Month: November 2012

This post is part of the “From the Bench” series celebrating the work of conservators. Part scientist, part detective, they work to preserve the past for the future. This series features the voices of conservators who are working on IMLS-supported projects in museums across the United States. For more information about IMLS funding for museums see www.imls.gov/applicants/available_grants.aspx.

By Marina Ruiz Molina, Assistant Conservator and Marjorie Shelley, Conservator in Charge

Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a collection of over four hundred drawings from the workshops of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). They include preparatory sketches and presentation designs for windows, interiors, lights, mosaics, and other decorative works. The collection offered a formidable challenge, when it was acquired by museum in 1967 as it had previously sustained considerable water damage that resulted in extensive mold growth. The damage was so severe that these drawings could not be exhibited or properly studied because they posed a health hazard for the researchers, and the aesthetic and structural disfiguration was too critical.

In 2010, we received a generous grant from IMLS to conserve a group of 65 of these pieces, all of them designs for stained glass windows. This grant has given us the opportunity to investigate, treat, and rehouse these drawings, thus making them accessible to the public and shedding new light on the process of designing stained glass windows.

One of the most exciting aspects of our work as the paper conservators in charge of this project has been accessing for the first time “hidden” pieces of information that had remained concealed for many years, covered under layers of dirt, mold, or even original presentation elements, such as mat windows. While detaching some of the mat windows during the conservation process, we found inscriptions that revealed relevant facts, such as the location of unknown windows, the identification of depicted figures, or the names of the commissioners.

Most importantly, we had the opportunity to better understand the imaginative practices devised by the designers who worked under Mr. Tiffany’s supervision in order to maximize the productivity of their creative work. Scientific and technical study of these multilayered, extremely complex objects has allowed us to confirm how these men and women often employed devises such as painted photographs, tracing techniques, and collaged cutouts to reutilize their own existing designs. As a whole, this collection of drawings reveals a fascinating and inventive array of designers’ tools — a turn-of-the-century predecessor of Photoshop!

Visitors to the American Wing of our museum can for the first time admire these delicate drawings, many of which are beautiful works of art on their own right.

For more information, visit http://www.metmuseum.org/

This post is part of the “From the Bench” series celebrating the work of conservators. Part scientist, part detective, they work to preserve the past for the future. This series features the voices of conservators who are working on IMLS-supported projects in museums across the United States. For more information about IMLS funding for museums see www.imls.gov/applicants/available_grants.aspx.

By T. Rose Holdcraft, Conservator and Administrative Head, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

Thanks to an IMLS grant, Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology can now share more of its broad-ranging Map Collection with researchers. The collection includes maps and illustrations from the Abri Pataud region in France, hard-to-find documents of the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site Chan Chan in Peru, and unpublished maps and drawings from the Lower Mississippi Valley Survey.

In 2009, we received an IMLS Conservation Project Support grant award to improve access and preservation of the historical maps, architectural drawings, and archaeological site plans. These archival items document American anthropological history of the past 140 years. The Peabody Museum, the oldest museum dedicated to anthropology in the Western hemisphere, conducted some of the earliest fieldwork in North America including the Hopewell, Mississippian, and Mimbres culture sites. By the project’s end in April 2011, we had created more than 5,200 new database records, and conserved and re-housed 6,600 items. Within the year we saw significant increases in public access to this collection and in research and teaching based on it. Researchers search the museum’s Collections Online website to identify documents and then arrange an onsite visit to study the collections. For example, a researcher recently visited with her uncle and marveled at several drawings of Maya monuments from Chichen Itza penned in the 1930s by her grandfather.

With grant funds, we cleaned, humidified, and stored the documents flat in acid-free paper-based folders in new museum-quality cabinetry. Previously, the majority of items were inaccessible: compressed, folded, and/or rolled. The map room with a new large viewing platform provides a comfortable space to safely handle and study these often oversized historic anthropological documents. The project supported professional development of several interns who updated object records with newly realized information critical to future research and preservation.

One of the discoveries during the project was a set of drawings by Ann Axtel Morris. These large colorful illustrations of Maya monuments were used in a 2011 Harvard course. Another find was a printed map, heavily used and annotated during an early expedition to South Africa; it now will be featured in a 2013 publication.

Since 2011, 31 individuals have requested access to more than 50 items in the map collection.

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is very grateful for key funding provided by IMLS to make these valuable collections available to the global community. For further information, see this Peabody Museum article and the museum’s conservation web page about the project.

This post is part of the “From the Bench” series celebrating the work of conservators. Part scientist, part detective, they work to preserve the past for the future. This series features the voices of conservators who are working on IMLS-supported projects in museums across the United States. For more information about IMLS funding for museums see www.imls.gov/applicants/available_grants.aspx.

