This is my first time working with an institution as large as YBCA, and it’s been really neat.

Over the past few days, I’ve been installing my work for Galleon Trade: Bay Area Now 5 Edition (which opens Thursday, Sept. 4) with help from the lead preparators, Justin Limoges and Justin Wyckoff. They’ve been friendly, calm, helpful and meticulous. YBCA’s also got a on-call, kick-ass installation team, which includes the fabulous Tammy Kim, who have transformed the Terrace Gallery in no time at all.

I often exhibit at spaces with fewer resources, and I am happy to bring my own tools and install my own work, but working with YBCA has been a welcome change of pace. For example, my kinetic sculpture needed to be mounted on YBCA’s 14-feet-high ceiling and I’m not really a fan of heights, so I was looking forward to handing that off to a professional! It was nice enough that someone would go up on a ladder to hang my heavy, unwieldy sculpture of moving parts, but I wasn’t prepared for the moment when Justin took out a tape measure to get the baseboard just 1/8″ over, making it parallel to the lighting track. That kind of obsessive attention to detail is usually exhibited by artists installing their own art, so to have it automatically extended to my work, even as a zillion other installation details need to be attended to, made me feel extremely grateful for this exhibition opportunity.

Thanks to the hard work of the installation team (and their sacrificed holiday weekends!), the opening is three days away but the gallery is already looking great. Megan’s site-specific installation is looking great, and works by the paired photographers (MM Yu and Gina Osterloh) and painters (Johanna Poethig and Norberto Roldan) are looking really cohesive.

Hope you can come see Galleon Trade!
Opening: Thursday, Sept 4, 5-8 pm, YBCA

Cheers to the unsung heroes of the art world.