September 19th
1 pm-4 pm
 
Basics of a Professional Preparator, -or-
How to Hang Pictures in a Museum or Gallery Setting 

 
There is far more to hanging pictures on a wall than merely using a nail and hammer and hanging it happenstance! What goes into hanging various shapes and sizes of art in a museum first requires establishing the “basic standard height” that the center of all the art to be hung should hang, and then knowing the basic formulas to enable one to hang an entire gallery’s art accurately, once, without the time-consuming need to repair pristine walls.
In this class, you will learn the two basics of gallery preparatory work: We will discuss how to properly maintain a gallery’s walls. Covered will be topics such as removal of screws from drywall, how to sink the screw holes, and how to spackle over the holes. If done improperly, this can add several hours to mitigate.
The second part of the class will be spent on how to hang the art to be installed by actually helping me map out a wall using the tools of the trade, measuring the art to be hung, and using the formulas for mounting the entire wall. We will then apply all the hooks, and then hang all the art at one time.
Hopefully, I will find some examples of art with bad choices of hanging hardware on its backside, so that we will have to spontaneously figure some “workaround” to hang the art securely. We will also learn how to hang triptychs (actually three separate components combined as “one art piece”). 
Finally, the last part of the class will be to return to the holes we spackled at the beginning of the class. I will demonstrate how having applied spackle sparingly allows one to sand the holes perfectly flush to the wall’s surface in less than a minute per hole.