The Art of the Preparator

June 4 - September 24, 2022

Preparators are the workers at an art museum who do the physical labor necessary for works of art to be shown in a gallery. They take artworks out of storage, get them ready to be seen, install them, deinstall them, and return them to storage. When done well, their work escapes notice, disappearing so that art may appear, which means that every exhibition of art is also an exhibition of preparators’ overlooked labor.

In The Art of the Preparator, Mallory Sanders and James Culbertson reference tropes of the conceptual art movement and its conceptualist predecessors to transform the materials and techniques of their daily work as two of the preparators at Southern Utah Museum of Art into artistic installations that highlight rather than conceal their ordinarily hidden labor.