Confessions of a Gallery Guard: The Press Shows Up…A Lot
You don’t always know when, either.
Okay, so it’s not like the press was showing up every day.
But, y’know, when you come out of a few years in foodservice and retail, any press presence seems like a lot. Being a small museum, we didn’t get a ton of press, but occasionally we would comp admission for those with press badges, and when exhibits would open, we would usually have a few local news channels show up with a small camera crew.
Being the ones downstairs, we were usually the first to make contact with these crews, which was never really a problem — we would just call upstairs for whoever in administration was the most appropriate person for them to talk to, and that was that. Those who were writers would go about the galleries like any other visitor except that we would take their contact info for the communications department, and the camera crews were usually very mindful and luckily tended to not show up during busy hours. Sometimes our director would do a walk-through with the crew, answering questions and promoting the current exhibit.
Generally speaking, if there was only a staff member (or a staff member with a guest such as a gallerist, artist, etc.) in the galleries, we didn’t have to watch them. Camera crews were on more of a…
