Juried Art Show Return Shipping Policies

[Kristen Ruck]

I am in charge of a large juried fine art show and feedback on return shipping policies from other museums that have juried art shows.

Let me wrap more detail around the scope of the shipping issue. We ship about 75 out of 350 works back to the artists following the show. Our present return policy is that the museum returns all unsold works COD using a shipper of the museums choice. We do not allow exceptions to this policy, such as artists with shipping account numbers. Our Curator of Collections states the following reasons for this policy:

1.The museum does not own a truck/van to safely transport art to a shipper.
2.The museum does not want to incur additional expense by having various shippers pick up at the museum.
3.To remedy lack of safe transportation we use a local business that has a trailer to safely transport the work to his business at which shippers have scheduled pick ups.
4.The intermediate business will not pick up art unless it is COD so they have a small profit.
5.The Curator of Collections prefers COD is used so she does not have to deal with misplaced return shipping forms or the extra work produced from artists who initially never sent their return shipping form.

My concern is that in this tight economy with shipping rates going up we are going to lose artists and their submission revenue due to our shipping policy. I need to know in detail what other juried art show return policies are so I know what changes to recommend.

Sincerely,

Kristen Ruck
Curator of Arts & Education
Kristenruck_owm@hotmail.com