1- Because I work across from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and am a frequent visitor I have kept close tabs on the progress, from the planning of the new museum to the controversy with the architectural plans and costs, the plans for the collection, demolition and current fundraising and construction. It’s been a fascinating journey touching so many aspects of the museum world. Most relevant for our class is how the museum packed up its priceless collection and put it into storage, and how it intends to manage the collection in a much smaller space. At a cost of 700M it surely is one of the bigger museum projects being undertaken and it is running into pandemic delays, stalled fundraising and fossils on the building site. Below is an LA Times article with all the latest including a rosy perspective from the museum director – Michael Govan.
2- The Georgia Museum of Art has a new storage solution. According to their announcement, their new off-site storage unit, nicknamed “Shoebox” because of its shape, will store exhibition materials and publications in order to free up space for their ever-growing collection. Since the museum is already equipped for storing and preserving art, they decided the best use of Shoebox would be to house building materials used in the construction of exhibitions, as well as the bulk of catalogs published by the museum. The museum will now have more space for collections.
3- I came across this interesting article from 2018, which looks at the issue of storing large amounts of institutional assets offsite – and the question of “how are these works creating cultural value if no one is looking at them?” Apparently as much as 90% of museum holdings are in storage rather than display!
https://news.artnet.com/market/gray-market-big-numbers-missing-museum-scandals-insights-11991051
1 click: Sylvia Welsh
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