When I attended this session, I was not planning to blog about it. Yesterday, I saw that no one had signed up to write about this, so I figured I would share the notes I have with the larger community.
Peggy Ellis began discussion with her rousing talk entitled Paper is Part of the Picture. (To envelop the room in the scent of old paper as she spoke, she passed around a bottle of Paper Passion Perfume.)
She feels that there seems to be a curious lack of language to describe paper. Often, no mention is made of the paper itself in the literature of art. It is important to be able to describe the physical properties of paper, even those that have been common in our lives. Common papers may change with technology and not be familiar to those in the future. For example, nineteenth century writing paper and etching paper had specific qualities that contemporaries would have recognized. In the past, artists were particularly attuned to the qualities of paper. Today, preference is given to extremely white paper. Most of today’s common papers are meant to travel through a printer.
She ended with a call to action: Using as many of our senses as we can, paper conservators need to develop and standardize descriptions that enable a fuller understanding of paper.
Kristi Dahm’s talk was entitled Winslow Homer’s Engagement of the Materiality of Paper.
Homer is an example of someone who was very attuned to paper and was very particular when choosing paper. He chose the best paper for the technique he intended to employ. Allowing the paper to show through is an important component of his and many other watercolor paintings. When the paper changes in appearance with age, the art is changed.
Homer often used watercolor blocks. You can find evidence of this, such as brown lines of adhesive at the edges, or white voids where adhesive was removed.
He used a particular paper during a trip to Bermuda in 1888/89 which has deep, diagonal furrows on the verso. In some cases, his printer printed his plates on both paper and parchement. The parchment versions were mre expensive.
He sometimes used Japanese vellum, which was introduced to Paris in 1888 and became very popular with artists. It was a smooth, dense Japanese paper with a lustrous, calenared surface. There were European-made imitations.
There are some posthumous impressions of Homer prints that were created by his later printer using the same paper, so they are hard to tell from originals.
The third talk, entitled Connoissership and Conservators’ Practice, was by Marian Dirda. She spoke about the importance of understanding the qualities of hte paper to inform treatment decisions.
Every institution has a curatorial tradition on which some of those decisions are based. This comes from an understanding of the part that the paper plays in conveying the spirit of the artwork.
For example, washing and flattening should not be done on a Mary Csssatt because undulations are typical in her prints and should be left. If something is an extremely rare first state, you should not wash it because it is important not to loose any characteristics. You can learn by comparing copies and variations of the same print.
Papers from the 1960s and 1970s are particualrly vulnerable to oxidative attack. The quality of paper has rise since the 1980s. We don’t have a lightfastness stadard for paper like we do for media.
Amy Hughes rounded out the presentations with a follow up to her talk about gels in paper conservation. To measure pH and conductivity, she uses a biopsy punch to make a small agarose pellet She leaves it on the paper 5 minutes, then places it in the conductivity meter first, then places it in the pH meter with 2 drops of water. The paper is less altered when you match the paper’s conductivity with that of the treatment solution.
She makes a bunch of stock solutions that will keep for a few months in the fridge. Learning to make the stock solutions is complicated. You need an instructor to teach you. There will be some future workshops with Amy, Daria Keynan, and/or Chris Stavroudis.
These presentations were followed by a lively discussion. Here are some select points:
* More study is needed about why color shift is happening in paper.
* It is important to collaborate with paper historians.
* There may or may not still be copies available of the Print Council of America Paper Sample book. Get one if you can. (I did a quick search and did not see any listed for sale online.)
* We need to create something even more comprehensive than that book.
* Colors can be scientifically measured, but simple color words and modifiers may be more useful.
* In a treatment report, it is always good provide context for why a treatment path was chosen.
* When concerned about over lightening, one trick is to light bleach from the back.
* Is it helping paper chemistry to preserve paper tone? We are not necessarliy extending the paper’s lifetime by washing.
* Why not just start with sodium borohydride? Paper chemists believe it is actually good for the paper.
* National Gallery of Art is putting together a comprehesive paper library. Please contact Marian Dirda if you have dated, known samples.
* Look, look, look, and look again!
Tag: AIC’s 44th Annual Meeting
Race, Diversity and Politics in Conservation: Our 21st Century Crisis–Sanchita Balachandran
[What follows is the full text of the talk given by Sanchita Balachandran in the General Session “Confronting the Unexpected” at the 44th AIC Annual Meeting on May 16, 2016. Not all images used in the presentation are shown here.]
Race, Diversity and Politics in Conservation: Our 21st Century Crisis
December 15th, 2015, 4:45pm. Baltimore City Hall. The building twinkled with Christmas lights and flashes from the roofs of police cars lined up along E. Fayette Street. Across War Memorial Plaza, on N. Gay Street, television vans were hunkered down. A few correspondents stood, microphones in hand, in harsh halos from the glare of camera lights, against the District Court of Maryland. It was the night that a jury was expected to return a verdict on the trial of police officer William Porter, the first of six defendants charged with causing the death of Freddie Gray, a twenty-five year old black man who died in police custody on April 19th, 2015. It was Freddie Gray’s death—yet another in a growing list of young unarmed black people killed by law enforcement—that had catalyzed the violence in Baltimore, that mobilized heavily armed state troopers to the city for three days. But I wasn’t there for the Porter verdict. I’d had the luxury of forgetting that it was being deliberated behind closed doors. Instead, I had come to listen to public testimony, an open airing of anger, frustration and love about different black bodies, the darkly patinated bronzes of Confederate monuments erected on city property. I’d come for a meeting of the Commission to Review Baltimore’s Public Confederate Monuments.
