posted 05-05-2006 01:08 PM            

What are the mechanics to deciding to travel an exhibition? I guess a better question(s) would be:
What are the right questions an institution mounting an exhibit for travel has to ask themselves?

I am sure there is a different a list questions the recipient institutions must ask themselves?

I am also sure you could write an novel in response to the above ... I am just looking for some general insights that would help the average visitor to a traveling exhibition better appreciate the effort of sending/accepting a traveling exhibition.

Thanks

posted 05-10-2006 08:46 AM            

So, for example, my recently closed "Style, Status, Sterling" was a large exhibition; but it was restricted to my "permanent" changing galleries alloted to decorative arts. It was not seen as an exhibition that would be a huge crowd pleaser, so it was placed in secondary spaces, was not given a catalogue, and received second-string publicity (i.e. only what free PR it got from newspaper reviews). These decisions are made by the Exhibitions Committee, which includes all of the curators, the Director, the marketing, education, programming and publicity departments.

posted 05-10-2006 09:00 AM            

As to TRAVELING exhibitions, the mechanics are very closely allied with producing in-house exhibitions. Traveling any exhibition involves large expenses, which must be passed on to the potential borrowers.

Let's say I had wanted to travel "Style, Status, Sterling: The Triumph of Silver in America." First we would need to prepare promotional material, including publicity, photographs, etc., in order to pitch it to various institutions. Presumably, only museums that did NOT have a substantial American silver collection would be interested (or places that, say, had a lot of colonial silver but no Victorian or 20th-century silver).

In order to sell a show to another museum, you have to know what it will cost. Crating up the silver in my recent exhibition (i.e. producing wooden crates, not cardboard boxes, each one filled with foam, cut to fit each piece, hence called "cavity packing.") would very likely have run some $20,000. Then there would be the issue of cleaning the silver between each venue, because no silver stays untarnished even in museum climates. So that usually means several hundred hours to properly clean all the silver. That cost has to go into the mix.

You cannot travel an exhibition without a catalogue, which would have killed my silver exhibition immediately. A small catalogue (40-50 pages) with color images runs at least $30,000; and a large one is easily $100,000. Most outside funders (National Endowment for the Humanities, for the Arts, etc.) demand not only a catalogue, but an elaborate educational program developed in advance, that will travel with the exhibition, enabling each museum to provide educational experiences related to the exhibition. Each institution needs to have the proper display furniture (cases, pedestals, plexiglas vitrines, boxes to create variety within the domes, etc.) as well as exhibition designers who can make the installation attractive and secure. If any of those are missing from one venue, then the organizer has to provide the cases, which adds a whole new dimension to the shipping costs. If a show is very rigidly designed, then the exhibition furniture sometimes has to travel with it, and this is expensive.