Why I joined AIC…and you should too.

I have often been met by blank stares when I tell someone outside the art community that I am training to become an art conservator. They may have never heard of the American Institute for Conservation, but for me it’s been a fantastic boon.

Being a member of AIC shows an ongoing commitment to the field, the institution and its values. Membership helps support all of the advocacy and education work AIC does for the conservation of art and historic artifacts.  Increasing public awareness of the work we do and its importance is a cause I hold dear and am happy to contribute to, even if I can only do so in small ways. In fact, as you probably know already, the 2012 annual meeting is all about outreach.

When I first joined AIC I had my doubts, and many other emerging professionals do too. I had been told by more established professionals that I should join AIC right away. But was membership something I could benefit from, even when I wasn’t 100% sure I would stay in the profession? Was it really worth the fee? Was I going to get anything out of joining?

The membership fee for students is $65. At first this sounded like quite a lot to me because at that time I was a pre-program intern: getting paid little or nothing, commuting long hours, taking pre-requisite classes in the evenings, and babysitting to try to afford all this. But once I realized what being a member actually meant (and that it is only about $5 a month) I decided it was well worth it.

Having access to the latest issues of AIC News and JAIC is a great way to keep up with current research, publications, internships and other career development opportunities. I really enjoy pouring over the printed issues when I get them in the mail. AIC News keeps me up to date with who and what is happening in the field. JAIC provides more depth of knowledge and food for thought. While older volumes of both publications are available online, I find that this resource is really best used when searching for specific information. Also, the annual directory helps me find members by institution, name or geographical area.

AIC is about connecting, communicating, and being committed to conservation.

Praise for Find a Conservator and AIC

A recent mailing, Conservation, from the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation contains a brief article about AIC’s online resources and the benefits of membership:

Sometimes the virtual world of the web is a collector’s best friend, especially when a simple click can help you save anything from a collection of old master drawings to a christening gown.

The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works website at www.conservation-us.org is a case in point. This veritable treasure chest of resources offers advice on how to choose a conservator and how to find one in your part of the country. It offers helpful tips for caring for all types of things, including architectural structures and detailing, manuscripts, prints, books, tools, jewelry, tableware, quilts, costumes, samplers, and flags.

The AIC also offers you the opportunity to establish connections with others who share your interest in preservation through publications, conferences, workshops, and daily networking opportunities. The Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation is a proud member.”

 

Review of Health & Safety for Museum Professionals appears in January issue of JOEM

Working in a city where there is a museum nearly at every corner, we enjoyed reading Health & Safety for Museum Professionals because it illuminated a world of work and workers largely hidden from our view when we visit the many museums here in Washington, District of Columbia. Most of all, we enjoyed reading this book because it is well written, well organized, and informative without being a ponderous reference book. Health & Safety for Museum Professionals is a valuable addition to any safety and health professional’s shelf of resource books, but it would seem to us an indispensible one for every museum safety professional.”

Excerpt from book review by John Howard, MD, and Anita Schill, PhD, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Washington, DC, appearing in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Volume 54, Number 1, January 2012

Nora Kennedy 2011 HP Image Permanence Award recipient

Congratulations to Nora Kennedy, Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 2011 recipient of the HP Image Permanence Award. This award is given by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) in partnership with the International Institute for Conservation (IIC) and is sponsored by the Hewlett-Packard Company.

“Established in 2006, the HP Image Permanence Award recognizes advances in colorant and print media materials that significantly increase permanence; advances in predictive science that increase the validity of permanence predictions or provide insight into optimal storage and usage conditions; and/or educational efforts that raise awareness of the effect of storage and usage conditions on permanence.”

Nora is specifically being recognized for her outstanding contributions that advance the longevity of photographic and fine art images created via modern digital methods in the form of her co-leadership with Debbie in organizing the Mellon Collaborative Workshops in Photograph Conservation, the creation and distribution of digital sample book and for leading the creation of the Photograph Information Record (PIR). Since any single digital print process can change in behavior from generation to generation in only  a few years, the PIR is an important link between the object and the actual materials that produced it.  It’s the best tool that we have at the moment to prevent an information black hole in institutions that collect digital prints.

Nora’s willingness to engage contemporary artists in discussion regarding materials choices, exhibition and mounting (all related to preservation) as well as the general care of photographs including digital prints was also noted by the awards committee.

For more information about the award see http://www.imaging.org/ist/membership/honors_desc.cfm?AwardCode=HPIP

Posting courtesy of Doug Nishimura, Image Permanence Institute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artists’ Records in the Archives: A Two-Day Symposium

Last fall, I attended an exciting two-day symposium in New York City titled “Artists’ Records in the Archives.”  Presented on October 11-12, 2011 by the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, the symposium highlighted something I knew little about: the presence of works of art in many archival collections.  Simply put, the dualism between art and its archival traces is no longer valid.  The goal of this conference was to start a dialogue that can address the ways in which archival concepts and practices must be updated and refined in light of this change.