By:  Rebecca Buck, Deputy Director for Collection Services, Newark Museum

With the help of IMLS, the Newark Museum has slowly changed its collection storage to best protect important collections and let curators and researchers easily see the safely stored objects within it. Drab gray open shelving has been replaced by enclosed cabinets powder-coated with Chinese red, Tibetan orange, Lenox green, Royal purple and, for the largest project – African storage – a yellow as brilliant as the African sun.

In the 1980s, the Newark Museum renovated and connected a series of early 20^th-century buildings under the direction of Michael Graves Associates. Storage was outfitted according to the standards of the time as directed by the individual curators. Over the years it became necessary to upgrade areas to increase space and develop better ways of protecting and accessing objects in the collections. The two latest projects, storage upgrades for jewelry and for the African art collection, will resolve some old problems and reach current standards of care.

Newark’s jewelry collection is magnificent, an active 1,900+ piece collection curated by Ulysses Grant Dietz, Chief Curator and Curator of Decorative Arts. It reflects Newark’s heritage: home of Tiffany & Company, Herpers, Hedges, Krementz, Riker, Bippart, Durand and others. The new Lore Ross gallery in the historic Ballantine House is one of the few galleries in the United States devoted solely to the display of jewelry.

Six old wooden and metal cabinets were replaced with three Delta cabinets full of narrow drawers with dividers – there is now at least one compartment available for each piece of jewelry. An IMLS-funded technician and a decorative arts intern arranged dividers as needed to accommodate rings, brooches, crosses, bracelets, and necklaces, and developed a volara padding scenario for each compartment. The work of inventory, lining, placement, and photography went on all of the spring and summer of 2012. The result: safe objects, logically stored objects, objects with mounts where they’re needed, a complete inventory, photographs attached to a complete database, and best of all, errors corrected!

The Newark Museum is also in the midst of a multifaceted African art collection expansion project. Led by Senior Curator, Arts of Africa and the Americas, Christa Clarke, the current African art galleries will triple in size, a conservation lab will be developed, and the first-ever catalog of the collection will be published. For the storage portion, an IMLS grant matched by money raised for storage improvement led to a wonderful compact storage unit that will hold thousands of works from the African art collection, reorganized by geography and genre for greater accessibility.

The Newark Museum’s ability to provide safe storage and collection care has been greatly improved by these projects. They help make certain that important objects will be available for generations to come.

This post is part of the “From the Bench” series celebrating the work of conservators. Part scientist, part detective, they work to preserve the past for the future. This series features the voices of conservators who are working on IMLS-supported projects in museums across the United States. For more information about IMLS funding for museums see www.imls.gov/applicants/available_grants.aspx.

Judith Levinson, Director of Conservation, American Museum of Natural History, Division of Anthropology

Most of the large and important collection of totem poles at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) has been on display for more than a century!  As decades have passed and other so-called “permanent” exhibitions have come and gone, these silent sentinels have stood near the entrance of the museum’s earliest building as countless visitors, from royal families to millions of school children, have passed by.

About 10 years ago, the anthropology conservation staff surveyed the 77 monumental poles and carvings from the Pacific Northwest in order to prioritize which pieces would benefit the most from conservation. In 2009, thanks to generous funding from IMLS, we were able to begin to work on some of the neediest cases. We started with the smaller figures—those, less than eight feet tall. Some we could de-install and transfer to the lab for treatment; others were too difficult to remove and had to be conserved in-situ working on scissor lifts.

Giant dust bunnies hid in out-of-reach crevices and thousands of splinters needed to be stabilized. We also had to contend with the well-meaning acts of past restorers. Using modern conservation practices and more stable materials, we were able to carefully reverse old restorations and stabilize the degraded surfaces, ensuring that they can be safely cleaned during routine housekeeping with the goal of maintaining them on open display to the public for another hundred years or more.

During the second IMLS-funded phase of the project, we were presented with the unique opportunity to work on the largest totem poles in our Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. The museum was installing a fire-suppression system that required the temporary de-installation of four monumental house posts. These posts had been commissioned for the museum in 1923 and were carved by native artist Arthur Shaughnessy in the remote community of Alert Bay, British Columbia. They were shipped across the continent and had stood in place, unmoved since their arrival.

Lowering each 1200-1500-pound pole was a feat requiring several “nights at the museum” with Marshall Fine Arts rigging company. Aided by a rotating team of trusty conservation interns and students, we set up our temporary lab in the Northwest Coast Hall and began a task as monumental as the posts themselves.

http://www.amnh.org/our-research/anthropology/news-events/house-posts-reinstallation

We are currently continuing our work on other needy cases from the hall and plan to disseminate our findings and treatment techniques in conservation publications soon.