Imagine trying to construct a world-renowned art gallery out of 165,000 square feet of bone-bare space — and you have less than two weeks to set up walls, lay carpeting, hook up lighting and install your art. To add to the task, most of the 7,000-plus pieces of artwork will arrive at the gallery on the same day. If you stumble in your efforts, most of the contemporary art community will be on hand to witness your blunder. And the whole carefully crafted construction will be torn down less than a week later.
Welcome to Thomas Blackman’s world.
For seven years, Blackman and his company, Thomas Blackman Associates of Chicago, have taken on this very challenge as the organizers of Art Chicago, which opens Friday at Navy Pier. The fair, said to be the largest of its kind in the United States, is expected to draw 40,000 art collectors and enthusiasts to view and buy works by modern and contemporary artists from Picasso to Paschke.
“There is no way you can test putting up a show this big,” Blackman said.
Blackman’s group rents booth space in Navy Pier’s Festival Hall to 214 gallery owners from 20 U.S. cities and 25 countries who install their own exhibits. But Blackman is responsible for turning the hall into a gallery.
“We start with a completely empty, rather drab space. There is absolutely nothing there,” said Ilana Vardy, director of Art Chicago.
Such preparations are fairly typical of large-scale conventions and exhibitions, but when the wares to be hawked are museum-quality paintings and sculptures that together are valued at $1 billion, the fair producer becomes the choreographer of a delicate dance.
About two weeks before the show opens, Blackman’s crews begin laying the groundwork. Art from other countries begins arriving by air the week before the show and is stored in warehouses. Most galleries are not allowed to move their pieces into the hall until three days before opening night.
The time crunch leads to an overnight vigil for many of the art handlers, who line up their trucks outside the pier the day before to secure a good unloading spot.
Because of the limited dock space and the fragility of the shipment, unloading is a slow process.
“Shipping is the most vulnerable time,” said Paul Gray, co-owner of Richard Gray Gallery. “I always worry that things might get damaged. We take every precaution, but we know that these things happen.”
Gray is like most gallery owners and hires professional art handlers to move the works, in his case about 30 pieces. Though most of his art is traveling less than two miles, Gray estimates he will still spend about $3,000 on shipping.
For 15 years, Jonathan Schwartz has specialized in handling art and his New York-based company, Atelier 4, expects to ship more than 1,500 pieces from 50 galleries in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles to the Chicago show. One sculpture alone for this year’s show weighs more than 3,000 pounds.
“The one thing that makes our job almost impossible is that art was never made to move,” he said. “I don’t think that is the primary concern of the artist.”
Most of the pieces travel across country in climate-controlled trucks, allowing the art handlers constant supervision of the work, Schwartz said. Damage control might include the use of acid-free packing materials that will not cause any chemical reaction with the art, materials always used by museums but more rarely by galleries because of prohibitive costs.
“Ideally,” Schwartz said, “nothing should touch the surface.”
To achieve this ideal, handlers sometimes place a cardboard collar around a painting, then drape it with plastic, which serves as a humidity barrier. Though a museum might invest in a specially designed container that controls humidity and temperature down to the degree, gallery pieces are more likely protected using packs of silica gel, like those found in boxes of new shoes, Schwartz said. (Inside Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, no special climate control measures are taken, Blackman said. The temperature is monitored and adjusted using the hall’s heating and cooling system.)
Though technological advances have made shipping art safer and easier, the other swing of that pendulum is that some of the installation pieces are even more difficult to move, Blackman said.
Schwartz remembers one particularly tricky shipment in his early years in the business. He was trucking two pieces by an artist from a New York gallery to an art show in Montreal. One piece featured a grouping of branches, the other volcanic ash. Despite his best efforts, the cargo jiggled and jostled in transit and when it arrived, volcanic ash was sprinkled across the truck’s floor and a small section of branch had snapped off.
“Oh, my baby!” the artist cried upon seeing the cracked twig. Years passed before the tension between artist and shipper eased.
“Sometimes artists have such great attachment to their work it is like their children. So you better be careful,” Schwartz said.
Occasionally he encounters an artist who insists on watching the handlers every step of the way. “They don’t understand, but they are making life miserable,” he said. “Imagine you are defusing a bomb, and you have someone breathing over your shoulder. That’s what it’s like.”
There are horror stories. A few years ago, Chicago artist Ed Paschke had three of his paintings stolen from two shipments. They were discovered in the home of one of the shippers, a man who was not a professional art handler and to whom the job had been contracted by the shipping company. Though Paschke did recover the paintings, one sustained $3,000 worth of damage.
“It is like when your child goes off to school for the first day,” he said of an artist watching his art shipped. “You feel like it is very vulnerable to the evils lurking out there. You eventually kind of get used to it.”
The hazards don’t end when the work arrives at the fair. A real danger is unintentional damage caused by fair patrons or participants. When a gallery is displaying more than $50 million in art, the slightest knock can be costly. Most galleries carry insurance to cover any incidents, but Blackman said the show also employs an on-call conservator — “sort of like a nurse for art,” he said — to repair any damage that might befall a piece.
Last year this art medic was put to work on a painting bumped by a patron in a backpack. The painting, worth between $6,000 and $10,000, was a high-relief work and material jutting out from the canvas was damaged by the backpack. This year, the organizers have banned backpacks in the hall.
Accessories are not the only things fair organizers regulate. Gallery owners must apply to be a part of the fair, and if their exhibit space doesn’t meet standards, they might be refused entry into next year’s show.
Booth space is costly — about $4,000 to rent one booth for the show, and most galleries have two or three booths — and the temptation for dealers is to get more for their money.
“Sometimes the dealer is anxious to show as much as he or she can and overloads the space. It becomes a flea market,” said Maya Polsky of Chicago’s Maya Polsky gallery. “Everything has to be in harmony.”
Polsky said she usually brings extra works to the show and decides during set-up what will go where. “It is such an odd situation because it is not a gallery,” Vardy said.
Blackman tries to keep the look of the show uniform and professional with a special lighting system, soft-colored carpeting and 12-foot display walls — two feet higher than last year’s and better for showing large works.
But the sheer number of paintings on display can be overwhelming to patrons and galleries. “There is no way to take it all in at once,” Paschke said.
Gallery owners know that visual competition can make sales more challenging. “That’s the downside of a fair. It is over-stimulating,” Gray said. “The upside (for a gallery owner) is that it is over-attended.”
Yet for all its bulk and hectic pace, Art Chicago, many in the contemporary art community said, is one of the most anticipated events of the year.
“It is chaos, but year after year . . . somehow everything works out,” Polsky said. “It is like a celebration of art.”
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Art Chicago
When: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Friday through May 10, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. May 11.
Where: Navy Pier Festival Hall
Tickets: $10; $7 students, seniors and groups (three-day passes are $20 and five-day passes are $30).
Phone: 312-587-3300 or e-mail: info@artchicago.com
