Our task was to set up our shops in a new museum being built, take possession of the artifacts the museum proposed to show, make mounts and armatures for the artifacts, and install them in the museum cases.
This work requires museum quality fabrication in brass, steel, wood, textiles. acrylic, and paper; as well as rigging and lifting skills, and equipment sufficient to moving and staging priceless works of art and artifact. Since 1982, SMS has mounted the collections of 35 major museums, and countless smaller exhibits and private collections and displays.
The transition from museum services to personal work- my personal transformation from serving artifacts to creating art- has occuried between 2010 and this moment. My company, Sanders Museum Services, helped to secure and protect some 100,000 artifacts of great cultural import in our 30 years of service to National and Municipal museums. Most of our work was with pre-industrial artifacts backwards to the Paleolithic era.
In the course of this self imposed service to History, I learned much about Human process by observing the logic and execution of my forbearers in the creation of tools to make tools to make tools. I was blessed with the opportunity to intimately examine every possible kind of human-made and natural artifact closely, over an extended period.
The closing of our family museum services firm brought with it the opportunity to reinvent myself with a new set of challenges as:
For my entire adult life, I have operated a high quality design/fabricate studio, serving Architects and designers in the Washington/Baltimore area. Sanders Design has served as our home base shop, providing design/build backup for the museum services; and functioning independently as an architectural acoutrement fabricator for Architacts in the Washington DC area. We provided detailing and custom fabrication of designer furniture and lighting for more than 25 years, and were published in Architectural Digest and several other significant design periodicals.
All the work here was done in our shops either by me personally or with my employees.