In 2004, the Jan Martense Schenck House was completely dismantled to make room for the construction of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The house was disassembled by the conservation firm Traditional Line, Ltd. and stored for a brief period before being re-erected in its new location on our Fourth Floor. The Museum’s conservators, designers and installation teams are still working on finishing touches and it will re-open to the public in mid-July 2007. The house is a local favorite around here, so it will be nice to see it go back on view soon.

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One of the great things about my job is coordinating materials for the website. For Schenck, we had four hours of video footage from the 2004 de-installation, so I created this short slideshow of the de-installation process using iMovie. I personally found it interesting to see how much video quality has changed in the past three years. This was filmed on what was considered a high-end consumer camera back in 2004, but you can see it’s pretty grainy and we’ve kept the images small to avoid further distortion. Still, it serves as a pretty good record of the process of taking the house apart for storage. If you are curious to know more about the de-installation process, David Owen wrote this Talk of the Town article for the September 2006 issue of the New Yorker.

The 2007 re-installation was also well documented and with much newer technology, so we’ll be posting some great shots from that process in the next month.