Tag: outreach

At the annual meeting this year, I appreciated that many of the sessions incorporated and allowed for conversations and discussion between the presenters and audience, and this session was no exception. The first half featured 3 more traditional-style presentations followed by a dynamic panel interview with 3 conservators whose career paths have diverged from the bench.

Sari Uricheck opened the session with a strong presentation  on “Promoting Conservation.” She spoke about marketing and PR and how the field of conservation needs to work on its message and image, and offered some concrete ideas for how we can start doing this. She pointed out the fact that conservation has weak “brand recognition” and made important points about the fact that terminology matters. We use so many different words to describe our work-conservation, preservation, collections care-but we need to be consistent in our language. Public Relations is about communicating and image control is part of this. Sari urged us to use the term “conservation” to describe our work.

In her talk, Sari outlined some essential elements of a successful conservation PR campaign. She discussed the need for an association audit-what do audiences connect with conservation?  Among the public, people often think of paintings conservation. In museums, many of our colleagues may associate conservation and conservators with being difficult or saying “no”, and among allied professionals, conservation may be associated with a large expense. Using PR, we can plant associations that we want people to make. Our messages should be explaining what conservation makes possible-we should be communicating “YES” not “NO”. Sari also pointed out that targeting allied professionals is just as important as targeting the public and that we need to highlight the fact that conservation is central to all museums’ missions.

Sari also discussed the idea of borrowing from a social organization model by Dr. Marshall Ganz-“Self, Us, Now.”  The idea is that we as a profession can draw unity, inspiration and power from our personal narratives to form a collective identity. And the urgency of “now” is often difficult to convey-why conservation now? There are ways to convince people that conservation is important now, such as organizing events around Preservation Week and May Day. Sari pointed out that the US is about a decade behind Europe when it comes to promoting conservation. She urged us to take action now to bring about a greater awareness of our field and what we do. I liked Sari’s talk and I think that her message is spot-on. I’ve been working on AIC’s PR Toolkit, so I particularly appreciated her ideas and I hope to start working on incorporating them into this resource soon.

Carmen Li spoke next, about a project at the Museum of Northern Arizona (MNA), where she helped develop a project using social media for fundraising, in conjunction with a collections move project from 2008-2011.

Money had been raised to build a new collections center, but the museum needed funding for supplies and equipment. So the “Save-a-pot” campaign was started to solicit small donations and to highlight research taking place behind the scenes. They started with a Facebook giving campaign by making a video featuring the prehistoric ceramic collection, showing the collection in its old storage conditions and then in the new storage location, and showing the progress of the move. The video was made using still shots, assembled with Final Cut Pro, edited using Quicktime, and uploaded to Youtube.

They made this into a “microgiving” campaign and let people know what their money would help fund-$5 for 50 hot glue sticks, $100 for a roll of Tyvek, etc. The key points of their campaign was that it told a story, it allowed for multiple donations of small amounts of money for specific causes, it showed how the donations would be directly input into the museum and the project, and it was based on the belief that philanthropists  need not be millionaires.

Unfortunately, after all of that work, the director left and the campaign wasn’t launched. So instead they posted the video on the MNA homepage and they still managed to raise funds. The lesson Carmen left us with is that while social media is easy to use, it isn’t necessarily simple to use it effectively and successfully. She also stressed the fact that museums need to be open to their staff taking on different roles.

In the third talk of the session, Catriona Hughes and Sarah Kay spoke about how the National Trust moved conservation projects into the public spotlight, which helped increase revenues and visitorship. Early on in properties within in the National Trust, visitors were shown finished rooms and conservation was done off-site or in the off-season. When work had to be done on-site, there was no access or interpretation for the public. In 2001, there was pressure for the Trust to increase revenue and open properties for longer seasons, which meant that conservation could no longer take place in the off-season, and lead to an effort to bring greater awareness to conservation and to make these projects more interactive and participatory.

Conservation projects started to be carried out with transparency, and they found that public engagement is a powerful way of building support and is a tool for unlocking funding. An example is the Attingham Re-discovered project, which began in 2006 in an effort to make interior improvements to the Attingham mansion. By drawing visitors into conservation debates and decision-making, they saw an increase in visitors by over 100%. Marketing and social media played a big role in this as well-they launched Attingham Park TV on Youtube.

