Below is the complete budget for the art exhibition These Days, which is on display at Mass MoCA through February 28, 2010. The exhibition highlights six different contemporary artists whose work reflects “a sense of both wonderment and elegy.” The exhibition covers 17,850 square feet, throughout ten galleries.

The individual projects range in media and scope: video, sculpture, installation, painting, animation. The exhibit includes four immersive installations: a “chapel to the twenty-first century” that features weeping saints, a safari-style soundscape with fake trees and camo netting, and a cynlindrical room in which the viewer watches a 360-degree video cyclorama and a video projection. Two artists provided work that was pre-existing. The costs for those projects are thus much less than for the four works specially commissioned and fabricated for this show.

This is an unusual budget even for a small museum. Mass MoCA dedicates its resources to working directly with artists, rather than just moving paintings, sculptures, and video from trucks to the gallery space. As the numbers below show, the Mass MoCA installations required the ingenuity and dedication of the entire musuem staff. Keeping overhead costs as low as possible is still one of the advantages of the small contemporary museum; less than 7 percent of the total budget went toward the “general expenses” of the museum.

—M. Rebekah Otto

General Expenses $7,902

Meals and entertainment $612.90

Part-time museum overhires for installation $650.00

Postage $66.03

Express mail $17.87

General shipping $35.92

Graphics and photography $76.41

Gallery guide printing costs $4,310.00

Operating and office supplies $1,980.00

Paint supplies, general signage, and gallery touch-ups $129.97

Regional travel (museum staff) $22.90

Project 1 $42,810.20

BELOW SEA LEVEL by PAWEL WOJTASIK 35′ 1″ diameter, 12″ tall cylindrical cyclorama with 8 interlaced LCD projectors

Materials $1,261.20

Drywall $500.20

1,308 square feet of 1⁄4″ flexible USG drywall to build the walls of the cyclorama

Latex paint—5 gallons $210.00

Plywood $96.00

3 sheets of three-quarter-inch A/C plywood to build the support frame for the cyclorama

Drywall studs $431.00

176 2″ x 4″ x 6″ studs—used to secure interior non-load-bearing structures

Drywall screws $24.00

Videography $3,810.00

Airboat and captains $850.00

4 hours—rented in order to film

Helicopter $1,200.00

2 hours—rented in order to film

Travel and lodging (New Orl.) $1,550.00

Mardi Gras expenses $210.00

360-degree camera $0.00

Borrowed from EMPAC

Projection $24,149.00

Short-throw convex lens projectors $10,024.00

8 Dukane 8763 LCD projectors that have an 18′ image throw, so the projector can be close to the screen

Apple computer $3,850.00

Asis digital-to-analog audio converter $350.00

This converter moves sound from the computer to the amplifier.

Amplifiers $650.00

Speakers $1.000.00

50′ VGA cables $360.00

8 cables at $45 each. VGA cables extend high resolution...