Nearly every academic discipline has acknowledged that objects have multiple values and meanings, that they embody relationships, histories, memories and identities. But the concept of multiple meanings and resonances of objects is often an abstract one, something left to imagine rather than viscerally experience. And in our own field of art conservation, we have been slow to recognize that objects are not merely a sum of the materials they are made from, but rather, that their “intangible” values may in fact be as important, if not more important than the tangible heritage we’ve trained to conserve. But to the nearly fifty people who testified on the night of December 15th, the intangible and tangible were densely intertwined. It was the same over-life size bronzes that functioned as works of art, as symbols of love and resilience, as markers of oppression and hatred, and reminders that white supremacy over enslaved black people remained a vivid memory on the contemporary landscape.
A biracial teenager of African American heritage spoke of standing on her porch and seeing the Confederate flag unfurled in front of the Lee and Jackson Monument year after year on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Representatives of the Sons of Confederate Veterans countered, saying that Lee and Jackson also had birthdays in January, as did MLK, Jr. Young activists suggested inviting Baltimore city students to re-cast the bronze into objects of their choosing. There were proposals to leave the sculptures in place with new signage, to replace them with images of prominent African Americans, to auction them to the highest white supremacist bidder and use the recovered funds for Baltimore schools. As I listened, it was clear that while it was the intangible heritage that the sculptures represented that was under attack, it was the tangible heritage, the objects themselves that would bear the blows. Destroying the thing might destroy the memory, for better or worse.
As the United States of America cries out about the pain, anger, pride and oppression that Confederate monuments represent, we conservators are considering their original casting techniques or identifying the best poultices for removing “Black Lives Matter” from them. As discussions of race, diversity and politics infuse our daily lives—from the American presidential election to the claim that the Academy Awards were “#oscarssowhite”—our own field has remained largely silent. Instead, as cultural institutions and museums are struggling to remain relevant, the conservation profession has continued to devote its focus to technical questions and solutions. Our rapid embrace of new treatments, imaging techniques and analytical methods stands in stark contrast to the lack of engagement with the social and political concerns that swirl around the objects we are called upon to preserve. Unlike unexpected cataclysmic events such as World War II, the Florence Flood, or the 2010 Haiti earthquake, all of which mobilized conservators who put themselves in harm’s way to preserve cultural heritage, our contemporary crisis remains invisible and unacknowledged.
Our crisis is one of desperate urgency, but it has gone unconfronted from the safety of our benches, beyond the field of view of our Optivisors and microscopes, in large part because we have been unwilling or unprepared to see the problems even within our own profession. In the forty-fourth year of the American Institute for Conservation, it is time to recognize the ways in which conservation routinely excludes certain hands, voices, perspectives, histories and legacies.
We are professional conservators. We abide by our Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice. We preserve objects for future generations. We are doing the right thing. We have the privilege of an unfettered access to objects and collections, with the authority to change or even erase a previous intervention on an object with the sweep of a cotton swab, the stoke of a brush, or an adjustment on a pressure-washer. It is precisely because we can claim this kind of authority, privilege, and power that we must re-examine the very core of who we are, what we do, and why we work. It is precisely because we have the ability and authority to maintain, change or erase histories, stories, memories and identities through our interventions on objects, sites and collections that we must re-engage with three key questions: Who are we? Whose objects are we conserving? Why does conservation matter?
Who are we?
The most recent document to explicitly ask who is racially represented, or not represented, in the American Institute for Conservation is the 1993 AIC Strategic Planning Questionnaire. In the intervening twenty-two years, not enough has changed. The 2015 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey found that “non-Hispanic White staff continue to dominate the job categories most closely associated with the intellectual and educational mission of museums, including those of curators, conservators, educators, and leadership.”
One of the more troubling findings of the survey is that the percentages of staff from underrepresented communities in leadership roles in the museum have remained unchanged over the past three decades. To quote Mariet Westermann, Vice President of the Mellon Foundation, “Diverse educational pipelines into curatorial, conservation, and other art museum careers are going to be critical if art museums wish to have truly diverse staff and inclusive cultures. It also indicates that the nation will need more programs that encourage students of color to pursue graduate education in preparation for museum positions.”
I am the product of an educational pipeline. As a college freshman, I received a paid Getty Foundation Multicultural Undergraduate Internship that introduced me to the field of art conservation. As a child of immigrants who were middle class but struggling to put me through college, I could not have afforded an unpaid summer internship to pursue my love of art history. Art was a hobby, a distracting indulgence as I finished my medical school requirements, as my college debt mounted on my parents’ and my shoulders. When I applied to conservation graduate school in my senior year of college, much to the genuine terror of my parents who had sacrificed so much to make sure that I would get a job, I knew that I had only one chance to make it. If I got into conservation school, and I got funding, I could go. I got in. I got funding. I went.
Many of my colleagues and I now joke that we would never get into graduate school. But when we consider the lack of historically underrepresented minorities in conservation, we must acknowledge the existing practices that year by year, keep them out. The experience of the average applicant today is staggering, often gained over years of barely paid or even unpaid preparatory work. If these same expectations had been in place twenty years ago, I would not be a conservator. For those high achieving underrepresented minorities who graduate from college with the option of different educational pipelines, conservation school seems an irresponsible choice given what a trained conservator can expect to earn in the early years of one’s career. After four years of training, my first post-graduate one-year position paid $18,000. It was almost a decade before I gained my first permanent position. Those in the audience of my generation and those younger may recognize their own career trajectories in my experience. Many professional paths are highly competitive and their outcomes uncertain, but within our own field, we must consider how we select and support young conservators, particularly those from minority and lower socio-economic backgrounds.
