Team Facilities or Team Exhibitions

[otterpope]

I have a question and maybe some of you here could help?

I had a curator tell me today that at most museums the exhibitions team handles rearrangement of exhibitions walls and space regarding painting, electrical, construction, etc. Would you say this is true. Does the facilities team at your museum coordinate these activities with the needs coming from exhibitions departments or are they hands-off and the exhibitions team does these things or works with contractors directly to achieve these things.

I hope my question is clear enough.

~A Southern Preparator

[kpf5097]

Ha, at my museum, I am both exhibitions prep and facilities. (and several other things I won't mention)

[mjquist]

All museums are different, it all depends on how your museum is organized. Our Exhibit Department is in charge of all the designing, building, moving, and planning; but the electrical and painting the main walls are handled by the facilities. Anything we construct we have to paint/stain ourselves.

[bcalz]

I would say usually the exhibitions department, but it depends on the institution, staff skills and resources, and on the exhibition. Larger institutions may have departments that handle certain specialties. Here the university does electrical work for the building, but we wire exhibit cases. Permanent exhibitions also may have more demands on building departments than temp exhibits.

[Ackerley]

Be ready to do it all.

[otterpope]

Thank you all for your responses. Our museum is currently undergoing strategic planning. Through the years i've been at this museum i've seen facilities be in charge of painting/constructing which was gradually shifted into the hands of the art preparators and curatorial assistants.

I've gathered from the above comments that there is a wide variety and no one answer to this. Twice as many have said exhibitions over facilities. But then again this is such a small sample, i'm not sure how much it really says about the industry standard.

The curators contend as curatorial assistants and art preparators we should be the ones working with the painting, construction, and electrical contractors. We tend to contend that we are better and planning, designing, installation/art handling while our facilities staff know the in's and out's of the buildings walls, circuits, and materials and is better suited to put forth the designs and plans we come up with. Currently, we do it all and our facilites crew has been shifted into only handling the outside grounds and setting up for event rentals. these shifts were not planned or thought out. They've sort of happened over a previous multi-year span of bad management before our current director came on board 2 years ago.

Our interesting moment is while in strategic planning phase we can maybe decide the course of things to come. We have a brief window of time better organize our workflow. I'm curious to know how this would change your comments (if you could choose your ideal situation.) I appreciate all your input thus far. It helps give some perspective.