b'above:The museum prep team: Matt Cummings, assistant preparator; Molly Hoisington, assistant preparator; and Nik Asikis, chief preparatorchannels in the ceiling. We drilled exploratory holeshanging exhibitions and working more closely with artists. in the sheetrock to investigate, and even used littleI came to SCMA in 2015 as a long-term temp after the27cameras to look around, but no luck. So we moved togallery reinstallationone of my first p ojects involved Plan B and ended up anchoring it in four places, eachstretching the Frank Stella mural, Damascus Gatewith four toggle bolts. In the shop, we tested how much(Variation III), in the middle of the Art After 1950 Gallery weight it takes to rip a single toggle bolt from a piecewhile things were still under construction since, given its of sheetrockyou can imagine what that looked like.size, it wouldnt be able to be moved in after the fact. Some people thought we went overboard but I dontUsually we do a lot of work in the shop beforehand, butthink so. You cant take chances when youre hangingits not always possible. You just have to take it as it comes.something so heavy. Traveling exhibitions require us to figu e outMatthew Cummings, assistant preparatorhow to make it all work in our space, and that involvesPlastic Entanglements was a challenge in that there some negotiation and creativity. Plastic Entanglementswere lots of bits and pieces to keep track ofsome that had another piece made of hundreds of small plasticvisitors might touch and damage, others that were very circles that needed to fill a wall end to endthe speci - fragile. There were times we would see a small piece of cations were variable, and so the wall could be any sizesomething on the floor and walk a ound the exhibition as long as it was filled with these perfectly placed and trying to see if anything was missing only to realize it spaced circles. They were .97 inches each, which made thewas just random debris.math a little challenging, but we did it. Forty feet of it.Art handling is very deliberative work that I started off studying computer science but endedinvolves a lot of assessing and reassessing and trying up with a BA in classics. After college I worked in an artagain. It can be something simple, like trying to level gallery for about 14 years, first framing, packing and a painting and the one place you need to put the nail crating and then switching into another role that had mehas a screw in the wall behind it. Or sometimes its more'