Visible storage

Last updated April 15, 2019

Visible storage is a method of maximising public access to museum and art collections that would otherwise be hidden from public view. Many museums and galleries have over 90% of their collections in storage at any one time and the technique has been widely adopted recently by institutions ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to London's Victoria & Albert Museum as well as in many smaller collections.

A museum is an institution that cares for (conserves) a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these items available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. The largest museums are located in major cities throughout the world, while thousands of local museums exist in smaller cities, towns and rural areas. Museums have varying aims, ranging from serving researchers and specialists to serving the general public. The goal of serving researchers is increasingly shifting to serving the general public.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, on the eastern edge of Central Park along Museum Mile in Manhattan's Upper East Side is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from Medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; it extends the museum's modern and contemporary art program.

Visible storage cases tend to be densely packed and with less explanatory material than in conventional displays. In addition, they may exceed head height making smaller objects difficult to see. The cases are often located in spaces that were previously unused or unsuitable for conventional display cases. The cases may be curving, cylindrical, packed closely together or positioned down the centre of existing galleries.

Claimants to have originated the idea include the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in the 1970s and the Strong Museum in Rochester, in 1982.^[1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art was one of the first large institutions to use visible storage when it created the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art in 1988^[2] and the Victoria & Albert Museum has recently adopted the idea in their ceramics galleries.^[3]

The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada is renowned for its displays of world arts and cultures, in particular works by First Nation band governments of the Pacific Northwest. As well as being a major tourist destination, MOA is a research and teaching museum, where UBC courses in art, anthropology, archaeology, conservation, and museum studies are given. MOA houses close to 50,000 ethnographic objects, as well as 535,000 archaeological objects in its building alone.

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References

↑ Museums as Walk-In Closets; Visible Storage Opens Troves to the Public by Celestine Bohlen in The New York Times , 8 May 2001. Retrieved 21 December 2013. Archived December 22, 2013, at the Wayback Machine .
↑ LACMA, Broad, other art museums work to put storage on display by Jori Finkel in The Los Angeles Times , 20 July 2013. Retrieved 21 December 2013.
↑ Transforming the Ceramics galleries: an exercise in restraint by Victoria Oakley & Fi Jordan in Conservation Journal, Spring 2009, Issue 57. Victoria & Albert Museum, 2009. Retrieved 22 December 2013. Archived December 22, 2013, at the Wayback Machine .

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[1] Museums as Walk-In Closets; Visible Storage Opens Troves to the Public by Celestine Bohlen in The New York Times , 8 May 2001. Retrieved 21 December 2013. Archived December 22, 2013, at the Wayback Machine .

[2] LACMA, Broad, other art museums work to put storage on display by Jori Finkel in The Los Angeles Times , 20 July 2013. Retrieved 21 December 2013.

[3] Transforming the Ceramics galleries: an exercise in restraint by Victoria Oakley & Fi Jordan in Conservation Journal, Spring 2009, Issue 57. Victoria & Albert Museum, 2009. Retrieved 22 December 2013. Archived December 22, 2013, at the Wayback Machine .