Category: Allied Organizations

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 Nancy Norwood, Curator of European Art, Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

April 16, 2012, the day we installed the Flemish tapestry Trellised Garden with Animals in our Renaissance gallery, was one of the most rewarding days in my 12 years as curator of European art at the Memorial Art Gallery.

As is the case with many older museums —MAG celebrates its centennial next year—we have the luxury of an encyclopedic collection of world art and the challenge of preserving it. Medieval and Renaissance tapestries are among the most impressive and popular works in museums, but because of their massive size, sensitivity to light, and fragility, their ongoing preservation requires special attention. In our case, the challenge was extreme. Most of our tapestries were acquired in the 1920s and 1930s specifically for display in our great hall, where they had been exhibited without interruption for several decades. By 2000, only one tapestry was healthy enough to remain on view.

Enter the European Tapestry Initiative, a project that began in 2002 as a way to systematically evaluate and conserve the tapestries in our collection. The end goal was the treatment of a core group of our best medieval and Renaissance work and the establishment of a systematic rotation schedule for them, a formidable task considering the need for specialized conservators and considerable financial resources.

IMLS Conservation Project Support grants provided both the initial and continuing support necessary for the success of the initiative. A 2003 Detailed Condition Survey grant kicked the project into gear, allowing Marlene Eidelheit, the director of the Textile Conservation Laboratory of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City to spend four days at the museum. She carefully examined and evaluated each of our tapestries, providing treatment proposals and training staff on handling and storage at the same time. This survey was an essential first step to implementing the project.

IMLS continued to support the Tapestry Initiative when, in 2009, we received a major CPS grant that enabled the essential and exhaustive conservation of Trellised Garden with Animals, woven in Brussels by the Pannemaker workshops during the 1560s and 70s. We knew that once Trellised Garden returned to view, we needed to have a replacement waiting in the wings for rotation the following year. In 2011, we received a third IMLS CPS grant that would support the treatment of Battle of the Animals (affectionately known to staff and the conservator as “Beasts”). Once Beasts returns to MAG from the Cathedral’s conservation lab, we will install it in the place of pride left vacant by Trellised Garden, which will have been rolled and returned to storage for a well-deserved respite from the stresses of light and gravity.

For more information on MAG’s tapestry and other conservation-related grant initiatives, see http://mag.rochester.edu/aroundmag/grants-and-awards-news/

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 Barbara Heller, Director and Conservator, Special Projects, Detroit Institute of Arts

With the invaluable support of IMLS, the Detroit Institute of Arts was able to upgrade storage for its American decorative arts and sculpture collections dating from the beginning of the European settlements until 1950. These objects had been located in six separate, inaccessible temporary storage spaces during the museum’s 2000 –2007 renovation and expansion project. This new state-of-the-art storeroom makes possible the safe removal, handling, and study of works by curators, conservators, educators, and scholars. Greater accessibility also facilitates contributions to the body of academic knowledge and the creation of new educational programming at the museum, and allows the public to see more of the collection. In fact the project has resulted in five articles written by conservators, curators, and educators published in professional journals and books and eight YouTube podcasts.

New powder coated cabinets line the room. The glass doors allow for visual monitoring of the collections. Fixed wall screens provide vertical hanging space for heavy metalwork, mirrors, and frames. The wide aisles provide adequate space to move works of art. Racks and platforms installed against the back wall accommodate larger sculptures and three-dimensional objects. These include Daniel Chester French’s three large plasters for the Samuel Francis DuPont Memorial Fountain, which are barely visible in the photograph on the bottom left behind their polyethylene sheeting and are fully accessible in the upgraded storeroom shown on the bottom right.

Also housed in this room are bronze sculptures by Frederic Remington, marbles by Hiram Powers, and decorative arts pieces such as glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany. A total of 2,749 objects were relocated to this room, of which 1,561 were rehoused with stabilization mounts. Digital photographs were taken of objects that had not been photographed, before placing them into their new cabinetry.

