Curated art placement and installation for the discerning client

Erik Story Art Services is a boutique company specializing in arrangement and installation of the art, photos, framed memorabilia, mirrors, and other treasured wall pieces in finer homes. Like, as one client recently wrote about us in a review, “an interior designer for art”, our curatorial eye for balance, sightlines, flow, cohesion, and more means that your art displays beautifully in your home. Our installation is museum-quality and derives from Erik’s career beginnings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Our installation is detail-driven, combining aesthetic sensibilities with the most professional methods and materials.

We use a 5-step approach to making the display of art in your home amazing.

Going back to 2010, Erik has performed or overseen the arrangement and/or installation of well over 100,000 pieces in about 3,000 homes in the Los Angeles area. For your protection we carry liability insurance and carry worker’s compensation insurance for our employees.

We primarily serve the South Bay but also work extensively on the Westside. But even if you live in another part of the L.A. region, please contact us to discuss.

My approach to art services is shaped by two rather random occurrences: being born into a long line of craftspeople, and my early training at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

My heritage is not an untypical American story: great-grandfather on my mother’s side came here from Sicily over a century ago, found humble work at a pasta company long before Americans called it “pasta”, and on the weekends worked on little houses he had purchased to either rent out or resell at a profit (flipping before it was known as flipping?). My mother’s father worked for almost forty years building sets for Hollywood movies. My father’s father was a southern farmer and carpenter who, folks said, had magic hands that could grow any crop and build anything. His first son (my uncle Vance) went on to a long career as a carpenter helping to construct hundreds of houses in and around L.A. My father worked an office job, but on the side was a magnificent furniture maker hobbyist. My mother, way too late in her life, revealed to me how much she used to love to draw and sketch but never dared dream of a career in the arts.

None of that was anywhere on my mind when, barely out of high school and not taking college seriously, I stumbled into a full-time job at LACMA during a period when they were growing rapidly and needed a few new hands. There, right off the bat, we young turks were given a tremendous amount of responsibility with priceless objects, a fact that still today boggles my mind. I was fortunate enough to work as an art preparator (fancy museum word for “installer”) under department head James H. Kenion, an unsung pioneer in modern museum display techniques who no doubt lost sleep at night after a day of seeing me wield tools anywhere near precious art. But he, miraculously, stayed patient while I, thankfully, had some craftsman genes kick in. 

So too, at the museum, was I lucky to learn about designing art exhibits from some of the great curators of the western art world — luminaries like Stephanie Barron, Maurice Tuchman, George Kuwayama, Pratapaditya Pal, Cecil Fergerson. I also got to meet or work with legendary artists who came to the museum to oversee installations of their art; legends like Sam Francis, John Baldessari, Laddie John Dill, Ken Price, and one of my favorites, Richard Diebenkorn.

I’d like to say that I stayed at LACMA for decades, retired, then went straight into private art services. Instead, I left the museum while still in my twenties. Over the years I did some work with galleries and on private installations, never giving another career in art services much conscious thought. But I think something was tickling at my brain, because just about everywhere I went — restaurants, friends’ homes, hotel lobbies, the dentists’ office — I would look at the art. But I wasn’t looking at it for its own sake. I was noticing whether the pictures were hung right, spaced right, grouped right, and felt right. 

Then about 15 years ago…

…with a small (non-creative) business reeling from the recession, I needed to pivot. With jobs scarce, I placed a few simple ads offering my handy/artsy services and almost immediately began to be called to people’s homes to hang their art. So I developed a few simple rules about how I wanted to treat clients — little things like showing up and keeping promises — and within a few months I was doing nothing but installing art in private homes. The better I got, the more confident I became in making suggestions to clients about placement, grouping, gallery walls, and other design aspects, and several years ago even began to offer placement design independent of installation. Today I typically bring at least assistants, but I am still very much hands-on, at your home for every minute of the work.

Art seems to make people happy, and people entrust me with their art. I am well aware of my good fortune.

Can you offer just the installation? I already know exactly where I want each piece to hang.

Yes, we offer the same museum-quality installation whether or not you use our design services. However, we may have a minimum job size for installation-only assignments. Minimums are smallest for our local service area of the South Bay, and slightly larger for other areas. See our service area chart here.

Can you offer just the arrangement? I already have someone to do the installation or plan to do it myself.

Yes, we can provide arrangement design with or without installation.

Can you design gallery walls and install them?

We design gallery walls, and we install them. Most of the time, we do both. So, we have designed them for clients who want to do the hanging themselves, we have installed them for people who have done the designing themselves (or had their interior designer do the designing), but for most of them we have done the designing and the installing.

What do you charge for your services?

After you let us know about your project we can discuss the pricing for your specific needs. Visits start at $250.

What forms of payment do you accept?

• Zelle
• Venmo
• Major credit cards
• Local check
• Cash for exact amount 

A receipt is always given immediately.

Are you insured?

We carry general liability insurance, as well as worker’s compensation insurance for our employees. If you live in a high-rise residential building or other complex in which entry (of vendors or tradespeople) is monitored by a staff, please check with your management office to ascertain whether we need to provide them with a Certificate of Insurance (COI), as this process often requires several days’ notice.

What about discretion? And your privacy policy?

We regularly work with clients who insist on their absolute privacy, which means complete discretion from the people and companies who do work for them. Whether or not we’re asked to sign an NDA, we treat all projects as though we had signed one. Therefore, we do not sell or share your name, contact information, or descriptive information about you. Any photos shown on our website are by permission of the clients (and at your request we will quickly remove any photo showing your items even if you originally agreed to allow us to post it).