What it is
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art runs art installations across a working public campus. Each one has three parties with different masters and no shared chain of command: the artist answers to the vision, the fabricator to the budget, and the museum's facilities department to the building and the public walking through it. A museum cannot quietly redo a mistake; a damaged piece or a missed opening happens in public.
For two years, from May 2016 to May 2018, Fowler held a standing, unpaid owner's representative seat on those installations. In the middle of the term, Tellus Build bid, fabricated and installed one of them: María Elena González's interactive sculpture Magic Carpet/Home, for the exhibition Home, So Different, So Appealing.
What Common Ground did
- Mapped the three parties before touching a schedule and wrote down who decides what: the artist on the vision, the fabricator on the fabrication budget, facilities on the building and its loads, and the seat on the schedule against the opening, on disputes between the parties, and on the sign-off for public safety and the accessible path.
- Bid the sculpture at a normal rate in March 2017 and built exactly what was drawn, on the museum's hours and site rules.
- Treated the choreography around the build, the restricted hours, the site discipline and the sequencing around other crews on campus, as the real deliverable.
- Held the one call the seat is accountable for: nothing opens until facilities walks the piece against a checklist and signs.
- Reviewed bids and change orders on roughly fifteen other campus installations, unsupervised, with nobody from the museum in the room, and kept the seat unpaid on purpose, since a fee from any of the three budgets would have ended its independence.
- Let the seat close with its term in May 2018.
Results
- Magic Carpet/Home was installed in June 2017 for Home, So Different, So Appealing.
- CODAworx selected it for its Interactive Art issue, announced in August 2017 in a release carrying Fowler's statement crediting the artist's vision and the museum's co-curators.
- Coordination across roughly fifteen other campus installations for the full term, with no headcount added and no paid line opened.
- A written charter for the seat: decision rights, the walkthrough gate before any opening, an independent engineer when two estimates disagree, and the one condition on pay that makes the seat hold.
External links
- Public data room: LACMA data room
Public record
- PRWeb: Tellus Design + Build constructs sculpture for new exhibition at LACMA (June 2017)
- PRWeb: Tellus Build project selected for CODAworx Interactive Art issue (August 2017)
At a glance
| Project type | Owner's representation and fabrication |
|---|---|
| Industry | Museums and public art |
| Seat | Volunteer Owner's Representative, May 2016 to May 2018; general contractor on the Magic Carpet/Home sculpture through Tellus Build |
| Ran through | Tellus Build |
| Dates | May 2016 to May 2018 |
| Duration | Two years |
| Location | Los Angeles |
| Public data room | LACMA data room |
| Related pages | Tellus Design + Build, Jesse Fowler |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |