Mount Up!

By: Stephen Loughman, Preparator

This is the first post for Stephen Loughman; he is the new Preparator for the Fenimore Art Museum and The Farmers' Museum. He joins us from SUNY Plattsburgh where he previously worked at the SUNY Plattsburgh Art Museum. He is very excited to be here, and show everyone what exactly a Preparator does here at the museum!

As we are gearing up and focusing more and more on the Thaw traveling exhibition, it is important to remember that it isn’t just the art work traveling to the Cleveland Museum of Art. For the past two weeks or so I have been working on preparing the mounts, for which many of the Thaw pieces need in order to be displayed on, for travel. Three large boxes of mounts to be exact! Each box was divided into little cubbies that the mounts will call home as they travel about the country. Many of the mounts themselves needed to be sanded and painted before travel. Once painted the layout of the boxes was configured taking into consideration the size and durability of certain mounts compared to others. I taped and hot glued a system of dividers and shelves so that each mount had its own place within the box making sure thus that the box could withhold the changing of venues and the wear and tear that goes along with such a process. The mounts themselves were then bubble-wrapped, labeled, inventoried and boxed, ready for Cleveland and beyond!