But “diversity” should not be misunderstood as a desire for simply changing the range of skin tones in our profession for the sake of appearances. Diversity means much more. Decades of research in numerous fields have shown that more socially diverse groups are more creative, innovative and productive than less diverse ones, but within conservation, the need for this diversity is all the more vital because of the kind of work we do. There is much at stake at not having a diverse group of conservators responsible for the preservation of the cultural heritage of humankind. Conservators preserve not only the physical aspects of objects, we also preserve the histories, memories and legacies that objects represent. Unlike the factual or tangible aspects of objects, these intangible aspects are all the more fragile, and subject to be changed or lost if we are not attentive to them. A more diverse group of conservators brings different life experiences, other cultural perspectives, and broader social networks to bear on the cultural heritage we preserve. Such a community also makes possible the challenging of assumptions and accepted ways of practice within the field that may in fact privilege particular kinds of cultural heritage while erasing others.
Consider the work of Shadreck Chirikure, Tawanda Mukwende and Pascall Taruvinga, who through their authority as heritage professionals, balanced the desire of the Khami people of Zimbabwe and South Africa to maintain their spiritual sites as undisturbed, “unmonumental” areas, but also worked with them to minimally stabilize areas so that they can retain their World Heritage status. Consider the work of Sanjay Dhar, whose work with Buddhist practitioners in northeast India recognizes the conditions and parameters under which the repainting of images is required so that they can continue to function in their religious contexts.[1] Consider Andrew Thorn’s work with the Jawoyn people of Australia, whose sacred sites could not be documented with photographs and drawings because such representations posed potential threats to both his and the Jawoyn peoples’ physical and spiritual safety.[2] These examples, all from outside North America, show the way that our conceptual framework for preserving the cultural heritage of humankind can and should expand to encompass a more diverse set of conservation professionals and community stakeholders, but also a more diverse understanding of what is important to conserve.
Whose objects are we conserving?
Last year, I had the privilege of working with a group of young curatorial students at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Curating the Archive and the Iziko Museums of South Africa. Only three months before, the statue of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes had been toppled from its perch at the university following student protest. It was just weeks after the hate crime that left nine African Americans dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The alleged killer had worn the Confederate flag, and the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid era South Africa, the latter two synonymous with white supremacy. We were talking about whether there was a symbol that all South Africans could embrace and call their own. After a few moments of silence, one of the white South African male students suggested, “the land.” None of the black students in the class responded. Under apartheid, land ownership was a primarily white privilege. But these black South African students, the generation of so-called “Born Frees,” the first born after apartheid, still could not claim land as either property or symbol.
The Preamble to our Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice states that our primary goal is the “preservation of cultural property.” But whose property? As conservators, we often speak of collections as our own—“my collection” or “my site”—even though they they do not belong to us. But to whom do collections and sites belong? Do they belong to the institutions and individuals who had the political, economic and lawful means to collect them, or do they also belong to the original makers and users? Two United States federal laws enacted in 1990 complicated the concept of ownership of objects that might come to belong to someone other than the original maker. The Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) asserted that artists hold moral rights and authorship over their own works no matter who legally owns them; and it gives artists the right to pursue legal action against those who compromise either the physical or conceptual integrity of their works. Also passed the same year as VARA was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a federal law that provided a process for museums to return human remains, funerary objects and sacred objects to descendants of their original makers and users.
In the twenty-six years since these laws have been enacted, our profession has been forced to change its practices, engaging artists and Native American communities in collections management and conservation treatments in unprecedented ways. Not all of these interactions are comfortable or collaborative, but these legal mandates have forced us to confront the fact that the collections we call our own in fact came from elsewhere, and from someone else. In the field of modern and contemporary art conservation, the recognition of the moral right of the original maker has driven new and creative forms of documentation and information sharing about the material requirements, but more importantly, the conceptual requirements of art works. It has also resulted in collaborative partnerships between conservators and artists, with the conservators often entrusted with ensuring the preservation of the conceptual integrity of the artist’s work, rather than simply its physical integrity. Unfortunately, this same creativity, resolve and belief in the primacy of preserving the conceptual integrity of Native American objects is taken less seriously by our profession other than in a few institutions. Native American communities are rarely treated with the same respect that modern and contemporary artists are in the museum, except for in a few institutions.
To make sense of this lack of parity, we must confront the unequal ways that objects come into an institution for collection, conservation and display. The fields of anthropology and museum studies, have for the past several decades, acknowledged the fact that their disciplines were complicit in the colonial and imperial projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anthropology, with its scientific method of writing ethnographies and collecting ethnographic objects, was predicated on the idea that certain cultures would soon be destroyed, and those histories, traditions and objects required documentation, categorization and preservation. Since the 1970s, anthropologists have been working to recognize and engage with the fact that their field was implicated in the annihilation of certain kinds of stories and in the oppression of peoples they categorized as “other” or “lesser.” Scholars in museum studies have acknowledged that the museum was fully embedded in the colonial and imperial enterprise, and its daily processes of collecting, curating and yes, conserving objects perpetuated this colonialism and racism, and asserted the dominance of white Euro-American cultures over others.
But we as conservators have yet to engage in a conversation that has been happening beyond our field for nearly half a century. Because we, too, were implicated.
Consider the work of the giants of our field, George Leslie Stout and Rutherford Gettens. Between 1928 and 1930, they developed methodologies, techniques and materials to be used on a Harvard University expedition to Western China that had the express intent of removing wall paintings from ancient sites for the Fogg Museum; in their writings on the subject, both Stout and Gettens were unsettled by the idea of tearing objects from their original contexts, and and the damage that this might cause, but the fact remains that their research and technical knowledge was essential to the larger imperial project of removing cultural heritage from the Chinese, who were thought incapable of preserving it.[3] As conservators, we have always assumed that our technical skills and knowledge will be used for a greater good, but what Stout and Gettens recognized nearly a century ago was that these same skills and knowledge could be deployed in more sinister ways. So we were implicated in these troubling practices, and by not acknowledging our past, we still are.
