Retrieve: Inside the "Icebox"

Presumably, the average museum visitor gives less thought to what it means for a museum to have a “permanent collection” than to the actual art on view. To be brief, what isn’t shown is stored--a much larger percentage of the collection of works remains normally unviewed. And if what’s in storage is “unseen,” then more so is the room itself; USC Fisher Museum’s storage room is a very small space concealed slyly within the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, an ordinary doorway un-announcing to the everyday student-passersby.

Behind these double-doors are a variety of artworks resting within a climate-controlled environment. All along the walls hang paintings, drawings, prints and mixed media works, while framed photographs are shelved on what appears as a tall, black bookcase at the back of the room. Older/larger paintings/works take their residence on sliding metal racks. Pulling out a single rack without knowledge of the collection is as if to uncover a treasure; you’ll find a painted portrait of Lincoln on one, a Warhol screenprint on another.




Sheltered away from the curatorial hand, these undisplayed works seem to hang together in limbo, quietly, un-hierarchically.
Still, there are less-than-treasures here. A “fake” Constable hasn’t been fully restored for its questionable attribution; dented and broken frames have made some older paintings unpresentable; a stack of paintings awaits its departure from the collection; and of course, not every work can have a fitting place in a theme show.

For my purposes, in bringing out other landscapes to display that were not chosen in Four Rooms and a View, there was initially less “choosing” involved in raiding storage for landscapes, as the concept arose simply because my visits to the storage room made it evident that the museum holds a good number of them. But “raiding” is too strong a word here: limitations of display prevented me from getting as many works for show as possible—some are currently in too poor condition to be displayed safely, others on loan in temporary locations or off-campus. But the retrieval of stored works from the permanent collection is never an arbitrary decision; after all, works chosen for display must have some value to them.

-Raylene Galarze