The museum preparator’s shop is located in a Borgesian poured cement industrial building, larger on the inside than out, tucked under the tangled, vulcanized ribbon of three highways converging and swooping at the snarled edge of downtown, where the city needed to expand but didn’t have enough room.

This is the workshop of the artist craftsman who, solo and somewhat hermit-y except when help has to be hired, prepares objects and their display mounts for top tier museums and institutions around the world. In business for over 20 years, he receives every kind of relic and museum object, from the bottled soul of Confucius, to half ton carvings of ferocious Persian war horses, and medieval hatchets that are still screaming in non-fictional bloody horror, plus the endless supply of African masks that caught the buying world by storm in the 1970’s that the old non-archival mounting epoxies are just now flaking and cracking and going all to hell.  Accumulations of the solo workshop, business papers on the drill press, commingling with treasures like pieces of the Wrigley Building blocking the office door, half built amps, most of a seismograph.

There is a locked object room, and works in mid-process at nearly every station in the studio.  Every kind of welding around a dream welding table, all the lines available pull down from overhead like the gas station, with files and blocks and clamps all under a brightly lit, vented hood, and there’s pipes holding linear feet of hanging tools, saws and wrenches, and a garment mannequin because sometimes there’s armor, or Florence Nightingale’s petticoat, or Lee Harvey Oswald’s shirt, and a large sand blaster box with the reach-in gloves, freestanding machines bolted to the floor for stability, a large fold-out sewing box with threads of every color seam tape and a stitch ripper, and two drill presses, two!, and this time I saw he had made himself a sort of welded saw horse with rings and hooks to hold an entire sanding center at the ready, all the several drills and attachments and bits waiting, nearly handing themselves to the maker.

As usual our meeting was a work-through, half-sandwich lunch interrupted by unavoidable developments, this time an arrived shipment of 4 enormous architectural terra cotta slabs that had adorned the facade of an 1880’s theater on the north side. Each gargantuan slab had its own wooden pallet and gravitational pull, and we spent at least 40 minutes getting them from dock to shop using a pallet jack and the creaky 1920’s freight elevator where everyone has to always say “watch your ankles” before operating.