By putting conservation front and center, the National Trust found that they could generate support, encourage funding, increase visitor numbers and raise the profile of conservation and the value of traditional skills.

These inspiring presentations were followed by a talk show-style interview with Scott Carrlee, Nicola Longford and Susan Mathisen, led by Julie Heath. All three conservators’ careers have diverged from the bench into other areas, including museum and institutional development, administration and community outreach. I found this part of the session so interesting and inspiring-all three said that their education, training and experience in conservation gave them confidence and curiosity needed to contribute and to be successful in these other roles. In their new positions, they can also act as important advocates for conservation. In this economic climate, with seemingly few jobs and opportunities, hearing from Scott, Susan and Nicola was an excellent reminder that there are many ways to be effective in caring for collections and that there are more ways to be a conservator.

The Balance Between the Conservation and the Dissemination of the Art Museum of the

Central Bank of Colombia Collections

Adriana Paez Cure

Middle East Photograph Preservation Initiative: Learning in Collaboration

Nora W. Kennedy, Debra Hess Norris, Zeina Arida, Rima Mokaiesh, and Tram Vo

Heritage Without Borders – Tackling Skills Shortages In The Developing World

Dominica D’Arcangelo

This interesting session addressed three initiatives in South America, the Middle East and Europe that provide conservation training, preservation resources, and public education to underserved regions of the world.

Heritage Without Borders brings together qualified and motivated young professionals (volunteers) to help solve heritage problems and build local capacity.  While participation is limited currently to UK residents there is the possibility that this restriction will change. They seek people who are excellent communicators and value education and training and who enjoy the challenge of developing creative solutions to real problems. Emerging conservators and senior professionals are welcome to participate in wide ranging projects. Removing the barrier of cost Heritage without Borders aims to help alleviate poverty through the improvement of heritage provision. 2011 projects were organized in Turkmenistan and Bosnia.

See info@heritagewithoutborders.org OR www.heritagewithoutborders.org

The Middle East Photograph Preservation Initiative (MEPPI) is a strategic training and outreach initiative to promote the preservation and awareness of photograph collections in the broad Middle East, from North Africa and the Arab Peninsula through Western Asia. MEPPI is collaborating with several partners. This multi-faceted initiative includes a survey of collections in the region, a series of courses for collection custodians with a distance mentoring component, and a symposium focusing on the rich photographic legacy of the Middle East. MEPPI Beirut 2011 welcomed 18 participants from leading photograph collections of the greater Middle East, including national archives and libraries, museums, press agencies, and universities from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Syria.

See http://www.meppi.org/ Or http://www.getty.edu/conservation/our_projects/education/cons_photo/cons_photo_meppi.html

While the Central Bank of the Columbia Museum of Art is not leading a global training initiative, this presentation reaffirmed the conservator’s varied role as administrator and practitioner, especially when dealing with the challenges of modern and contemporary art and a demanding exhibition schedule.

See http://www.banrepcultural.org/museodearte.htm

Lessons learned from these unique projects and global preservation activities include;

• Importance and value of collaboration with multiple partners who contribute expertise and financial or in-kind support .
• Enormous  value of on-site  and engaged partners who welcome expertise, can mediate project development and implementation, and remain committed to public access to collections at-risk
• Need to develop sustainable solutions to build capacity and better ensure continued impact
• Need to respect and embrace regional traditional preservation practices while advancing conservation practice and understanding
• Importance of multilingual glossaries to facilitate conversation and advance understanding
• Need for cultural sensitivity and clear understanding of goals of all global partners
• Focus on the highest of standards connected with unvarying flexibility
• Always identify in-country resources, including  adequate storage enclosures
• Potential for international projects to advance preservation awareness and best practices and connect communities globally
• Value of distance mentoring to strengthen education and build a strong cohort of workshop participants
• Opportunity to connect our  efforts to successful and prominent  global initiatives, including Doctors Without Borders
• Potential for these projects to build confidence, advance skills, and expand marketability of emerging conservators

N.B.  This post was written by Debra Hess Norris, Henry Francis DuPont Chair of Fine Arts, Chair and Professor, Art Conservation Department, Associate Dean for Graduate Education & Interim Associate Dean for the Arts, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Delaware.

This group of sessions presented various projects of outdoor murals, public sculpture, and architectural elements  and how the general public was involved and/or contributed to the efforts of preservation and cataloging of the collection.