Much that was discussed was relevant for conservators.  Choosing the appropriate category (library, archives, art, special collections) for a work has implications for its accessibility, preservation, resource allocation, and value for insurance purposes.  As such, transparent methods and principles for this categorization must be developed.  Archiving and preservation strategies for works created in multimedia and emerging media must also be explored. Archivists are interested in establishing best practices and guidelines for categorizing works, and establishing some objective criteria.  They are agreed that archivists must work more closely with curators and conservators over time to periodically examine the institution’s holdings to ensure that works are properly categorized and cared for.  The lesson for scholars engaged in research is that art collections, archives, and libraries do not have tidy boundaries.

Speakers included Ann Butler (Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard) who spoke about the blurring line between “art” and “archives,” and how some objects that were once considered documentation are now exhibited as art.  She went on to discuss how this presented challenges for categorizing objects.  Marvin Taylor (Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU) chose specific items from the Downtown collection (post-1975 New York) to illustrate the same problem – what is “art” and what is “document”?  Examples included street art documentation, and artists’ notes and drawings on correspondence in the archives.  Chrissie Iles (Whitney Museum of American Art) discussed how, as time passes, archival materials may migrate toward status as art objects.  She pointed out that recent art movements make definitions of art objecthood elusive.  In the absence of an object, such as in the case of performance art/time-based works, photo documentation stands in for the art event, so these kinds of documents are often collected and exhibited as art objects themselves.

Other topics covered by this symposium included how to preserve, process, manage, and make artists’ records accessible to researchers.  Digitization of archives and preservation and accessibility of born-digital materials were also explored.  There were many wonderful speakers on these topics, but in particular, Sally Brazil (The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library), Julia Feldman (MoMA), and Erin Murphy (Harvard Art Museums) all gave very exciting talks about their experiences with processing and managing artists’ records in their archives.  Ms. Brazil spoke about the Frick family archive, Ms. Feldman about the Fluxus archive, and Ms. Murphy described the processing of the Alfonso Ossorio archive.

Erin Kinhart described the massive digitization project of 118 collections in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Charles Duncan highlighted several important collections of artists’ records that have already been digitized, including the Louise Nevelson papers, papers of the Photorealists (Audrey Flack, et al), the Jack Stewart graffiti archive, Jimmy Ernst’s papers (son of Max Ernst), letters pertaining to the Armory show, etc. Megan McShea spoke about artists’ audiovisual records, which are at particular risk for irreparable damage if not conserved, due to the inherent fragility of the media.

It was interesting to hear about the many different kinds of archives, from public to private, large to small, and everything in between.  Andrew Martinez (Rhode Island School of Design) shared some examples from the RISD archive, an institutional and teaching archive that contains many original student art works, such as the student work of noted photographer Francesca Woodman. Her transcripts, application materials, artist statements, essays, and exhibition documentation can help scholars establish a timeline for her work and better understand her developing vision.  By contrast, Allison Hemler (The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation) works at an archive devoted to one artist, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and generally speaking there are no discrete art objects in collections. Owners of installation work by Gonzalez-Torres receive a Certificate of Authenticity and a guidelines sheet. Every installation is unique, thereby resisting monumentalization of the art object.

The symposium concluded with a session on the subject of born-digital archive materials and art works, and a discussion of how to ensure access to artists’ records created today with emerging technologies.  Social media and web archiving was discussed, and Dennis Moser (University of Wyoming) showed examples of the far fringe of digital arts – performance works done solely online, in virtual worlds – which perhaps illustrate best of all the particular challenges of preserving digital art.

This overview can but scratch the surface of what was discussed.  For me, I gained a new appreciation for the field of archives and preservation, and I am excited by the new directions for collaboration between archivists and conservators.

 

 

Preserving the history of conservators and conservation

Did you know that the upcoming AIC Annual Meeting will celebrate the 40th anniversary of AIC?  At such a milestone it is important to ensure that we are preserving our own history.  As part of the January AIC wiki Edit-A-Thon month we have launched a new section on the wiki to record information on the History of Conservation and Conservators.  This is just a start in developing a template for entries but we hope that people will be interested in adding information on colleagues who are no longer with us, their own practices and labs to record for posterity.  Thanks go out to AIC member Rebecca Rushfield for pushing this project forward.  If you are interested in participating or adding information on the wiki please use the Email AIC’s e-Editor contact form at the bottom of this blog page.

Information on other important contributors to our field is available in other areas as well. You can access information on the FAIC Oral History Project on the AIC website.

