattered differently. Proximity — to family and to meaning — mattered more.

Detroit pulled him back. Gauci joined a former colleague’s architecture and design firm, became a partner, taught at both Wayne State and the University of Detroit, and worked deeply with the DIA. The pace was relentless; the commitments were total.

The alignment, for a time, held — until it didn’t.

A fire destroyed the firm’s office. A major museum project collapsed under the weight of pride and miscalculation by his partner. Gauci remembers sketching during a difficult conversation — an invented galley with oars and a sail — and realizing, mid-line, that it was time to leave.

“It was time to sail away,” he says.

The next day, he informed his museum clients of his departure. Within hours, the DIA called and asked him to step inside — not as an architect designing buildings, but as the chief designer for the museum, helping it navigate a looming centennial celebration.

What followed were 16 years of sustained and exacting work inside one of the country’s great museums — work that taught him how to orchestrate space from the inside out: light, sequence, pacing and narrative. Gauci became, as he puts it, “the conductor instead of just the player.”

From there, the work radiated outward. He was working at the museum in Detroit while also taking museum design projects in Santa Fe. He then moved to Washington, D.C. — a closed town, he notes, where access matters more than ability. He joined a new firm, became a partner, built a studio, led teams and executed projects at breakneck speed.

When his parents passed away and the pace no longer aligned with the life he and his wife, Kathy, wanted, Gauci stepped away again.

Knoxville came next.

Ten years ago, newly relocated and unpacking boxes, the couple wandered into the KMA — and they joined on the spot.

“I saw this place and knew it knew what it was doing,” he says. “It had clarity.”

Through committee work, board service and strategic planning, his involvement deepened with ethics and rigor. In summer 2025, he assumed the role of chairman of the Board of Trustees.

“Museums,” Gauci says, “only work when ambition and care are kept in balance.”

Select. Sequence. Sustain.

Now, as chairman of the KMA board, Gauci says he is honored to continue the fine work of his predecessors. He remains actively involved with the museum’s dedicated patrons, board, staff and volunteers who believe in and sustain the mission. 

“We continue to monitor and implement our strategic plan to meet and even surpass our objectives,” he says. “The KMA is among the jewels of Knoxville’s cultural community, and all of us strive to excel in all we do.”

Indeed — words are not for wasting.