Education/Inspiration
Curatorial Assistance—One Stop Shopping for Exhibiting Artists, Museums & Galleries
By DE Contributor
Dec 1, 2007

For those who seek the very best quality and efficient service in framing, packaging and shipping of their work, Curatorial Assistance, Inc. is a creative arts organization that offers art-related services to their clients and audiences globally. Located in Pasadena, California, this organization has been in business nearly 20 years and has developed a stellar reputation amongst the art cognoscenti. They’ve collaborated with over 4,000 museums, galleries, corporations and other clients worldwide, assisting them with their exhibition projects.

The Beginning
“We’ve been described by one New York curator as the ultimate independent curatorial organization because we are a private company that performs the same services that can be found in any major museum, except that we don’t have a gallery,” says Graham Howe, Founder and CEO of Curatorial Assistance. “This organization grew out of my years of working in art museums as a photography curator. My last ‘institutional’ job was working as a curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.” Howe was also once curator to singer-songwriter Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash fame. “To pay my way though school as a UCLA graduate student in 1976, I was lucky to land a brilliant job as Graham Nash’s curator. It was a great collaboration, Nash was buying thousands of some of the most powerful photographic images ever made and I got to care for them, and make exhibits and books from the collection. I thought that Graham Nash could have been one of the world’s great photo curators if he had ever decided to quit his day job,” Howe recalls. Sadly, however, this collection was dispersed in 1991. “Losing that job inspired me to create the one that that I always wanted to do, so I invented a business that creates exhibitions and tours them to museums throughout the world.”

Graham Howe © Rebecca Howe

Prior to Curatorial Assistance launching its initial group of 16 traveling exhibitions, they began buying a lot of framing, crating, art packing, and signage from local vendors. “But we discovered that many of the products we bought fell apart on the road. I learned that most framing and crating was fine for general home use, but more durable products were needed to withstand the rigors of a serious exhibition travel on the road.,” said Howe. Very quickly, Howe and his staff realized that if they could not buy better products then they had to build them. “It was also an ethical issue,” Howe points out, “we were trusted with other people’s artwork for presentation in museums but were equally charged with its preservation. We couldn’t allow the artwork to be damaged. That was of paramount importance to us. But we also had to present this work elegantly and beautifully,” he declares.

Howe first hired a crating expert away from an organization in New York who started the Curatorial Assistance crating shop, and then hired one of the chief framers from a famous Los Angeles framing company to start their framing department. “Then we then went back to the drawing board so find solutions to the problems that had caused the conventional products to fail. “he says. “Thankfully, these products have withstood the years of demanding use we gave them, so now we’re smiling.”

The Company Today
Today, Curatorial Assistance has three divisions: One that travels exhibitions, another division that fabricates them, and a third that does “special projects.”

Sam Mellon © Paul Redmond

Sam Mellon, Director of Products and Services, discusses the fabricating part of the business: “Simply put, we build frames and other art display solutions, crates and exhibit signage,” he says. It’s a comprehensive fabrication process so that when the completed exhibition arrives at the museum or gallery, they have a “turnkey” exhibit that is ready to install right on the gallery floor and walls.”

While the company tours exhibitions of all kinds of art, “Our specialty has been photography,” says Howe, “mainly because of my passion for the medium and my background as a photo curator.” Mellon also studied photography in college. “Yes, so we really speak 'Pho-To' here at Curatorial,” says Mellon. After graduation, he worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for nearly eight years, and rose to a position where he was in charge of LACMA’s art installations. He says, “In that situation, one learns a lot about what an exhibition needs to be safe and look good and be up on time.” He brought his museum experience to Curatorial Assistance in 2002.

“Curatorial Assistance originally worked only with museums and on large-scale projects when I came to work for them,” says Mellon. “While we still do a lot of this, we now are also looking after individual photographers, collectors and other artists on their own projects. Whether it’s one frame or 150, or a tour to the New York Met or Timbuktu, artists and collectors’ now have access to the unique set of museum quality services all in one place. “Now, many artists are bringing us their entire exhibitions, and involving us in the planning stages. In addition to a great result, this saves them enormous time and expense by doing it right the first time!”

Unique Products
Curatorial Assistance offers both ready-made and pre-manufactured, high-quality art frames made of natural American hardwood moulding that are robust and yet elegant in their presentation—all in a quick turnaround time. They also offer a full range of art packaging services—simple plywood shipping boxes, traditional crates, or the high-tech ArtCrate—all of which are built for the safe and economical transport of art objects.

