Secret Places: Chazen's art storage space for non-displayed items

The nearly 1,000 paintings clinging to sliding metal racks create an unexpected collage of subjects and colors in an unassuming storage room on the UW-Madison campus.

Then you're told to look up and notice the giant canvas rolled and suspended from the ceiling — an acrylic painting that stretches to 17 feet when framed.

"You use everything available," said Russell Panczenko, director of the Chazen Museum of Art, as he leads a private tour of this Secret Place — the museum's 4,500 square feet of on-site art storage. "If you have to hang it from the ceiling, you hang it from the ceiling."

Chazen's storage areas contain millions of dollars of artistic works not on display.

"Everywhere you look, stuff!," Panczenko exclaims during the tour of rooms so secret officials ask that we not describe where they're located.

When the museum opened in 1970, the whole collection numbered around 1,500 objects — mostly either paintings or works on paper. Today the collection numbers more than 20,000.

"Now we've not only expanded in the two-dimensional areas, but we've gotten more and more into decorative arts," Panczenko said of the museum's collection that includes furniture, ceramics and glass.

That makes for tight storage at the museum, which has about 22,000 square feet of exhibit space and is located next to the Humanities Building. Only about 3 percent of the collection is displayed, but that number is expected to more than double along with gallery space once the museum's additions opens in the fall.

Paper and prints

We relinquish our pens in the room where the museum's extensive and vulnerable works on paper collection is stored; only pencil is allowed.

Here cabinets are filled with box after box of matted sketches and prints.

"You may not realize it but you're surrounded by 9,000 to 10,000 works on paper," Panczenko said.

This room next to the main office isn't so secret: the museum has for years made it available to art students and classes studying specific pieces in the collection and to the general public by appointment. It alone holds almost half of all the museum's artwork.

A quick elevator ride and we enter the museum's three-dimensional artwork storage room. Here, open metal shelves hold large pieces of art such as furniture and sculptures, and glass-enclosed cabinets store more fragile items like the museum's growing contemporary glass collection.

Shelves for the 15 cabinets are shallow by design — only about 18 inches deep.

"The chances of catching with your sleeve (reaching for a piece of art) is not good museum practice," Panczenko said.

Between these highly organized cabinets, aisles overflow with furniture that doesn't fit on shelves and rolled up artwork with no other home than atop the cases.

In addition to storing the objects themselves, the museum has to store the expensive custom-built wooden packing crates they come in and the pedestals they are displayed on. But most of them are out of the building in a rented warehouse.

"It's not ideal, we don't want it that way, but we have no other space," Panczenko said.

'Wherever things fit'

The final storage room houses the museum's paintings and other framed artwork not currently on exhibit. Racks that reach floor to ceiling roll out on tracks allowing museum staff access to the works.

"We started chronologically, and we ran out of space," said Ann Sinfield, registrar at the Chazen, of how the artwork, which hangs on both sides of the metal screens, is organized. Now artwork is hung by size — "wherever things fit."

Fluorescent lights with special ultraviolet sleeves are strategically spaced so they don't shine directly on the paintings.

Panczenko knows the story behind each of the nearly 1,000 paintings. He moves down the line and pulls out a rack filled with a collection of British watercolors, which he said were at one time "the poor man's way to get big-scale paintings into their homes."

He points to one, "Herod's Feast" by Thomas Matthews Rooke who created the graphite and watercolor in 1895, which shows Salome, daughter of Herodias, dancing for King Herod, who is so delighted he promises her anything she wants

"If you look at it the artist is clearly very interested in historical costume, jewelry. It's a lovely, lovely painting," he said