Leslie Ranier, of the Getty Conservation Institute, began the session with a discussion of the 1932 Siqueiros mural, America Tropical, located in Los Angeles across from City Hall.  Although the artist had been commissioned to portray a particular subject matter, he instead used the opportunity to comment on American imperialism.  Authorities were not amused and it was almost immediately painted over.  As years went by and the overpainting faded, the mural began to peek through.  The wall onto which the mural had been painted was partially hidden by surrounding buildings so the lack of visibility contributed to it being ‘lost’ to the public.  By the 1960s, however, there was a public call to restore the mural and the GCI became involved in the 1980s.  A temporary protective shelter was erected to provide protection.  By the 1990s, an agreement was signed with the city to provide treatment which is currently underway.   A more permanent shelter is being designed by Brooks + Scarpa Architects, along with an interpretive center  (with the help of IQ Magic) and an observation platform which will bring the public up to eye level with the restored mural. (http://www.pugh-scarpa.com/projects/siqueiros)  Outreach activities for this project include:  site visits for the public and officials to view conservation activities, screening of a 1971 documentary on the artist, staging of an opera which tells the story of the mural, production of a video of the project and its evolution, and a symposium on the legacy of Siqueiros.  These activities, along with the actual conservation work on the mural, all contribute to preserve the story of the mural and the evidence of the artist’s hand.

The next presentation was by Kristen Laise, of Heritage Preservation in Washington DC.  She discussed the evolution of their Save Outdoor Sculpture program which was able to bring together 7,000 volunteers across the country to catalog 30,000 public sculptures between 1989 and 2006.  This effort introduced the local communities to conservation and directed attention to long neglected statues.  This catalog was then made available to the public through the Smithsonian’s Inventory of American Sculpture database.  The program was carried out through a combination of federal, foundation, and corporate funds and had a presence in every state in the country.  (Sidebar:  During the course of my own work restoring public sculptures, I can’t tell you how many times I was asked if a statue was newly installed, when in fact it had been there for a hundred years.  Sometimes you just don’t see what’s in your own backyard until a project like SOS calls your attention to it.)  Children’s education was one of the targets of their outreach activities and included a traveling exhibition entitled “Preserving Memory”, an education kit called “Inside Outdoor Sculpture”, and even the introduction of a Girl Scout patch program.  I believe she mentioned that efforts to publish information on the program on YouTube are currently underway.  With an emphasis on good visual images and extensive press coverage, Kristen stated that her office had binder after binder after binder of press clippings covering the program.  Perhaps because of the huge success of the program, the National Cemetery Administration used it as a model for their own Historic Monuments Assessments program where 960 objects in 125 cemeteries were assessed, with a subsequent 76 historic monuments conserved. (Full disclosure: I was a recipient of several of those contracts.)  Kristen then reviewed their follow-up program of Rescue Public Murals which was launched in 2006.  The goal of the project was/is advocacy and documentation for public murals.  She gave an example of a mural in Atlanta which lacked these items and was unfortunately repeatedly covered with graffiti to the point that it was no longer recoverable.  Heritage Preservation has collaborated with ARTstor to publicize images of public murals (http://www.artstor.org/what-is-artstor/w-html/col-murals-heritage.shtml) in an effort to garner community support for their protection.  Again, Kristen emphasized the importance of good press coverage in protecting murals, the need to have community groups take ownership, and the necessity of educating the public (in particular, any neighborhood associations within the area) as to the importance of the mural.  Another aspect of the RPM program is to review existing guidelines for mural protection, to conduct artist interviews, and to do materials research to support preservation efforts.

Next up was Richard McCoy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  After an initial blog post to challenge the public to come document IMA’s outdoor art was less successful than he had hoped, Richard took another approach and went to his museum studies students at Indiana University Purdue University (IUPUI).  His assignment to them was to survey the public art within their campus and to create Wiki articles and Flickr posts to document the collection.  They used SOS materials to guide them in conducting their surveys and became familiar with the importance of primary source material in creating their Wikipedia postings.  The resulting blog attention to this project was so extensive that Wiki gave it an entry on their main page.  And because of the use of geolocators within the Wiki posts, links to other websites and pages (e.g., a fan page within Facebook) resulted in an even greater dissemination of the information.  Richard’s next effort was to bring students to the Indiana Statehouse to document the art found within the building.  During this effort, students were able to bring attention to an overlooked statue that had been shown in the 1893 World’s Fair and had since been mistakenly identified (http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2011/02/08/resolving-to-care-and-document ). To further publicize and utilize the documentation efforts of the students, the ‘book creator’ tool within Wikipedia was enabled and guidebooks to the public art of the Statehouse were produced and sold.  At the beginning of his presentation, Richard stated that the premise of using Wikipedia is that rather than claiming ownership of the information, the author is giving the gift of knowledge.

