What Exactly Does a Registrar Do?

For Lora Chin Derrien, senior registrar at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), a childhood love of thrift shops and antique family heirlooms led to a career managing collections of art.

The gist of what I do: I oversee a team of highly versatile and talented registrars at the GRI. It is a choreography to direct the constant flow of activities while maintaining equilibrium. We handle shipping, the receipt of incoming acquisitions, and creation of detailed records in our collections database. Each record includes item description, condition reporting, and review of those records for accuracy. We negotiate terms for incoming loans related to GRI exhibitions and outgoing loans to external institutions. There’s also insurance, object tracking, storage, and inventory.

A family legacy of collecting art: I was born in Manchester, England. Due to the Cultural Revolution in Communist China, my parents moved to England by way of Hong Kong in the 1960s after leaving Shanghai. Most of my family’s belongings, including the art, were lost, confiscated, or destroyed. A few things were eventually returned to my family. My uncle passed on these objects to my mother because of her connection to them. I remember this classical female porcelain figurine that she adhered on top of a wooden carved base originally meant to display a piece of veined marble evocative of a landscape painting. She was always collecting objects and reinterpreting them to find her own past and the culture that she grew up in and lost.

Growing up in Southern California was in stark contrast to the distant stories I heard as a child about my mother’s family. My maternal grandfather collected paintings and decorative objects. He displayed them in his house where there was an “Eastern” room and a “Western” room for greeting guests. My father’s side was in the shipping business, so he was surrounded by this cultural exchange with the West from an early age. He attended a middle school founded by Jesuit fathers, and his beautiful penmanship and posture are marks of the discipline that was instilled by this education. I was taught to approach things with that kind of discipline, but I was also given the freedom to explore my interests wherever they led.

Discovering art through antiquing: It was paradise to live in Coronado as a child. I loved roller-skating and biking but was less enthusiastic about practicing the piano. When we visited San Diego, my mom and I would go to antique shops there. As a teenager, gallivanting through LA thrift shops was another way I was introduced to old things. I became interested in clothing because it was accessible, and I was mesmerized by the textures, color, fabric—especially if made in the 1920s and 1930s. I liked that fabrics, tailoring details, and style could inform me about the objects, their cultural origins, and functions within that era.

A first career in auction houses: My early jobs were actually in auction houses. I learned about the different levels of work, from acquiring and appraising, cataloging, the client relations aspect of the work, and then objects going on the auction block. It was very exciting. But after a few years, I realized that it was the ideas behind the objects that engaged me. I was less interested in the auction market and understood that I wanted to work in a research setting.

From Getty to Paris and back again: I was familiar with the Getty Villa because I had referenced some of the 18th-century decorative arts pieces that were on display there in my honors undergrad thesis. For a postcolonial paper that I presented in a symposium during my graduate studies, I also looked at paintings in the Getty Museum. It was by chance that I applied for an assistant position in the director’s office at the GRI. After a year, I switched to a different job in collection development. Then, I decided to move to Paris to continue my studies in French language and culture—I had double majored in French and art history at USC. While I was in Paris, I also worked for a textile designer, organizing and archiving her past collections and supervising the production line. After almost two years there I moved back to LA and resumed my old job in collection development, which had coincidentally become vacant. Not too long after, a new position was created in the registrar’s office at the GRI. I transferred to special collections, where I progressed in my experience, and then became senior registrar in 2020.

Why do we need registrars, anyway? Documentation is vital, down to the last detail in the object description. While training new staff, I always try to explain that when you’re describing an object for our records, think of the process as distilling an item down to its most essential points. That way, someone who comes after you can read the description and understand that, for example, these photographs are in an album, but something loose has been inserted between the pages. We need to boil it down to whether you can physically re-find what you’re looking for. We also include a condition report of each object in our records, because if something gets damaged, we need to know when it was damaged—was it during transit or was that always there?

Maintaining the security of objects is also challenging, just by the nature of the materials. If we get 10 letters, there could be three or four sheets enclosed in an envelope. We want to account for every single piece, not just the broad description of 10 letters. Things can go missing for an array of reasons and go unnoticed over time, as seen in the recent scandal at the British Museum. This is why it’s imperative that our security procedures are maintained to the highest standard.

Treasure hunting (and storing): When the GRI acquires an archive, we have an inventory, but it’s not on the item level, so every time you open a box, there can be surprises. Every day there could be something arriving, from small photo albums with 100 photos to large archives that require two tractor trailers. Once the crates arrive, then everything we unpack has to go onto shelves in our storage vault. Our collections have greatly expanded and diversified over the years and include 3D objects and framed work. But bookshelves aren’t made to house these types of things.

As a result, we must constantly find creative solutions for how to store these materials securely before processing and cataloging are completed.

Most challenging collections: Two more recent collections come to mind, and they’re both from Chicago. I was part of the team that moved the Johnson Publishing Company archive from its original home to the warehouse space in Chicago where the collection is being processed. It was challenging because of the sheer size of the collection: over 4 million photo-graphic prints, slides, and negatives; 5,000 magazines; 200 boxes of business records; and more. As co-owners, we worked in tandem with the Smithsonian/NMAAHC [National Museum of African American History and Culture] team, devising a shared plan and liaising between them and our Getty team. The second is the Richard Hunt archive. For shipping, we had to consolidate approximately 800 linear feet of materials, some of which were fragile maquettes and wax models, from two studio locations.