So to say in our Code of Ethics that our primary goal is the preservation of property affirms our responsibility to the now legal owner. It is to tacitly accept the violence which has systematically removed and disenfranchised people from their cultural heritage. We accept that the cultural property we now steward is housed in buildings erected on land legally taken from Native American and First Nations peoples, the same peoples whose representation in positions of museum leadership today is statistically zero. By abiding by the term cultural property rather than heritage, we also forget the fact that property once did not just concern objects and sites. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, whose monument still stands in Baltimore City, wrote on March 6, 1857 in the Dred Scott decision that any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, was not a citizen of the United States. He also affirmed the right of slave owners to claim their slaves as property. It is this legacy that activists are responding to by tagging Confederate monuments. It is this legacy that we preserve by removing the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”
Why Does Conservation Matter?
Today, cultural heritage is regularly in the headlines for its destruction, not its conservation. The destruction of archaeological sites and art objects captures the public’s attention rather than the bloodshed, forced migration and trauma of hundreds of thousands of people from these same places. Shortly after the recapture of Palmyra, Syria, from Islamic State extremists in March of this year, there was discussion of restoring the ancient edifices razed during occupation. But why do these places and objects matter when there are so many urgent crises? Why is their conservation and preservation needed?
Because cultural heritage, not cultural property, can still be claimed by even those communities that have been traumatized and marginalized, and systematically and legally oppressed and annihilated for generations. As long as a tangible link exists between people and their past, there remains hope for a more just and dignified present and future.
Consider Joseph McGill’s Slave Dwelling Project, which reclaims the forgotten domestic spaces of peoples enslaved in the United States from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Sleeping here affirms that these places and these people matter.
Consider the 2015 return of the name Denali, “The Great One”, to the mountain sacred to native Alaskans, one hundred and nineteen years after both the land and the name were taken from them by the United States government.
Consider the announcement that the site of the Stonewall Inn will receive National Landmark Status in June of this year, acknowledging the struggle for equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people that began here forty-seven years ago.
Consider the Multaka or “meeting point” program which provides Arabic-speaking tours of sites and objects from Iraq and Syria at the Berlin Museums so that refugees can see glimpses of a home they may never be able to return to.
As long as these tangible sites and objects exist, there is evidence that people were here, that their histories, their memories and their past mattered, and that they are still here, still matter, and will continue to matter in the future. Our role as conservators can and should be to protect and conserve these tangible links, to affirm our belief in the dignity and human rights of all people. But we cannot approach the preservation of cultural heritage with the naïve statement that “all lives matter” or “all cultural heritage matters”, because history has shown us again and again that some lives, and some cultural heritage has been allowed to matter far more than others’. If we believe that conservation has a role to play in pursuing social justice, then it means changing the way we work. It means recognizing that we are stewards of collections through historical and political circumstance; that our authority can be both utilized for the cause of equality, but also abused. It also means that while we may be authorized to physically conserve collections, they and the histories and stories they represent also belong to the people who claim them. Instead, our work has to support and make possible the right of people to tell, sing and perform their own narratives of their own cultural heritage.
Our profession is at a turning point. We can maintain the status quo as the world changes around us, making us even less vital to the urgent concerns of the day. Or we can acknowledge our own past, and begin to think and work differently in the present. What is at stake here is not what conservation is, but what conservation could be.
Conservation in the twenty-first century can no longer just be about objects. Conservation also has to be about the people whose lives are inscribed on them.
Notes
[1] Dhar, S. “Challenges in the context of the living sacred tradition of Mahayana Buddhism”. The object in context: Contributions to the 2006 IIC Congress, Munich, 2006: 151-155.
[2] Thorn, A. “Access denied: Restricted access to indigenous cultural sites.” Conservation and Access: Contributions to the 2008 IIC Congress, London, 2008: 209-213.
[3] Balachandran, S. “Object Lessons: The Politics of Preservation and Museum Building in Western China in the Early Twentieth Century.” International Journal of Cultural Property, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2007): 1-32.
44th Annual Meeting – Book and Paper, May 16: “Watercolor Pencils: Composition and Conservation Concerns,” presented by Lauren Buttle and Natasa Krsmanovic
It always amazes me how much we have still to learn about various types of media. The presentation by Lauren Buttle and Natasa Krsmanovic underscored how little we still know about watercolor pencils (also known as aquarelle or water soluble pencils).
Water color pencils first appeared during the 1920s, with Staedtler being the first to mention them in 1928. They are related to copy pencils, which contain a water soluble dye and were introduced in the late nineteenth century.
In their study, Lauren and Natasa and their coauthors, Laura Hashimoto, Michael Doutre, Kaslyne O’Connor and Rosaleen Hill, examined four products: Reeves watercolor pencils, Staedtler karat aquarelle 125, Staedtler ergosoft aquarelle, and Derwent watercolor pencils. These were first analyzed using mid-IR spectroscopy, which revealed that each of the products had the same general composition. All contained clay, water-soluble wax, a polysaccharide binder, and colorants. The wax was further revealed to be a modified polyethylene glycol, or mPEG.
The second phase of the project involved testing samples to determine the impact of conservation treatments and solvents. The researchers drew lines with watercolor pencils onto Windsor & Newton watercolor pen and ink paper that was subsequently cut into 14 sets of inch-long strips. They tested four colors – red, blue, grey, and black – for each product. Of 14 watercolor pencil test strips, seven were stored in the dark (that is, they were not aged), while seven were artificially aged at 95°C and 50% RH for 96 hours. They were then tested for reactivity with water, ethanol, acetone, and toluene immersion for 5 minutes each, non-contact exposure to 100% RH for an hour, and smudging with a smudge stick, with additional samples retained as controls. Color change was measured with a Minolta chromometer, with readings taken thrice for each testing area.
