There’s way more to it than just screwing in the bulb and the museum’s chief lighting designer is turning it into an artform at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

"As innovative as any of the works of art on view here will be the lighting configuration, designed to reduce building electricity use by a whopping 75 percent. It will save 25 percent in air conditioning costs, since the far more cooler LED lights won’t raise interior temperatures. Further, the LED lights—the acronym stands for light-emitting diode—will last four times longer than incandescent or halogen lights for further savings.

What museum visitors will notice, however, is how stunning everything looks.

“I always thought when we went to more energy-efficiency, it was going to suck, that I would have to reduce the quality of light,” says Scott Rosenfeld the museum’s lighting director. “What we found was that not only does it not reduce quality, but it provides a whole new level of choice that we didn’t even know existed.”

Rosenfeld, who says he began his career as “a lightbulb changer at the Walters,” the museum in his Baltimore hometown, has since become one of the nation’s leading experts on museum lighting. As chair of the Illuminating Engineering Society’s museum committee, he’s worked with the Department of Energy and researchers from Northwest Pacific Labs, among others, to determine exactly the right new lighting for the nation’s oldest purpose-built art museum."

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