The next speaker was Fabio Carrera from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.  Fabio has spent 25 years collecting information on public art and architectural elements created before 1797 in Venice, Italy.  His WPI engineering and science students began documenting these in the late 1980s in partnership with Earthwatch Institute volunteers, creating a wiki-based website to give access to the information to the public (http://venipedia.org/index.php?title=Main_Page ).  Each object is given a single page within this website, leading to the creation of 3,068 pages of information; sematic tags within the pages allow you to search for like items.  Their documentation efforts have enabled the discovery that 33 pieces within the catalog are now found to be missing.  The project has continued to evolve, with efforts currently underway to create a mobile app which will serve as a guide to each of the public art wiki entries.  It is to have interactive ‘intelligence’ which will allow the viewer to view condition photos of the object while standing in front of it, to provide an updated photograph, to contribute money to its restoration, to sign up for alerts when others update the catalog entry, and other ways to stay informed.  This app is expected to be ready in the summer of 2012.  In addition to this wiki project, Fabio has started a non-profit organization called PreserVenice.org which will collaborate with UNESCO in the preservation of the public art of Venice.

This was followed by a presentation by Andrew Smith of Sculpture Conservation Studio in Los Angeles where Andrew told the story of a glass tile and mosaic mural that had been covertly installed on a train trestle in Encinitas.  The religious image (a surfing Virgin of Guadalupe) combined with the fact that the art was unsanctioned by the city, sparked controversy and the city tasked his firm with investigating how/if the mural could be removed.  Because nobody had yet claimed responsibility for its creation, Andrew and his fellow conservators were at the site attempting to understand its fabrication and how it might be removed – while the public and press watched.  A few remarks made by Andrew to an inquiring reporter regarding the artwork, spoken from the heart but perhaps made without thinking of the ramifications, went viral online and called even more attention to the project, resulting in international coverage and scrutiny of how the artwork should be seen.  This sort of attention then placed both the client and the conservator in a difficult position.  Andrew ended the presentation by prompting the audience to consider where the line is when conservators are asked to protect controversial or provocative works of art, particularly when they are not sanctioned by authorities.  And we must be careful to remain aware of the public’s perception of our efforts in this age of instantaneous media coverage.

This session was brought to a close by a short video presented by Scott Haskins which was created to publicize the efforts to save a series of freeway murals created in Los Angeles as part of the 1984 Olympics.  The murals were supposed to have been maintained and preserved in perpetuity but, instead, were being painted over by Cal Trans because of their legal obligation to address graffiti.  Part of his efforts have included the edification of highway crews to show that the graffiti tag can be removed without completely painting over the whole mural and that the mural can then be saved (http://www.fineartconservationlab.com/save-los-angeles-freeway-murals/ ).  A second closing note was given by Viviana Dominguez, who discussed the removal of three mural paintings from the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Haiti after the recent earthquake.  Their efforts successfully saved these 3, while 11 others were destroyed during the quake.

The presentations of the Public Art Outreach Session were all very successful in showing how important it is to involve the community in preservation efforts.  It is our responsibility to articulate the significance of public art, not only in terms of the importance of the artist or the placement of the object, but also its beauty, the artist’s vision, and how the object speaks to the soul.  The methods through which that is accomplished have grown exponentially over the past couple decades and we need to be familiar and comfortable with the ways in which we can publicize our message.

This interactive session was chaired by Suzanne Davis (Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan) and Emily Williams (Colonial Williamsburg), and focused on issues related to exhibiting conservation goals and activities to a public audience. Attendees of the session had the chance to hear presentations that examined a number of conservation outreach models and methods, and were then invited to brainstorm solutions to some of the issues raised during the talks. Before introducing the speakers, Suzanne Davis expressed why she thinks exhibiting conservation is important and effective: doing so raises awareness and support, by the fact that conservation as a field fascinates people of many interests, making it an ideal subject for exhibition.