Their results showed that exposing watercolor pencils to wet treatments is exactly as problematic as one might assume. Aged and unaged samples both experienced significant bleeding when immersed, particularly undergoing aqueous immersion. Of all colors, red had the most dramatic response to immersion. Immersion treatments also resulted in color shifts, with polar solvents causing greater shifts in color than non-polar solvents. However, some of the color change was due to change in the color of the paper.
Humidification appeared to have no effect; however, the researchers did not dry the paper under pressure, and it is possible that there may have been some off-set of color if they had done so. All media was affected by mechanical smudging, although aged media was affected to a smaller degree.
This talk raised a lot of interesting questions, and the discussion following the presentation suggested avenues for further research. One attendee asked when mPEG was introduced, raising the idea that the composition of these pencils has likely changed over time, while others suggested testing the solubility of colors in xylene, or testing the pencil lead directly. This research will be continuing at Queens University, and I am excited to see where it will lead.
Author’s Note: The original version of this blogpost omitted the names of Michael Doutre and Kaslyne O’Connor. The author apologizes for the omission.
44th Annual AIC Meeting, Pre-Conference Session, May 14: "Florence: Days of Destruction" by Franco Zeffirelli
If we try to pinpoint which events have caused major changes in our lives, we might come to the conclusion that many of them unfolded unexpectedly. And the worst ones seem to also happen fast. Whether we realize it or not, the Florence floods of 1966 were such a change. Many might not remember this time at all, and others – myself included – were yet to be born. As any other part of world history, it is a story that needs to be retold.
One of the pre-conference events was the screening of Franco Zeffirelli’s “Florence: Days of Destruction”. The Florentine filmmaker probably found that filming in this time of need was a way to cope with the immense gravity of the situation. What he also did was create a platform for awareness. The original Italian title, “Per Firenze”, reflects Zeffirelli’s attachment to his hometown and to all that it represented. Richard Burton, who narrates the film, could sympathize as he had recently seen his beloved Wales go through something similar. It doesn’t take being in the film business to relate to this feeling.
On Saturday, February 20th, 2010, heavy showers followed by landslides transformed Madeira Island – the place I will probably always call home – into a sort of gigantic mudbath. Everything that could be dragged from the mountain tops to the shore was. People were hurt, some even died that day. In a video published on February 21st by SkyNews, one sees how mother nature was nothing short of relentless:
On the quiet days that followed, there was a collective sense of mourning and loss. Everyone was shocked. I felt numb. Although I usually had no problem taking photographs, somehow I could not make myself pick up my camera. I could never be a photojournalist.
I first returned to work on February 23rd. Walking through the downtown part of Funchal, I saw damage on a scale I never thought I would have seen before. In a way, it felt like it could have been a war zone. Coincidence or not, that’s said in Zeffirelli’s film about Florence.
After about a week, the conservation team at the Arquivo Regional da Madeira, where I was working at the time, was contacted to provide help to a few cultural institutions in need. The buildings where they had their storages were on downtown Funchal, where basements had simply become pools of rubble. After draining the water out, they needed help figuring out how to deal with piles of books and documentation.
This experience changed my attitude towards conservation, setting a whole new standard of what an object in bad condition looked like. As much as those were tough times, they also provided bonding time with my colleagues. We kept each others spirits up amidst less than pleasing working environments when by the end of the day we were proud of our muddy coveralls. I would like to think it was a feeling common to all of those who put themselves to work during that time.
However catastrophic the situation that Zeffirelli’s documentary shows, it also focuses on the positive outcome that even such an event might have. It underlined the importance of cultural heritage in society and how it could bring people together because it was the right thing to do.
Because Zeffirelli’s work transcended into one of those things that are greater than the object itself, the film was shown for the first time after being digitally restored at this year’s AIC-CAC conference. It brought us together again at the conference, even after all these years have gone by. Not all the destruction was in vain after all.
To see how this event was portrayed in the media of its day, I encourage you to also take a look at the LIFE magazine Dec. 16th, 1966 issue (the report on the flood starts on page 28).
44th Annual AIC meeting, May 17, 2016, “An Unexpected Surface: Research and treatment of a 19th century mounted oyster shell by Froment-Meurice” by Emily Brown
This talk focused on the research and treatment of Froment-Meurice oyster shell artifact made by Emile Froment-Meurice. The conservation concerns were identification of the corrosion layers and treatment of the metal surfaces. The artifact was purchased by William Walters in 1878. It is a composite artifact that depicts two putti discovering a pearl inside of an oyster. The oyster shell holds a natural pearl in a metal mount. The mermaid stem and putti are a silver copper alloy, the base is silver with a gold enriched surface and the hinge is a gold alloy. The oyster shell artifact was damaged and repaired multiple times in the past. The 1930 photograph from the museum shows the object in one piece.
The main condition issue for this treatment was the heavily tarnished metal surfaces. The silver and gold elements were nearly black with heavy tarnish overall. In the 1840s the goldsmiths would often intentionally create a darkened oxidized surface on silver. In a 2003 French catalogue “Tresors D’Argent” (translated as “Silver Treasures”) two similar shell objects are included, but both have polished and shiny metal elements. Other artifacts are listed as “oxidized silver and painted sheet metal” objects. A similar oxidized silver surface can be found on the commemorative shield (c. 1881) by Froment-Meurice in the Art Institute of Chicago labeled as “an elliptical shield of oxidized silver”.
There are a few differences between tarnished silver and oxidized silver. Tarnished silver is an unintentional patina created by airborne pollutants. Oxidized silver is an intentional antiqued patination created by chemical compounds. The small traces of silver chloride found on the surface of the artifacts may be a byproduct of silver chloride that was used to antique the surface of silver objects. With this in mind, the decision was made to clean the silver, but not remove the black surface. The gold elements would be cleaned until bright.
