Team Facilities or Team Exhibitions

[bcalz]

I would say usually the exhibitions department, but it depends on the institution, staff skills and resources, and on the exhibition. Larger institutions may have departments that handle certain specialties. Here the university does electrical work for the building, but we wire exhibit cases. Permanent exhibitions also may have more demands on building departments than temp exhibits.

[Ackerley]

Be ready to do it all.

[otterpope]

Thank you all for your responses. Our museum is currently undergoing strategic planning. Through the years i've been at this museum i've seen facilities be in charge of painting/constructing which was gradually shifted into the hands of the art preparators and curatorial assistants.

I've gathered from the above comments that there is a wide variety and no one answer to this. Twice as many have said exhibitions over facilities. But then again this is such a small sample, i'm not sure how much it really says about the industry standard.

The curators contend as curatorial assistants and art preparators we should be the ones working with the painting, construction, and electrical contractors. We tend to contend that we are better and planning, designing, installation/art handling while our facilities staff know the in's and out's of the buildings walls, circuits, and materials and is better suited to put forth the designs and plans we come up with. Currently, we do it all and our facilites crew has been shifted into only handling the outside grounds and setting up for event rentals. these shifts were not planned or thought out. They've sort of happened over a previous multi-year span of bad management before our current director came on board 2 years ago.

Our interesting moment is while in strategic planning phase we can maybe decide the course of things to come. We have a brief window of time better organize our workflow. I'm curious to know how this would change your comments (if you could choose your ideal situation.) I appreciate all your input thus far. It helps give some perspective.