Samhain Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice
Toured the Minneapolis Institute of Arts storage main storage facility today with other members of the docent discussion group.
Brian Kraft gave a presentation about Registration, a hidden facet of museum life, hidden at least from the museum going public. They accession all objects, giving them a number with the year and the number in sequence from the beginning of the year, one for each object acquired. The condition of the art work gets a record, good enough for legal and museum purposes, though perhaps not good enough for conservator’s eye. A conservator gets a call if anything in the piece looks wonky.
The museum loans out about 350 pieces each year and any piece worth more than a significant amount of money has to have a courier who never leaves the art. Brian, for example, last month flew to Australia with an object. This involves sitting in warehouses, following art out of the plane, waiting at customs. Not glamorous.
Though the museum used to accession about 1,000 works a year, in recent years the number has declined to around 400 with a renewed emphasis on quality over quantity.
Registration cleans the art and its various vitrines, frames and mounts. Registration also moves art, both for special exhibitions and for regular curatorial determined rotations back into storage. The large Chihuly sunburst, permanently fixed to the lobby ceiling, gets cleaned once a year, for example, when a skyjack, a rental, comes into the museum for that and a few other high tasks.
The museum has 173 galleries, 82,000 plus accessioned works and 2,000 + in “record book” art, art not considered museum quality but that does fill a blank spot in our collection. This last never goes on show.
When a loan is made, the borrowing institution pays for packing, insuring, moving, and installation, then return. This means that in the case of big exhibitions mounted by our curators the price tag for the show can be quite high.
The MIA now has an in-house frame maker who can make a $30,000 frame for $5,000. A significant cost saving. There are several specialists on staff, art packers, the frame maker, a lighting person responsible for 5,500 light bulbs and assistant registrars for exhibitions, loans and acquisitions.
To get to the storage area we left the public side of the museum and got in the freight elevator. The freight elevator came into the museum during the renovation and expansion before the target wing. They built it big enough to side-load a 1957 Cadillac, a car anticipated for an exhibition that never came to fruition, though when the Tatra came in the elevator was plenty big. Ken Krenz, the registrar for the permanent collection, took us down to the storage level and opened the white 15 foot high doors into a treasure house.
Think of a below ground attic chuck full of interesting things one of your crazy aunts might put out for a garage sale. When we came inside, stored items from the Oceania collection sat on a tall, all metal cabinet to our right. To our left a small work table with a computer and a work area serve as Ken’s throne room for his domain.
Just beyond his computer, down a long hall way, were racks on either side, ceiling mounted and made of heavy gauge screen. They pull in and out, bringing with them paintings hung from ceiling to floor. I imagine there were 20 or 25 racks on each side, some 50 in all. In the hallway were the inverted v-shaped, carpeted, rolling carts used to take paintings to and from the galleries or to conservation. Beyond these racks on both sides were rows of enameled white cabinets, locked, some with windows and some with no windows. Beyond one such row on our right were storage areas with large sliding anodized aluminum holders covered in a mesh that allowed air but not water to pass through. On each aluminum mesh holder was a Chinese imperial robe.
In an enamel cabinet beside the bays devoted to Imperial robes, cabinets with no windows, Ken showed us floor to the top of the 6 foot cabinets shelves filled with Japanese scroll paintings, each box a work of art in itself. Some of the boxes had the works title on the outside, some, too, had a small essay by a famous art historian written in Kanji on the inside cover. These scroll boxes had u-shaped holders that kept the scroll from resting on the box’s bottom, avoiding flattening a scroll over a long time in storage.
Toward the rear wall there were rows of sturdy metal shelving, ceiling to floor, stuffed with sculpture, chairs, tables, cabinets and other bulky items.
Other hand moving items similar to those in grocery stores crowded aisles and made easy access difficult.
More on this tomorrow.