Perhaps you're admiring the purposeful brushstrokes, or maybe you're wondering what it was about this man that inspired van Gogh to paint him over and over again. You're probably not envisioning the portrait packed into a wooden crate inside the cargo bay of a 747. But Irene Taurins has. As senior registrar at the PMA, she's responsible for monitoring the storage, transport and borrowing of valuable artworks. Registrars are the art traffic controllers of the museum world, the vital support system that helps curators and other staffers oversee the permanent collection and realize exhibitions.
Every exhibition begins with an idea, sometimes several years in advance.
Which is why, says Taurins, registrars have to know where everything in the collection is at any given moment. A daunting task considering PMA has more than 300,000 objects. But with two staff registrars, two associate registrars, two assistant registrars and an administrative assistant, Taurins has plenty of help. If the work is not in the collection, the curator makes the first contact with a potential lender, requesting the work and sending a loan agreement. The agreement is sent back to the registrar, who then contacts the lender to confirm or negotiate the specifics, such as how the piece will be shipped and who will carry the insurance.