During the project period, more than forty-six objects, including silver by Paul Revere, were rotated into the DIA’s American galleries or loaned to exhibitions at other institutions. The museum conserved forty pieces—twelve received new mounts—and nine new collection acquisitions were processed. Additional documentation information for 383 objects and 1,200 new digital images were entered into the museum’s collections management database, allowing for new images to be linked to the DIA website. Renewed access has allowed the museum’s curators to review and research the silver collection. A new installation showcasing DIA’s early American silver and decorative arts is being funded by the Americana Foundation and scheduled to open by the end of 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 Jude Southward, Conservator and Museum Conservation, Department Chair
Denver Museum of Nature and Science

It’s fall, and the trees are shedding their leaves, making playful swirls on the ground. Have you ever wondered what happened to leaves that fell to the ground around 65 million years ago? At the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS), we are rehousing beautiful fossil leaf specimens from Denver Basin excavations that date from that time period. The specimens are remarkable because so many of them retain a cuticle. The cuticle is the waxy protective coating on living leaves, and it allows researchers to investigate past carbon dioxide levels. It is just one of the ways the museum is helping to study our changing climate.

With help from a Conservation Project Support grant from IMLS, DMNS is providing optimum storage conditions for the 8,900 fossil leaf specimens housed at DMNS. The leaf fossils are preserved on mud, silt, and clay matrices that are not strongly cemented together.  Even though these are fossil specimens, they are prone to damage from handling or from prolonged exposure to water, which could occur during fire suppression.  If the cementation fails, the fossil breaks apart. This project is helping us protect these specimens against both physical and water damage. Many museum staff members are working on the project including conservators, curators, collections managers, and a dedicated crew of volunteers in the museum’s Earth Sciences Department. The team is working together to place the specimens in standard trays with customized supports. The specimens and their trays will then being placed in new, high-quality, closed cabinets.

As part of the project, staff conservators are completing condition reports on the 800 type specimens in the collection. These type specimens are the most significant taxonomic fossil leaves in our collection because they are the specimen on which a new species description is based. They have the highest curatorial and conservation priorities for closer examination, which allows us to see the remarkable structure of the leaves.

In addition to the rehousing and condition reporting by conservators, the effort entails work by project staff to conduct collection management activities, such as reviewing taxonomy to determine correct storage location, inventorying specimens, and creating storage labels. Finally, all inventory and condition report information is being entered into the collections database.

I have had the opportunity to work on more than a dozen IMLS-funded projects. I truly appreciate the impact of the agency’s commitment to collections preservation.

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 Emily Williams, Conservator of Archaeological Materials, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Department of Conservation

Excavated during the Bicentennial year of 1976, the artifacts from Martin’s Hundred tell an exciting tale of colonialism, adaptation to a new land and …a deadly struggle. Situated near the banks of the James River in Virginia, Martin’s Hundred was settled by 280 colonists in 1618. In 1622 the settlement was temporarily abandoned after 58 colonists were killed during the Powhatan Uprising. Resettled shortly thereafter, with a much diminished population, the settlement never regained its footing and by the 18^th century core components had been acquired by Robert “King” Carter, who turned it into a plantation.

The artifacts from Martin’s Hundred represent a broad range of domestic, agricultural and military items. A handful of items, already antiques when they were brought to Virginia, date to the late sixteenth century. Other artifacts include the first close helmets found in North America, pieces of armor and chain mail, table knives with bolsters decorated with silver and gold wire, and a shackle. Most of the iron artifacts were treated when they were first excavated to remove the dirt and rust from the surface, broken artifacts were joined together and the surfaces coated to prevent moisture from causing further corrosion.

Nearly forty years later, the Martin’s Hundred artifacts are a good reminder that, unfortunately, no conservation treatment, however skillfully done, lasts forever. Many of the objects were corroding again. The IMLS grant has allowed us to begin stabilizing them anew. We are carefully removing the wax coatings, cleaning the surfaces, and then desalinating the objects. The process of desalinating removes the salts that have seeped into an artifact during burial, which if left, can cause more damage. Our intervention does not stop there though. We are rehousing the artifacts, providing more support, and reestablishing a system of sealed drawers that maintain a very dry environment. The drawers have clear plexi lids that are held in place by magnets to prevent dry air leaking out but still allow visitors and scholars to see the objects. We are becoming experts on magnet strength, a skill I never thought I would cultivate!

Like the excavation, the retreatment project has offered new tales. As the wax has come off, we, and visitors to our lab, have been impressed by the degree to which objects were reconstructed in the past and by how carefully they were recreated and preserved. They remind us that although techniques have been refined the goal of preserving these objects is a constant.

 

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.