About Me

Every seat in the chain

I began as a gallery preparator, moved to a museum as an audiovisual technician and installer, and from there into art handling. I went on to work as a driver, a packer, a department manager, and an operations manager, and was ultimately appointed President and CEO of one of the larger regional fine art services companies in the United States, where I spent nineteen years — eleven of them leading it.
That progression is the foundation of this practice. I know what a condition report looks like when it has been written with care, and what it looks like when it has been written at the end of a fourteen-hour installation. I know which provisions in a storage agreement carry real weight and which are present largely for appearance. And having spent two decades on the vendor side, I understand precisely where a vendor's interests and an owner's interests diverge.
 

What I have built

I have designed and built out 71,000 square feet of fine art warehousing, including 24,800 square feet of actively climate-controlled storage and 15,000 square feet of standard art storage, together with three production shops. These specialized projects encompassed climate systems, racking, workflow, security, fire protection, location assignment, and access — the elements of a facility that underpin object security and safety.
I have designed facilities which were reviewed by independent parties rather than assessed internally: the earlier facilities by GRASP and AXA Art, the later ones by Ernst & Young on behalf of the ICEFAT standards committee. External audit is the difference between believing one's standards are sound and having them independently verified.

I have also implemented barcode tracking for over 10,000 works, and have migrated private and public collections into new databasing systems that better served the owner's needs.
 

Teaching

I have taught professional practice at Cornish College of the Arts, lectured on archival storage and seismic mitigation, and conducted private trainings on handling and storage for collectors and their staff. Much of what I know has been learned on the job, at the fairs, in the trucks, and where consequences are very real. I can speak from first hand experience, and love putting on lectures and workshops about standards and techniques.
 

Why the owner's side

After nineteen years of moving, building, and storing other people's work, the request that came most often — and most often after hours — was for a straight answer about what an owner ought to be asking for. Collection care carries a great deal of specialized vocabularies, processes, and approaches that are rarely made explicit to the people paying for it. Helping an owner define and properly scope what they actually need, before a vendor defines it for them, is where the greatest value lies.