The IMA has roughly 20,000 square feet of space dedicated solely to the storage of its encyclopedic collection. About 4,000 square feet accommodates our prints and drawings collection. The remaining 16,000 is for paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, textiles and more. 16,000 square feet of space may sound like a lot of room, but for a collection of over 55,000 objects, every inch must be utilized.

The IMA has taken measures to maximize its storage areas. One of those ways is employing high-density storage technology like the kind we have for our textile and painting collections. The textile collection is housed in custom-made Delta Design cabinets, which store the collection according to the needs of each individual piece. Is it a carpet that needs to be rolled? Is it a dress that needs to be hung? These cabinets move along tracks that allow the user to have access to the collection one aisle at a time.

Here is a video showing how the storage system works:

A good portion of the IMA’s vast painting collection is hung on suspended rolling racks.  These racks are hung at close proximity to maximize the space allotted for painting storage.  In addition, paintings are hung on both sides of each rack.  This doubles the amount of usable space.

I took some time to talk all things storage with Jesse Speight, the IMA’s Supervisor of Packing and Storage.  Jesse likens the artworks in the IMA’s collection to individual patients with needs: their health is important and requires constant checking.  Are they exercising? (Is the artwork on display regularly?) Do they brush their teeth? (Have they been dusted, cleaned, polished?) Are they resting? (Adhering to IMA’s rotation policy for fragile objects?) Are they getting too much sun? (How long has the artwork been under gallery lights?) If they are diagnosed with an ailment, do they need surgery? (Is a trip to Conservation necessary?)

All these things are taken under advisement when storing an object. It’s Jesse’s job to make sure that each and every “individual” in the IMA’s collection is stored in the best way to optimize its health and longevity.  There are several ways of doing so. One way is to house the objects in specially designed containers.

This can mean trays for smaller objects:

Or customized enclosures for small sculptures:

Another way to optimize individual health is to take materials into consideration. This can mean understanding the materials that make up the artwork itself as well as using the appropriate materials to store it. For example, you would not want to store an African object made with animal hide alongside a silver tea set. The object made with animal hide, no matter what precautions are taken, is in a state of decay and will emit gasses over time. If stored in the same cabinet, these gasses would eventually cause the silver to tarnish. Therefore, objects with different material makeup are generally stored in separate areas. For this same reason, the materials used to house our artwork are always archival and inert. Even the cabinets themselves are coated with a baked-on enamel rather than a gas-emitting paint.

For me personally, when I had my first internship at the IMA, it was our Art Storage that sold me on wanting to work here. It’s overwhelming yet organized. It’s still and quiet, yet alive and breathing with history. And perhaps best of all, the enthusiastic people that work within its walls are not without a little bit of humor:

Image Courtesy of the Tacoma Art Museum

Painted around 1786, it’s a luminous, bucolic little scene- that holds its own next to J.M.W. Turner’s powerful and dramatic The Fifth Plague of Egypt from our permanent collection (recently returned from New Orleans Museum of Art). Having the Gainsborough from Tacoma to compare with paintings by Turner, Benjamin West, and Richard Wilson creates a new experience of the IMA’s holdings in late eighteenth-century English landscape painting. The painting will be here until June 2011.

The painting may look like it was painted directly from nature, but Gainsborough created his landscapes in the studio, working on them in the evenings after his portrait sitters had gone. He certainly used sketches made outdoors to help compose his paintings, but he also built little landscape tableaux in the studio to lay out his compositions. Discussing Gainsborough’s working practice, his rival Joshua Reynolds reported that “from the fields he brought into his painting-room stumps of trees, weeds, and animals of various kinds; and designed them, not from memory, but immediately from the objects. He even framed a kind of model from landscapes on his table; composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees and water.” This process-oriented approach to landscape painting was typical of Gainsborough.  Another landscape by Gainsborough in the IMA’s permanent collection is an example of what the artist called a “varnished watercolor,” created in mixed media that includes white lead, ink, gouache, milk, and glue on several pieces of paper joined together and mounted on canvas.  The painting, on view in the balcony of the Clowes Pavilion, has the appearance of a drawing, thanks to the rapid execution and the flickering highlights.

Gainsborough may have made his name as a society portrait painter, but he found real joy in landscape painting. Because of his fame as a portraitist, it’s somewhat surprising to realize that Gainsborough could apparently be rather half-hearted about the business of portrait painting.  He himself admitted that he sometime found it tedious to crank out the portraits his clients demanded and wished that “the People with their damn’d Faces could but let me alone a little.”  In a letter he declared, “I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol de Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village when I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.”

Gainsborough was a rather temperamental character who had very strong opinions about how his work should be displayed.  In fact, he eventually broke his ties with the Royal Academy after a dispute over how his paintings should be installed in their galleries—he preferred that they be hung higher on the wall so that the his broadly painted style could be fully appreciated. In a huff, he pulled his paintings from the Academy’s annual exhibition and began displaying his work in his studio, where he could hang his paintings as he pleased. The painting on loan from Tacoma is one of seven landscapes that Gainsborough exhibited in his London home, Schomberg House, in April of 1786.

The story of the departure of the John Sloan began in July 2006 when the IMA director received a letter from another institution requesting the loan of Red Kimono on the Roof for an exhibition on Sloan’s New York paintings.  The exhibit was scheduled to be shown at four museums from October 2007 through December 2008.  The letter was passed on to me,  the American art curator, and the museum’s registration department setting in motion a carefully documented chain of events that would lead to the departure of the painting. The IMA requires at least six months notice to process the loan of a work of art from its collection.
I assessed the loan request to decide if the exhibition would be appropriate for the loan of this important painting and decided that the exhibition was a significant overview of the artist’s work and both the painting and the IMA would benefit from the loan.  The conservation department examined the painting to assess its condition to travel and the registration department requested facilities reports from each of the institutions that will be presenting the exhibition.  There are numerous criteria that have to be met for the IMA to agree to lend to any institution, including appropriate fire protection standards, proper security guards, access to conservation staff in case of damage, no construction or renovation that might pose a risk to the work, proper humidity and temperature control and no food in the gallery space to name just a few of the things we consider before lending to another institution.  Even crate storage is taken into consideration to make sure the crate is properly stored to avoid damage or contamination.  Little critters in the crate pose a threat to any work of art.  The crate is carefully constructed by the IMA to withstand the rigors of travel and protect the work of art, so we want to be sure it remains in the same condition it was created.

Red Kimono on the Roof was deemed safe for travel. Sometimes the IMA requires a courier to travel with a work of art, especially if it is going abroad or if there are concerns about potential damage to a fragile piece.  Curators, conservators and registrars can be couriers as can their assistants if trained for the purpose.  The courier must be present during all phases of transportation and to oversee the hanging of the work in the exhibition space.  When the exhibition closes, the courier often returns to manage the process of taking the work down, assess its condition and accompany it back to the IMA.  If a courier is not required for the entire travel route, one can still be sent to the destination site to assess the work when it arrives. Before a work can go out on loan, the loan must be assessed by the museum’s Collection Committee and approved by its Board of Directors.

So, come and visit John Sloan’s Red Kimono on the Roof when it returns to its permanent place in the American galleries.  There is always a renewed appreciation for a work that has gone out on loan, along with the satisfaction that people who have not visited the IMA have had the opportunity to enjoy it.