A diverse array of conservation outreach cases were presented at a lively pace of 15 minutes per talk. Tom Learner’s presentation on the exhibition of De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column at the J. Paul Getty museum showed how conservators were able to balance very technical information on the process of making the object with thought-provoking questions about how to preserve the artist’s original intent. This was done by including polyester maquettes in the exhibit space, along with supporting media that ran images and video of Valentine in action. Cynthia Albertson discussed the challenges and successes of exhibiting the conservation behind MoMA’s project to reunify Diego Rivera’s portable murals. Items featured in the gallery – including X-ray films showing the walls’ internal structures as well as examples of the artist’s materials – were accompanied by online features and a fresco-making course at NYU.

Following these initial talks the audience divided up into discussion groups and were invited to consider some questions, which had been printed out and left on each group’s table. My table decided to tackle the following questions (paraphrased):

Q. A lot of energy goes into creating conservation exhibits but is the conservation community aware that these exhibits are happening or do we stumble on them when visiting other museums?

A. The table felt that we do generally try to follow what our colleagues are doing, but that there is no centralized platform to find this information. News about exhibitions tends to be trickled onto web-media platforms like Facebook via word of mouth (or click).

Q. Should we as a community be more involved in helping to promote them?

A. Yes.

Q. Through what paths?

A. Perhaps through institutional or affiliated blogs.. this could be done by working closely with the institution’s social media person.

Q. Do we need to reach out to our own community?                                                                                            

A. Yes, perhaps through posts on the AIC Blog, which can be linked to other social media platforms. At this point in the discussion the idea of an online conservation ‘bulletin board’ was raised – a location to post these types of exhibitions. A platform that allows for visually-impacting, post-it-like messages of events would be useful – like Pinterest.

Q. How should we ‘outreach’ about outreach in AIC?                                                                                                            

A. One member of the group pointed out that this is already happening – AIC’s in-development PR Toolkit, which is hosted on the WIKI, offers a list of traditional and social media tools to help conservators reach out to their intended audience.

Talks resumed with Irene Peters’ discussion of the challenges of exhibiting day-to-day activities in a visible conservation laboratory at the Musical Instrument Museum. Digital monitors explaining the purpose of fume trunks, docents trained to talk about conservation, and open tool cabinets displayed close to the visitors’ window were among the techniques used to transform an active lab into an ongoing conservation exhibit. Sanchita Balachandran talked about how outreach is an integral part of the conservator’s role in a university museum. Her work at the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum has encompassed everything from object treatment and exhibition to providing access to collections through courses and online didactics. The session’s final speaker, Christopher McAfee of the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, discussed the various approaches the department has used to educate staff and patrons on the proper handling and care of archival collections. His training video on the subject – filmed in the style of an 1960’s airline safety video, flashing tooth * smile included – elicited laughter throughout the room.

The session ended with a final panel discussion of the questions our breakout groups had tackled after the first two talks. A rep from each table joined the panel at the front of the room, and we worked through the following questions (paraphrased here):

Q. Should conservators share information on how they treat artworks?                                                                    

A. Attendees seemed to favor sharing preventive information over explanations of treatment, though Christopher McAfee pointed out that explaining the process of a particular treatment, along with the caveat that trying to repair something yourself will likely make it worse, has led patrons to approach trained conservators for help instead.

Q. Do we know what our audience knows about conservation?                                                                 

A. We don’t, although surveys could help us to better understand the extent of visitors’ knowledge (as has been done at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan).

Q. Is it valuable to weave conservation information into gallery exhibits on a regular basis?                          

A. This could be challenging for space reasons, but there is plenty of room online for this information to be regularly featured.

Q. Does conservation outreach take too much time?          

A. Perhaps, but if we work as teams with the institution’s media departments time could be reasonably split and balanced. Ironically, our table ran out of time before we could tackle this particular question.

The balance of presentations with group and panel discussion made this outreach session quite valuable. I feel as if I’ve walked away with some answers to the questions many of us have about whether conservation exhibition is worth the added time and energy. If we work to promote our presence both in the gallery and online, I think these efforts will be worthwhile.