By Suzanne Dimma

I love the gallery look at home. It’s polished and if you don’t have a lot of artwork, the wires actually fill up wall space, making things look fuller. I hung a lot of art this way in my last house. As much as I loved it, it took two people and three days to set it all up.

Do it Yourself
First, we screwed heavy gauge rings into the wall near the ceiling line, then slipped a 3/4-inch rod through the holes. This was the starting point for the steel cables that we looped around the rod and secured with crimps. We then fed the wire through a hole drilled into a bolt-and-screw combination attached to the back of each frame. Once the pictures were positioned, we tightened the screw to the bolt holding the wire in place.

The Pre-Fab Route
You can save time and energy by getting a professional track and cable system. While they are readily available and easy to work with, they are more expensive than doing it yourself. Most of them include a horizontal rail that mounts onto the wall or can be hidden behind a drywall reveal, pre-looped cables and various self-locking hooks that clip the wires to the back of the art.

Where to Get it
A great online shopping source is arts-supplies.net. It carries various hanging systems and offers sample kits you can try. Even better, we found a pre-packaged system at Soho Art & Custom Framing in Toronto that comes with a metre and a half of rod, two clear Perlon cables (for an invisible look) and all of the clips you need. For more than a few pieces of art, you should probably go custom and have the whole thing professionally installed. Most suppliers will give you a free estimate and you can pick and choose the materials and avoid the dirty work altogether.

Special thanks to David at Soho Art & Custom Framing and Sara at Petroff Gallery.

First published in Wish March 2007

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