The gold and gilt silver components could not be cleaned with abrasion or normal polishing. Instead an acidified thiourea xantham gum gel was used to clean the surface. The gel as applied with a cotton pad and rinsed with water. The dwell time was kept to a quick 5 – 10 seconds. The process was repeated as needed. For the metal clasp, mylar was placed between the metal and the shell to protect the surface of the shell. The gel was applied with a brush and then rinsed with the use of chem-wipes and a bristle brush. The gel cleaning produced a bright and shiny surface. The process had excellent control and a quick removal of the material was possible. The putto were adhered into place, but the shell was left partially unassembled for transportation. A complex and well-designed storage and shipment box was created for the artifact. This storage box was featured in the STASH flash III on May 14th and will be published on the AIC STASH website.
44th Annual AIC meeting, May 17, 2016, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do? The Conservation of an Italian Marble and Micromosaic Tabletop” by Elizabeth La Duc
Elizabeth La Duc gave an engrossing talk in the Objects Specialty session on the conservation treatment of a 19th century Pietre Dure and micromosaic tabletop belonging to the Josiah Quincy house of Historic New England. The stone tabletop, positioned on top of a painting and gilded wooden base, had and been conserved in the past. Her treatment was readdressing this past treatment and returning it to exhibit-able condition.
Pietre Dure translates into English as “hard stone”. The Pietre Dure portions consist of decorative stones set into the carved channels within the black marble base and adhered with a rosin and beeswax. The micromosaic areas are images made up from tiny tesserae called smalti. The smalti are cut to shape and inserted into an adhesive of linseed oil, lime and marble dust. The top surface was polished to a flat surface and the gaps between the tesserae were filled with tinted beeswax. This beeswax can be seen under ultraviolet light, but it has often been lost through over cleaning and use.
The table top was in poor condition. The four sections were poorly adhered and slightly misaligned. A large crack in the stone tabletop ran across the middle of the tabletop and transected both the Pietre Dure and the micromosaic elements of the table. Two stone inlays were missing and there were losses in the micromosaic along the central break.
The conservation treatment started with a surface cleaning of calcium saturated water with the pH raised to 8.5 with ammonia and added drops of Triton. Acetone was wicked into the old joins to dissolve the older restoration adhesive. B72 and microballons were used to glue the pieces back together.
For the conservation of the Pietre Dure portions two options were considered. In Florence, the missing elements would have been replaced with new cut stone. The Pietre Dure objects are decorative and require a high level of finish. Another Italian treatment option is to cast crushed stone and resin to recreate the missing inlays. This second approach was chosen and the new Pietre Dure elements were created with tinted epoxy bulked with fumed silica cast into silicone rubber molds. In some areas it was necessary to back of the Pietre Dure areas of loss with a layer of Japanese tissue coated with B72. The epoxy elements were then cast directly into the loss. Gamblin conservation colors were used to finish off the top of these fills and a layer of Acrysol WS24 was brushed on top to give a polished shine.
The micromosaic repairs were based on similar micromosaic designs. Since the micromosaics were mass produced with only a small range of designs, similar images could be used as guidelines for decorative elements on the fills. The areas of loss in the micromosaics were backed with acid free matt board topped with a layer of modostuc. Gamblin conservation colors were used to inpaint the surface in two steps. The first step painted the background colors and the second step painted the individual small tesserae.
This was an elegant and well executed treatment with results that were aesthetically pleasing and reversible. Under close examination, the areas of filled loss are distinguishable from the original material. This was a great talk and I hope to get a chance to work on micromosaics someday!
44th Annual Meeting – General Session, May 16: “Race, Diversity and Politics in Conservation: Our 21st Century Crisis,” by Sanchita Balachandran
The theme of this year’s annual meeting focused on disasters and the unexpected in conservation. However, in her talk, Sanchita Balachandran, conservator at the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, focused not on emergencies threatening the collections we care for, but, instead, on a crisis within the field of conservation itself: the crippling lack of diversity in our profession.
In one sense, conservators are very aware of the problem. As Balachandran pointed out, we are trained to recognize the intangible as well as the tangible values inherent in the objects we treat. Implicit in this training is the fact that, as conservators, we have the power to erase history.
What happens when that type of power is wielded by a small, homogenous group? Graduate school prerequisites require applicants to have spent a significant amount of time gaining experience, largely through unpaid internships, which effectively excludes people from less affluent backgrounds – and by extension, certain minority populations. Similarly, people from these backgrounds may be less willing or able to make such drastic sacrifices for a field where the job opportunities after prolonged graduate study are low-paying and scarce. This limits the field as a whole, since more diverse groups have been proven to be more innovative and more productive.
The lack of diversity also has a more problematic effect on our work. When we treat an object, we choose which tangible and intangible values to retain, and which to discard. In doing so, we privilege certain types of objects and treatments. How do we approach the issue of Confederate monuments in Baltimore that were spray-painted with the slogan, “Black lives matter”? Should the slogan be removed?
Balachandran argued that we must confront the unequal ways in which objects come to institutions; museum processes were created by a colonial framework, from which conservation itself is not exempt. If nothing else, museums and libraries exist on land taken from Native American peoples. Museums must focus on cultural heritage, as opposed to cultural property, and work to rebuild connections between objects and the communities from which they were taken.
This issue of diversity is hardly a new problem. The people who become conservators largely come from a similar racial, cultural, and socio-economic background, and tend to be overwhelmingly female. However, by raising the subject in the annual meeting, Balachandran paved the way for a real discussion on how the field can encourage the participation of people of all backgrounds. At least, that is my hope as a fledgling conservator: that this will serve as a clarion call to the AIC board, graduate programs, and administrators to reflect upon their roles as gatekeepers to the field and to implement real changes to make our profession more inclusive. The fact that Sanchita Balachandran got a well-deserved standing ovation leads me to believe that my hopes are shared by others.