Photographers and artists typically do custom framing for their exhibitions, “but in many cases we found that using standard-sized pre-manufactured frames can save our clients significant time and money.” Howe remarks. “Ready-made frames from some companies often come at great price point,” he adds, “but the quality usually isn’t up to museum standards.” Curatorial Assistance offers its museum-quality pre-manufactured Standard ArtFrame at a very reasonable price point, “for less than half of the cost of a custom-made frame,” according to Mellon. The Standard ArtFrame is available in the 16x20 inch size at $59 and 20x24 inch size at $79. “It comes packed in a styrene-lined heavy-duty cardboard carton that’s strong enough to ship anywhere in the world,” says Howe. With their large inventory of these frames, orders can usually be shipped the same day that they’re ordered.

“The traditional wooden crate works great,” says Howe, “but they’re very heavy, hard to handle, and with all the wooden batons on the outside, they are much larger than they need to be. As the cost of shipping is based on both the size and weight of a crate, we figured that we were spending a fortune shipping heavy wooden crates just to protect the relatively light framed art inside.”

Taking a cue from hanging out backstage at Crosby, Stills & Nash concerts, Howe noticed that musicians didn’t use wooden crates to move their gear. Instead, they used lightweight fiberglass laminated road cases to ship their delicate musical equipment. After experimenting with aluminum extrusions Howe designed a road case that was optimal for art in transit and the ArtCrate was born.

“So we now we fabricate these specialty road cases that snugly fit frames and other art objects providing superior protection while saving 30% on shipping bills.” Says Howe. While Curatorial Assistance also offers cost-effective plywood Reusable Economy and Standard Museum crates beginning at $300 and $400 respectively, they also offer Standard and custom ArtCrates beginning at $599. “The construction we use is based on the specific needs of the art,” says Mellon. “So we can offer a truly wide variety of options in all our crate products.” Many of the ArtCrates also double as long-term storage solutions, and have features that include butterfly-latch lid locks, rubber grip handles, polyurethane foam lining, and impact resistant fiberglass/plywood walls. Curatorial Assistance builds their own frames and crates on the premises. “Our testers are the museum registrars who receive incoming work and who are the official ‘art safety police,’” Howe notes. ”After sorting out our startup problems by building our products in-house, its quite gratifying to sometimes get fan mail from registrars.”

Fine Art Presentations
Curatorial Assistance’s distinguished clientele includes a wide variety of artists such as Paul McCarthy, Andrea Zittel, Arthur Drooker, Mark Laita, Marissa Roth, Rankin, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Peter Beard and Robert Weingarten. “Our artists love our capability of mounting and framing extremely large works, up to about the size of a two-car garage door,” says Howe. Institutional clients include the J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, the Norton Simon Museum, the Huntington Library and Art Galleries, and the Pasadena Museum of California Art. They do all the framing for the best photo galleries in Los Angeles, including the Fahey-Klein Gallery. “We like to help everyone, but at the same time, we’re not FastFrame. Our niche is high-end, fine art presentation, but we’ll apply the same aesthetics to family photos,” Mellon adds.

“We also frame the work of a great many dead photographers,” says Howe, “Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Bill Brandt, André Kértesz and you know, none have never complained, not once!”

Curatorial Assistance owns the estate of British-German born photographer, E.O. Hoppé (1878-1972), a contemporary of Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand and Walker Evans. They are working on a long-term publishing and exhibition program to bring this former household name back to prominence. “In the 1920s, he was the most famous photographer in the world,” Howe explains. With W. W. Norton, they have published two books of Hoppé’s work and plan a total of at least eight more volumes. “Each book will contain about 200 images,” states Howe. “Ansel Adams said that an excellent crop for any photographer would be to make about 12 good photographs in one year. That would give you about 500 in a 40-year career. In a few years when we are done, Hoppé will be the only photographer in photo history with over 2,000 really great photographs to his name. I don’t know any other photographer who has that much good work! We are very excited about this special project.”

So whether they making one frame for an artist or a redesigning a museum exhibit in Tanzania on the edge of the Serengeti desert (a project for the Getty Conservation Institute), “The thrill of what we do is to make other people look good,” says Howe. Mellon adds, “The most exciting thing for me is being involved with artists and helping enhance the experience of their work.”

For more information on Curatorial Assistance, Inc., visit www.curatorial.com.


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