High Museum Project: Government shut-down!

A couple weeks ago I announced that I will be working for the next four-five months on hand-painting over 450 plates for an installation in the lobby at the High Museum in Atlanta. Last week I received one palette of plates from a domestic distributor that wasn't quite enough for the entire project, so I was waiting on the rest of the plates coming in a shipping container from the factory in Italy in late October. I was still going to be short on the number of plates for the project, but the curators at the museum were ok with making the overall composition a bit smaller to accommodate the available plates and everything seemed to be on track after lots of phone calls and re-working of art...then came the government shut down.

Last week, I was listening to NPR on my way to dropping my daughter at pre-school and the segment on the radio was discussing the backlog of shipments getting through customs in the US due to lack of personnel to process shipments in customs. Normally this wouldn't have concerned me, but I realized that my project was going to be further delayed by a shipment being stuck in customs! The possibility of not getting the plates I needed in time was unfortunate...what to do?

Thankfully the distributor I have been working with was well stocked with enough inventory of an alternative plate that will do the trick and I can stick to the original design. I write this as I await the second shipment of all 500 plates coming on a freight truck this afternoon. Little did I know that my project could be affected by the shut-down!

Also, I want to officially say a huge thank you to AMACO for supporting this project! Much of the glaze and underglaze that will go into making this large painting happen is coming from my friends at AMACO.