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Why is he writing this blog?

Let me introduce myself by introducing my background. I’ve been a project manager across the art world for the past 35 years. I’ve worked for both commercial and non-profit institutions. I’ve worked for trucking companies, universities, commercial galleries and museums. I’ve had many titles and responsibilities in those 35 years. I’ve been on the trucks and behind the general manager’s desk. I’ve quoted, budgeted, managed and supervised exhibition installations, house moves, estate moves, corporate moves, art-fairs, auction house installations and museum relocations. I’ve managed art storage warehouses and designed them from the ground up. I’ve packed household china and Faberge eggs, Gutenberg bibles and baseball cards. Actually, I’ve packed baseball cards for museums and for a 10-year-old boy who really didn’t want to move away from New York. I’ve been a project manager much longer than those 35 years if I count the years I spent learning about profit percentages, margins and risk assessment managing nightclubs and the years I spent in the Navy’s submarine service learning flowchart and chaos theory.  I guess I can trace this back to 1976. That gives me 42 years of experience in project planning. When I moved to NYC in 1989 my first art world job wasn’t on a crew, it was as the head preparator for a major commercial gallery. It was a little frightening and I could only make it work by being hyper-organized. The reason I got that job was because of my earlier experiences trouble shooting submarine software, balancing nightclub budgets and also because I had been a preparator at an artist run “alternative space” and the director of a university gallery.  1989-1990 was a season of complex installation-based art exhibitions for this gallery. There were no rules, no budgeting guidelines and no directions on how to proceed. A picture hanger would have been lost. The owner was looking for someone that hadn’t already developed what he called “the Soho mentality”. Someone who knew how to get results with little money and no guidelines. Someone that could “think outside the box, figure it out and make it work”. That’s what I have been doing for galleries, art-service companies, collectors, artists and museums for the past 30 years, just figuring it out and making it work. Since 1995 I’ve been teaching other people the system that I have used to manage projects. I have successfully trained people within the industry for decades.  I have also been teaching a class on project management for the arts at NYU for the past 10-years.

In 2006 I was hired as the manager for packing, crating, storage, art-service projects and relocations for a major NYC Museum. I still hold that position. I have held the title of operations manager at Marian Goodman Gallery and head preparator for Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. I was the NYC special projects and general manager for Fine Arts Express, Director of The University of Buffalo’s Bethune Gallery and preparator for HALLWALLS.  I have been the project manager for multiple museum and corporate collection relocations including both MoMA relocations. I am an instructor for NYU’s School of Professional Studies where I teach “Object Care and Display for Collections Managers”. In 2014 I received the NYU Teaching Excellence Award for my class. I am currently under contract to write a book on project management for the arts and I am also currently working with NYU to develop an art-handling and project management degree program.

I decided to start this blog as another way to get the information out and as a way to start a discussion. I think everyone in the industry that does what I do has had to figure it out on their own. I know for me large scale estimates didn’t click until I shared site visits with a house-move estimator and watched how he sped through what was taking me forever to calculate. He was kind enough to share his information and it helped me tremendously. Maybe I can do the same for you or maybe you have a different way of doing things. I’d love to hear about it.

I will be posting and testing out information from my NYU class lectures on “Object care and Collection Management”, from my upcoming book, “FINE ART MOVEMENT AND STORAGE-PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR THE VISUAL ARTS: Estimating, Quoting, Budgeting and Managing Art-based Projects” published by ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD and from the object care and collection management degree program that I am developing for NYU.

Sometimes I need to hear it out loud or see it on the page before I can say to myself “well that doesn’t work?”

So here goes, let’s talk.

Chuck Agro, 2018