Ramblings on Tidying Up & Hoarding Supplies

Spring cleaning extends all the way into the realm of museum education, it seems. For the past few weeks, I've been making steady progress on cleaning, reorganizing, and condensing the museum's inventory. I've mostly been doing this to make materials more accessible when creating prototypes or gathering supplies for programs as well as to minimize clutter on workspaces. It's my biggest pet peeve to have so many materials and not have an organization system where things are easily located and clearly labeled to make the inventory process much smoother.

The most significant changes I've made while at the Kimbell has been working in the main studio space. One of the first things that I did at the start of my internship was to organize the lower cabinets and recycle small paper scraps and organize larger scraps into plastic bags and into Sterilite containers. While it took me nearly a day to sort through the drawers, matching like paper together and getting rid of scraps that were unusable, the immediate improvement to the organization system was apparent.

These past weeks have been focused on tackling the other areas of the studio, starting with the paper cabinets. Papers are constantly being taken in and out of the cabinet and so materials pile up in ways that make it look messy and difficult to find what you were looking for. It only took me about a day to reorganize all their drawing paper and the majority of the colored paper sheets; this made it way easier to see the inventory on how many sheets of paper were available and made a system going forward for returning materials to. The same thing was done to the verticle file cabinets that stored drawing pads, large sheets of paper, and cutting mats. I made a labeled card where things go back to so create a system that made sense and materials could be easily located. The other cabinets have been slowly worked through, reorganizing printmaking materials and clay tools, but there is one area that I just haven't been able to make any progress in.

The Kahn workroom is where all excess supplies are kept as well as where inventory goes to die, in my opinion. Since it is so far removed from the studio spaces, materials that are placed in there tend to be forgotten about as they are infrequently used and buried beneath newly moved items. Although there has been some headway organizing specific shelves containing fabric or paper scraps, it is impossible to try and organize the entire space, even if all three interns were working in there. There is just simply too many things that are placed in the workroom that go unused and pile up as they are forgotten about.

This issue of hoarding supplies is something that I've seen during my time student teaching. Many of the art educators I worked with had supply closets that were literally falling out whenever the door was opened and finding things was next to impossible. While I was able to tidy up small things here or there during off-periods, there was no way for me to help organize all the excess materials. It wouldn't ever be until the last two weeks of my teaching rotation when I took over the classroom full time that any progress would be made. Now, the cooperating teacher would have the whole day to go through the closet, throw away materials that were never being used and had no immediate applications. After culling the unnecessary things, then the remaining materials could be inventoried and reorganized in a way that made sense and maximized space.

The inventory lists are outdated now because there are so many things left in the workroom. There are so many things in the Kahn workroom that I don't believe that are ever going to be used again, such as the reception booklets from the Piano buildings opening years ago. Some things have too few of to be usable in a program or are too small to feasibly use yet I cannot get approval to throw things away. Seeing this makes me yearn for an inventory sheet that is shared among employees to track materials that are bought and used to make sure that excess materials aren't being ordered as well as using what is currently in stock. This would definitely require a team effort to go through all the studios and supply closets and get an accurate inventory on the materials available as well as getting rid of things that wouldn't be reused in the future, but I think it would streamline program development to know what is currently on hand as well as freeing up the budget for other things.