Edited to add: Read the full text of the talk at Race, Diversity and Politics in Conservation: Our 21st Century Crisis, posted by Sanchita Balachandran.
44th Annual Meeting – Objects-Wooden Artifacts Session, Monday 16 May 2016, "The study of boxwood prayer beads and miniature altars from the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Metropolitan Museum of Art” presented by Lisa Ellis
Lisa Ellis, Conservator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), presented collaborative work on the study of boxwood prayer beads and miniature altars from the early 16th century (c. 1500-1530). The beads and altars are very small, complex, and intricately carved artifacts whose construction has not been well characterized. Teams at the AGO and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) are exploring the carving techniques and joinery strategies using careful examination, micro-computed tomography (µCT scanning), and physical deconstruction of select artifacts to better understand how the pieces were created.
Because of their depth and small size, traditional photography has been inadequate to capture the various layers in focus within one image, making distance sharing and comparative work impossible. In order to better share between institutions and scholars, the AGO set out to photodocument these artifacts with high resolution images that are in focus throughout the depth of the artifact. In order to do this, they are taking a series of photos at various focal depths, then stacking the images to maintain sharpness. The image quality is profoundly improved from the old hazy images that made it impossible to understand the detail.
Prayer bead, AGOID.29365. Detail showing “The Coronation of the Virgin.” The Thomson Collection of European Art © Art Gallery of Ontario.
Through preliminary x-radiography, they found that the artifacts can be grouped in to two broad classes: artifacts created in simple relief and artifacts created with a complex design. The complex artifacts were then µCT scanned, revealing the multiple elements joined together. Using medical imaging software, they were able to better understand the parts and see that the beads were created in layers. With the software, the various layers could be virtually deconstructed so that each layer could be examined and stacked, as if each piece were separate. At the MMA, Pete Dandridge, Conservator and Administrator, was able to disassemble a bead to physically see the pieces, which further helped to interpret the µCT data and reinforced the understanding of the layers. Since not all artifacts can be taken apart, the µCT scans provided to be invaluable in examining the construction and documenting the process. One example showed a bead attached to a rosary that had multiple roundels set into the main structure. The roundels could be virtually removed with the µCT scans and software, revealing a numbering system beneath.
In addition to examining the construction, they also looked at the limited polychromy present on some beads. Although most pieces were unpainted, a few pieces had painted details in blue, black, or red. These elements, along with adhesives and coatings, are being analyzed at the MMA and the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) with a suite of techniques.
These artifacts and findings about them will be presented in an exhibition, Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures, opening in Toronto on Nov. 5, 2016. The exhibition will feature over 60 boxwood carvings from institutions and private collections across Europe and North America. Following its debut at the AGO, the exhibition will open at the The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Feb. 21, 2017, before travelling to the Rijksmuseum on June 15, 2017. For more details about the exhibition and related programming visit www.ago.net and follow #miniAGO on twitter and instagram.
For images and further details on the work being carried out at the AGO, visit this link at the CODART eZine: http://ezine.codart.nl/17/issue/45/artikel/investigating-miniature-boxwood-carving-at-the-art-gallery-of-ontario-in-toronto/?id=119#!/page/1
Investigation on these materials have been on-going. For some background on earlier work that started this process, visit this link on the AGO website: http://www.ago.net/idea-lab
Other collaborators not mentioned above include: Alexandra Suda (AGO), Andrew Nelson (Sustainable Archaeology, Western University), Barbara Drake Boehm (MMA – Cloisters), Elizabeth Moffatt (CCI – retired), Jennifer Poulin (CCI)
Joint 44th AIC Annual Meeting & 42nd CAC-ACCR Annual Conference, General Session, May 16, “Clandon Park – rising from the ashes,” by Christine Leback Sitwell
In the spring of 2012, as a conservation student at UCL, I had the privilege to visit Clandon Park during a field trip. When I heard of the fire that occurred almost three years after my visit, I was shocked and devastated. My attendance to this talk was driven by a personal resonation with Clandon as well as the curiosity and fascination to see an emergency plan in use, despite the circumstances.
A personal photo of a classmate in the marble hall, 2012 and the marble hall post fire, 2015
Christine Sitwell, the Paintings Conservation Advisor for the National Trust in the UK, discussed the emergency response plan in regards to the fire at Clandon Park. The fire started quite small in a basement office on the right side of the building in the late afternoon of April 29, 2015. The fire then rose through the empty elevator shaft, enabling it to reach the lead covered roof and travel across to the left side of the building. Because of this, items and rooms on the left side, albeit still damaged, were not as badly damaged as the right side of the building. It was estimated that the amount damaged and/or completely lost totaled ninety-five percent.
Clandon Park, being under the auspices of the National Trust, has an emergency plan in place. Ironically, five weeks prior, a training procedure involving the fire brigade occurred at Clandon. Christine briefly went over the basics of the plan, including their incident reporting system. The system involves a phone tree, salvage areas to move objects, security, and something called star item sheets. These star item sheets were developed by property staff that prioritize objects as great significance to the property or of great art historical value. They are clear, simple, and to be used by the fire brigade when salvaging items. They are laminated and have two copies, one on the property as well as one in the regional office. Below are the two example slides she provided.
Once these objects have been removed from the property, they are moved to designated salvage areas, inventoried, and finally moved to more secure locations. Three of the items salvaged included three paintings that, fortunately or unfortunately, had to be cut from their frames as the paintings in their frames were much too heavy and risky to be removed together. Positively, the frames were saved as well. Clandon has bottom hanging frames just for this reason, the frames hang at the bottom for ease of removal.
