Open Forum

Hello all,

I am working on a loan agreement for a exhibition that will become a traveling exhibition after it is on display at my museum. For the loan agreement, what language has anyone used to say that the loan period is for the duration of the traveling exhibition tour and that the owner of the artifacts gives the museum the right to loan the items to a institution that rents the exhibition? Thank you.

Hi Clayton,

At my previous museum, we had ramped up our traveling exhibit program and were regularly initiating and touring shows to multiple venues. As the registrar, it was my job to negotiate the loan contracts for those. 

Feel free to reach out directly if you have other questions or if something doesn't make sense, but for the moment I'll stick to just the basics. In negotiations with each lender, we set the loan term for the entire duration of the exhibit which covered all venues. I always gave the lender the names of the venues as well as contact names and numbers in case the lender wanted to reach out directly, and I provided the show dates as well as expected travel dates for each installation. I requested facility reports from all host venues and reviewed them to make sure that our own pieces, as well as the loaned material, would be safe there (this was done before we finalized the exhibit contract with the host venue). The lender's only loan contract was with our museum, not each host venue. 

The exhibit contracts we negotiated with each host venue had very similar language to that in our regular loan contracts about care of collections, such as security, handling, lighting, climate, and so on. It also included requirements for notice of any damages or loss, and pre-approvals of any variations of display or shipping methods that might risk the artifact's stability. Each exhibition contract contained the loan dates from our museum to the host, including travel and display. Toward the end of each show, hosts were provided with the next host's contact information in order to re-label crates to ready them for shipment. Our museum handled all shipping logistics, working with each host to arrange for dates, times, and facility details like loading docks or security gates. When we traveled these shows, host fees included the shipping costs and a prorated portion of our staff time for coordinating the loans and creating the show.

The last several years I was at that museum, we had become accredited through AAM and I noticed that helped us significantly with larger museums as we negotiated loans both for our site and for loans that would travel. That said, we still had to provide our own facility report and only once was I asked to provide reports for the other venues. 

Hopefully some of this is helpful! Again, feel free to reach out directly if you'd like!

Best,

Angela Stanford