Hundreds of paintings resembling an intricate game of Tetris sit tightly squeezed together on giant racks. Endless rows of porcelain statutes are locked in temperature-controlled cabinets, and ancient wooden masks radiate a musty, earthen smell.
This is the Utah Museum of Fine Arts basement, where the majority of the museum’s 20,000 objects reside. While closed to the general public, students and researchers can tour this area.
Shelly Threadgill, collections manager, said that while the museum lists all the artworks it owns online and many have photographs accompanying the listings, she likes that UMFA offers a chance for students to see pieces currently off display in person.
“I feel like a photograph is never really going to capture the feeling of the piece,” Threadgill said. “It looks different: It’s bigger than you thought it would be [or] it’s smaller than you thought it would be.”
To apply for a basement tour, students, teachers or researchers submit a collections visit request through the UMFA’s website at least two weeks in advance of the visit. Visits are limited to 15 people, with larger groups divided and rotated between the collections and the upstairs galleries.
While some teachers may not care to go through the process of applying for a tour and some students may not want to walk through the crowded halls to see a few pieces of art work, come next year this may be the only way to experience the UMFA’s collections. Beginning next semester, the museum will close for about a year for structural updates.
Threadgill said the basement will not be affected by the construction, and the museum may offer more tours to compensate for the lack of upstairs galleries.
“A lot of students don’t really understand what goes into putting on a show for a museum,” Threadgill said. “I think it’s really exciting to have a chance to kind of show the student what it is that we do and kind of a lot of behind-the-scenes of what goes into putting on a show.”
The basement tours begin in the staging area, a cement-floored room where the pieces are either prepped for storage or display. Mindy Wilson, director of marketing and public relations, said the tours show another side to museum work.
“The students who are interested in art and art history think that the only jobs in that world are curators,” Wilson said. “[But] there’s like a whole other way to have a career in museums — that’s super fascinating.”
From the staging area, the tour goes through temporary storage and then the four main rooms, where the colorful art stands in stark contrast to the plain rooms and walls. The art is divided by type (3-D objects, painting, textiles, etc.) and then by the material they’re made out of.
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