What is the afterlife of an artwork? After a piece’s creation, it emerges briefly into public view, and—if fortunate—is acquired and shown again elsewhere. But if the work is valuable enough, its fate is often more static: soon after its creation (in the case of contemporary art) or its sale (in the case of works by a deceased artist), a painting or sculpture may be sealed in a crate and consigned to long-term storage, disappearing from sight for years, if not decades. And so alongside the art market, the fine art storage industry has expanded significantly, with buyers, dealers and museums not only in the U.S. but around the world acquiring more and more objects that people and even institutions no longer have room for.
The length of time artworks remain in crates at storage facilities varies widely, “from a few weeks to decades,” Thomas Burns, chief operating officer at fine art storage company Fortress Storage, told Observer. The shorter-term leases tend to be for clients “who are in a period of transition in their lives; people move, die, get divorced,” and need a place to put things until life settles. Other art investors “hope that pieces increase in value in years to come” and will let them sit in crates until that time arrives. And some place artworks in freeports—custom-free storage sites in the U.S. and elsewhere that allow buyers to avoid sales and use taxes as well as tariffs.
The two largest players in the fine art storage industry are UOVO, which launched in 2014 with one 280,000-square-foot site in Long Island City and now operates thirty locations across the country totaling 1.5 million square feet, and Crozier, which has two million square feet of storage space across forty sites worldwide.
SEE ALSO: What Collectors Really Want from Galleries, According to Artsy’s Casey Lesser
They offer a solution for a world of too much, beginning with artists who increasingly work at a large scale to align with the demands of international art fairs, where bigger is de rigueur. These larger artworks require commercial galleries to maintain expansive showrooms for temporary exhibitions. After the show, “dealers have to store it, then they sell it to collectors who have to store it, then they donate it to museums that have to store it,” New York City art advisor Todd Levin told Observer.
Museums, foundations, gallery owners and private collectors are the primary clients of these facilities. Collectors make up the bulk of art storage clients, but museums provide the greatest volume of objects to store. And it’s worth noting that the need for storage is a broader cultural phenomenon, of which fine art storage is just one segment. There are currently more than 52,000 self-storage facilities across the U.S., with the rate of new openings rising sharply, from an average of 439 per year between 2010 and 2019 to 735 per year between 2010 and 2023. (The pandemic boosted the self-storage sector.) Americans spend more than $45 billion annually to rent storage lockers by the week, month or year.
Fine art storage facilities differ from your local storage locker in several ways—the first being that they only accept objects of long-term value. “We don’t allow other types of things, like mattresses,” Nir Eshed, head of operations at Mana Contemporary, told Observer. “They might come with bed bugs and roaches,” which could infest the entire facility. And at $30 to $60 per square foot—the rate Mana charges clients for storage units—it’s probably cheaper to just buy a new mattress anyway.
Cost is another differentiator. According to the Journal of Consumer Research, the average monthly cost of a standard commercial five-by-five-foot self-storage unit is $90. At Fortress Storage, the lowest-priced vault is sixteen square feet priced at $250 per month. At the higher end, Fortress charges up to $10,000 per month for half a floor. Prices for art storage “range widely, based on the size of the space, the term of the lease and the market,” Caroline Page-Katz, chief operating officer and president of UOVO, told Observer. “New York City is a different market from Denver. There is more space to house a fine art storage facility in Denver than in Manhattan, which raises the price there.”
Prices also vary depending on whether one rents a private room or stores crated objects in shared spaces. Some artworks are physically small but, once packed and crated, occupy considerable volume because crates are never stacked to prevent accidents from falls. That means even a modest number of works can require a relatively large and more expensive area.
But what actually makes facilities like Fortress, UOVO and Crozier so much more expensive than self-storage units is that these buildings are climate-controlled to museum standards (70°F, 50 percent relative humidity) and feature comprehensive security protocols. Many, though not all, have round-the-clock staffing to deter break-ins and immediately address any system failures. Fine art storage facilities are almost always single-use buildings, meaning they do not share space with unrelated tenants and are equipped with backup generators in case of power outages. (Self-storage sites, by contrast, are more akin to garages and susceptible to extreme temperature fluctuations and security breaches.)
Private collectors often receive reduced premiums on fine art insurance when storing works off site. “Insurance companies don’t like art in houses that only have monitoring systems,” Levin explained.
That isn’t to say accidents and thefts never occur at fine art storage sites—only that they are rare or at least rarely reported. A fire at Momart’s east London warehouse in 2004 destroyed hundreds of works by Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili and other notable artists. A fire at Artex’s warehouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 2005 damaged and destroyed quite a lot of art. A 38-ton Richard Serra sculpture went missing in Madrid in 1990 after being placed in a fine art storage facility that went into receivership in 1998; the museum that owned it didn’t inquire about it until 2006. In another case, Fine Art Logistics in London mistakenly disposed of a 1984 sculpture by Anish Kapoor. And in 2005, two employees at Fine Arts Express in St. Louis were caught stealing $4 million in artworks, which they attempted to fence through third parties.
Security is a key concern at fine art storage sites, not only because of the high value of the contents but because the spaces are hubs of activity. Gallery owners come and go—sometimes showing works to potential buyers in on-site viewing rooms, other times simply exchanging crates. Museum curators rotate artworks between storage and their institutions’ galleries. Collectors or their staff may visit to photograph pieces or digitize records. “We have rooms for photo shoots and can custom build facilities for clients,” James Hendy, senior vice president and general manager at Crozier, told Observer. “We can also provide digitizing and archival services for clients, if they like.”
Crozier and UOVO employ specially trained art handlers to pack, unpack and move works for collectors, dealers and institutions. Their climate-controlled vans and trucks are deployed during hurricanes, wildfires or other emergencies, and for less dramatic relocations like summer moves. And that brings us to the final differentiating factor. At facilities like those, storing art is only the beginning.
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