Name: Bruce MacGilpin
Position: President, The Icon Group Inc.
Years: 22
Chances are, at some point deliverymen have brought clothing, computer equipment, furniture, etc. to your home. But any of the Icon Group staff are at your door, they’re probably delivering a valuable work of art. (Icon was among the art handling and moving companies responsible for transporting works from all over the world to the recent Art Chicago exposition.) Behind the Scenes talked with company founder MacGilpin about how it’s done.
Q. How do you prepare a work of art for shipping?
A. We use soft packing, which means protective materials [such as] bubble wrap, cardboard, Tyvek. Often people crate. Each crate has to be custom packed. It’s a series of cushioning batons and barriers to put every piece in place. After some protective material has been put on the object, the handler is important. You can’t bump up against things . . . You don’t move fast. There’s no rocket science to it, it’s common sense. You’re always moving through openings and around sharp objects cautiously.
Q. Do you work with larger works of art or works in materials that require additional attention?
A. The contemporary art scene is by nature often experimental, consisting of just about anything you can think of. We have moved heavy sculpture, and bronze sculpture. Although we weren’t involved in moving it, I have seen automobiles used as sculpture. There are multimedia exhibits, [and] we sometimes get them. There can be very large paintings, there can be very heavy items. We handle all manner of things.
Q. What’s the price range of the pieces you’ve handled?
A. It is a very wide range. We’ve handled multimillion-dollar pieces, $2 [million], $3 million and then some, but the bulk of the work I’d put between $5,000 and $50,000.
Q. What are some of the more memorable deliveries you’ve made?
A. We just [delivered] a small Picasso painting. We picked it up at O’Hare, because it was coming in internationally, and delivered it to Sioux City, Iowa, for a private client. The insurance people may require an armed security accompaniment. We’ve gone from Chicago to New York with two armed security guards in a chase vehicle behind the truck. . . . I’ve hung an $8 million painting from the bottom of an elevator. The painting was large, the elevator small, the client in the penthouse. People buy paintings that are smaller than the elevator, so it’s not uncommon to ride on top of the elevator. If you’re in the penthouse, that’s on top, so in this case we couldn’t. We had to hang the painting off the bottom of the elevator and get to the floor we wanted that way. There was a 150-foot drop below an $8 million painting. It was a French Impressionist painting on an unusually large canvas.
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Q. Who are your customers?
A. The biggest clients you have and the one dictating the field would be the museums. They set the standards for the hanging, and they tend to give you a lot of business. They’re demanding. You have to have specialized trucks, trained employees. We do work with a lot of private clients. The auction houses are very big business. They need handlers to bring all the objects that are going up for auction to or from their place.
Q. What’s your own relationship with art? Do you like it or collect it yourself?
A. I got into this backhanded. I was an art student [at] Northern Illinois University. After I finished my graduate work there I was in the gallery program. As I worked there, I realized they really need some help in the packing and shipping side. We did a very interesting exhibit at NIU of puppets, shadow puppet, marionettes, all different kinds of puppets. The puppeteer threw them into boxes and trunks and drove from California, and I thought, this guy needs help. So I actually made him some crates, because I was concerned these great puppets were going to be damaged. That’s what sparked in my mind the need for this type of service. Personally, I tend to like contemporary art most, and my wife has a contemporary art gallery [Fassbender Stevens Gallery], I’m very involved in working at the gallery as well. Rather than making art, I do it vicariously by seeing and it and meeting a lot of different artists.