Once the bulk of the items are salvaged things are not over. In addition to inventory and conservation, the next issue is security. Christine mentioned that the ease of information through the internet, smart phones, and the press increased risk of theft of items and perhaps more subsequent damage to the building. The emergency plan for Clandon Park includes a communication officer. Their duty is to be the point of up to date information regarding any changes, and updates during and immediately following an emergency. They are the point of contact with the press and the public.
Christine then shared a video diary she recorded during the aftermath of the fire. It included a school that was shut down for two days to help store some of the objects. The video diary is below.
Rescued from the ruins – a video diary of the salvage operation at Clandon Park
More issues occurred because of the many different salvage sites. A collections management system was created in a spreadsheet manner in order to determine the different levels of damage to each object within each salvage site. The building construction was damaged but intact, leaving a shell of a building. The damage was assessed with a 3D laser and the building’s structural stability was able to be evaluated. There were various other methods of surveying the damage, including a drone.
There were also the health hazards associated with the burning lead roof. The burning created about six feet of lead oxide dust and debris inside. The possible risk of mercury and asbestos poisoning was also present. Therefore, admittance had to be regulated and personnel properly outfitted in order to excavate the burnt layers to retrieve small finds.
The final part of the talk was in regards to the future of Clandon Park. It was stated that the General Director of the National Trust will rebuild Clandon Park, but to what degree. There have been instances with other National Trust properties on how they have handled such a large devastation. The options with how to handle Clandon park were to: demolish, maintain as a ruin, restore completely, reinvent for another purpose, or a use blended approach. The latter seems the most likely to occur.
To end her talk, Christine shared another video about the future of Clandon Park. The video can be seen below.
Clandon Park: The Future
Overall, it was intriguing and somber to see an emergency plan being utilized during such a destructive event. I enjoyed the fact that it was not a talk on the development of a plan in case of emergency, but rather the practice of it in the moment. Not only was this a learning experience for the National Trust and everyone involved in the process, I’m sure it meant a great deal to everyone who was present at Christine’s talk. If anyone else had the chance to visit Clandon before the fire, then you are aware of how such a startling loss this has been, not only for the local community, but for admirers around the world. I am hopeful for Clandon Park’s future.
Further information:
Clandon Park at the National Trust
Our Work at Clandon Park
44th Annual Meeting – Book & Paper Session, May 17, "Targeted Cleaning of Works on Paper: Rigid Polysaccharide Gels and Conductivity-Adjusted Aqueous Solutions," Amy Hughes and Michelle Sullivan
The past few years have seen an uptick in the number of BPG session talks focusing on cross-disciplinary materials and techniques that allow for more targeted treatment approaches. Specifically, the use of rigid polysaccharide gels, such as agarose and gellan gum, and conductivity-adjusted waters are techniques with a more established history in paintings and objects conservation that are being adapted for treatment of works on paper.
Michelle Sullivan, Graduate Fellow in the Department of Paper conservation at the J. Paul Getty Museum, spoke first about the use of gel systems in targeted cleaning of works on paper. Sullivan outlined the advantages of gel systems, which include:
- targeted, precise application by cutting gels to shape
- restricted lateral movement, minimizing tideline formation
- increased dwell time for reagents in solution and solvents
- no mechanical action, protecting paper fibers
- colorless, transparent/translucent gels facilitate treatment monitoring
- ease of removal, virtually no residues
While the science behind these gel systems is best left to the experts in the postprints, here are a few notes worth keeping in mind when designing treatments with gels:
- Agarose is more opaque than gellan gum; gellan gum’s translucency allows you to more closely monitor treatment.
- Casting thinner gels affords greater control over solvent diffusion.
- Pore size is inversely related to concentration; the higher the concentration, the smaller the pore size, which leads to greater capillary action.
- You can use a range of modified aqueous solutions with the gel systems, including pH- and conductivity-adjusted waters, chelators, and enzymes.
- The gels can be used with polar solvents; just soak the prepared gel in solvent of choice overnight. Sullivan noted that the gels become more rigid when soaked in solvent, so she recommends cutting them to the desired shape and size prior to soaking.
- Examination under UV revealed more consistent washing with the gel than with a traditional blotter wash.
Sullivan then presented two case studies. First, by tracing the outline of a stain onto a sheet of polyester film and then using this template to shape the gellan gum, she was able to reduce the stain locally without the risk of tidelines. In the second example, Sullivan humidified a print and then washed it overall by placing it face-up on a sheet of gellan gum. A medium-weight sekishu paper was placed between the print and the gel. (She tried Hollytex as a washing support, but it did not allow for consistent penetration.)
Experimentation is currently underway to determine whether or not gel residue is left behind on the paper substrate. Agarose, gellan gum, and methylcellulose are being tagged with UV-fluorescent dyes in order to track their movement onto the paper; results of this testing should be available in 2017.
Next, Amy Hughes, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, spoke about her research into the use of pH- and conductivity-adjusted waters in treatment. Adjusted waters minimize swelling of the paper fibers while at the same time improving wetability and solubilization of degradation products, allowing conservators to design treatments that are more sensitive to the object. Again, I’ll leave the scientific explanation to the expert (though I have to note her lovely illustration of osmosis featuring a very plump carrot), but the procedure involves measuring surface pH- and conductivity of the object using agarose plugs and handheld meters (this video from the Getty clearly outlines the process) and then combining ammonium hydroxide (weak base) and acetic acid (weak acid) to form ammonium acetate (neutral salt) that, with water, can be used to create an isotonic solution (a procedure also outlined in a Getty video). Hughes did note that some objects washed in adjusted waters retained a vinegar odor that took 3-5 days to dissipate; further testing is underway to address this issue.
These talks left me feeling very inspired to begin testing out these new treatment methods in my lab!