California Indian Cradle Baskets
Yikes. I survived it. I really did.
The latest here is that we installed a huge exhibit. Huge. Shipping weight was 10,000 pounds and probably 4/5 of that were the crates themselves. The museum organization we belong to thought that the professional exhibit designer knew what she was doing when she put it together. It is supposed to be a traveling exhibit and the designer indicated all along that she understood what materials to use -- then it turned out to be a huge, heavy, nearly impossible to move "traveling" exhibit. The crates are furniture grade - you could put them together and there is more wood in those crates than a new 4-bedroom house. In some venues, the crates would not fit inside the Museum and had to be unpacked outside - we were lucky that we could get them all in. And, of course, J waited to the last minute to panic. We got help from two of the commissioners or everything would still be in the crates - they had to build walls for the Plexiglas cases to hang on!
The week previous, A and W (two Museum commissioners) built walls for the Museum. Friday and Saturday J and I painted them. Tuesday morning we moved the walls out of the way. The exhibit arrived and the crates took the entire main gallery and adjacent gallery. With the help of A and W we emptied them and moved the contents out of the way and got the crates ready to be moved to the off-site storage. Wednesday, the crates were moved off site to storage. In the now cleared area of the main gallery, we put up the new walls. We worked on condition reports on what we could see. Final painting was done. Decisions were made where the 12 wall hanging Plexiglas exhibit cases would hang. We placed the 5 free standing units. The traveling TV/DVD set up and two audio cases (double as storage) were studied. We've never had audio cases before. Thursday we hung the plex cases - most of which measure over 5' in length - placed everything else, set up the free standing unit that has to be put together, found out that the audio cabinets are supposed to go with specific cases (not mentioned in the exhibit manual), and had a volunteer show up an hour late. Friday we hung all the photographs (yes, J and I spent the entire week screwing), rearranged the lighting, and got ready for the program scheduled for that night. I didn't bother going home after work because I had to be back to the Museum by 6:30 so Friday ended up being a 14 hour day.
Saturday I realized that my car was vandalized when it was parked behind the Museum (we've been having a lot of problems) and it will be at l east $200 to fix. Just enough to blow my budget, but not enough to get the insurance involved. However, Monday was a comp-time day and thus the entry ends on an up note.
The latest here is that we installed a huge exhibit. Huge. Shipping weight was 10,000 pounds and probably 4/5 of that were the crates themselves. The museum organization we belong to thought that the professional exhibit designer knew what she was doing when she put it together. It is supposed to be a traveling exhibit and the designer indicated all along that she understood what materials to use -- then it turned out to be a huge, heavy, nearly impossible to move "traveling" exhibit. The crates are furniture grade - you could put them together and there is more wood in those crates than a new 4-bedroom house. In some venues, the crates would not fit inside the Museum and had to be unpacked outside - we were lucky that we could get them all in. And, of course, J waited to the last minute to panic. We got help from two of the commissioners or everything would still be in the crates - they had to build walls for the Plexiglas cases to hang on!
The week previous, A and W (two Museum commissioners) built walls for the Museum. Friday and Saturday J and I painted them. Tuesday morning we moved the walls out of the way. The exhibit arrived and the crates took the entire main gallery and adjacent gallery. With the help of A and W we emptied them and moved the contents out of the way and got the crates ready to be moved to the off-site storage. Wednesday, the crates were moved off site to storage. In the now cleared area of the main gallery, we put up the new walls. We worked on condition reports on what we could see. Final painting was done. Decisions were made where the 12 wall hanging Plexiglas exhibit cases would hang. We placed the 5 free standing units. The traveling TV/DVD set up and two audio cases (double as storage) were studied. We've never had audio cases before. Thursday we hung the plex cases - most of which measure over 5' in length - placed everything else, set up the free standing unit that has to be put together, found out that the audio cabinets are supposed to go with specific cases (not mentioned in the exhibit manual), and had a volunteer show up an hour late. Friday we hung all the photographs (yes, J and I spent the entire week screwing), rearranged the lighting, and got ready for the program scheduled for that night. I didn't bother going home after work because I had to be back to the Museum by 6:30 so Friday ended up being a 14 hour day.
Saturday I realized that my car was vandalized when it was parked behind the Museum (we've been having a lot of problems) and it will be at l east $200 to fix. Just enough to blow my budget, but not enough to get the insurance involved. However, Monday was a comp-time day and thus the entry ends on an up note.