In other news, conservator Jean Portell is working on a biography of Sheldon and Carolyn Keck and is hoping to receive recollections and comments  from colleagues.  Take a look at the piece she wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle  Heights Couple Who Made Art Shine Like New and to learn more about two of the field’s pioneers.

We Need to Leave Some Work for Future Generations

In the last few months of 2011, Segolene Bergeon Langle and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, two members of the advisory committee overseeing the Louvre’s restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin and Child with St. Anne”, resigned in protest of the way that the project had been conducted.
According to a report in the New York Times (“Leonardo Painting’s Restoration Bitterly Divides Art Experts”, by Elaine Sciolino, January 4, 2012), the Louvre is under pressure to attract audiences with blockbuster shows for which masterpieces from its collection are often spruced up. As “Virgin and Child with St. Anne” is to be part of an exhibit that opens in March, the implication is that the Louvre let economic concerns drive its conservation policy– despite the Louvre’s assertions that the cleaning was necessary and that the dispute is solely about aesthetics.
Bergeon Langle has said that “despite great progress in our competence we need to be driven by modesty. Better and more controllable materials are yet to be discovered. We need to leave some work for future generations.” While her remark may be true about the treatment of masterpieces, with all of the lesser known art works in need of treatment, is there not something a bit disingenuous about it?

Plying the Trades: Report from NATCC Conference

“Plying the Trades: Pulling Together in the 21st Century,” the 8th North American Textile Conservation Conference (NATCC), met in Oaxaca, Mexico this past November, 2011.  Following two days of apropos workshop offerings, including an introduction to biological classification for textile conservators held in the local ethnobotanical gardens, two aqueous cleaning courses with the ever-in-demand Richard Wolbers, back-strap loom weaving (with regional artisans specializing in different techniques), natural dying (using local products including the hand-spun wool slated to be dyed), and feather mosaics (following a traditional technique using adhesive derived from a specific orchid flower), the program got off to a resounding start with a thought-provoking keynote address by Dr. Sven Haakanson.  If anyone present already felt sated from the successful workshops and early regional tours they could not help but quickly be drawn into the flow of the following two days.  Dr. Hakkanson’s touch points of living heritage, community, and repatriation of knowledge paved the way for an exciting conference filled with multi-cultural and disciplinary presentations, covering the territory of regaining lost traditions, sharing knowledge with local communities, creating discussions between communities, collection holders, and conservators, and finding paths for mutual ground or compromise for object care.

A few highlights included a history of community development and outreach at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), conservation in the public eye (quite literally due to their on view textile conservation laboratory) at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, UK, and the immense challenges and rewards of building international education programs.  Participants were further inundated with information during poster sessions, set during coffee breaks, which successfully promoted many discussions.

Planned to the nines, the conference also included a cocktail reception in the beautifully restored Centro Academico y Cultural San Pablo (originally established as a Dominican convent in 1529), and, the following evening, the conference closed on a high note with a full parade down the streets of Oaxaca complete with band, balloons, dancers, lanterns, and fire works leading the attendees to a lovely dinner set in the local Ethnobotanical Gardens.  Everyone left Oaxaca full of knowledge, mescal, and a new found appreciation of community.  Not to worry if Oaxaca proved too difficult to reach: post prints are available for purchase through natcconference.com (CD format) and plans are in the works for NATCC’s next conference.  Moving from one welcoming community to another, and focusing on modern materials, NATCC is slated to meet in San Francisco, November, 2013.

—Denise Migdail

 

AIC reaches out to Appraisers at AAA’s annual meeting

The second question that I am most frequently asked in my work after “Can you fix it?” is “Do you have any idea what it is worth?”   Hopefully the answer to the first question is “Yes!” but my answer to the second question is “No, assigning value isn’t what conservators do, but I know the name of several good appraisers”.  It is understandable that private clients are more likely to proceed with conserving a piece with high intrinsic worth, and there is synergy between what we do and what appraisers do.  Thus it was an important outreach opportunity for AIC to have an exhibitors table at the recent Appraisers Association for America annual meeting in November in New York City.  My business partner Eugenie Milroy and I had the privilege of representing our colleagues by manning the AIC booth during the two day meeting.

Yuri Yanchyshyn and Rachael Arenstein at AIC table
Yuri Yanchyshyn and Rachael Arenstein at the AIC table

There were about 300 people in attendance and during the coffee breaks the exhibitor’s area was full of appraisers perusing the tables.  We brought a laptop so that we could have the visually appealing AIC outreach PowerPoint presentation on a looped display and then use the computer to connect to the AIC website when we wanted to show people how to access the Find A Conservator feature online. Some attendees were well aware of conservation as a field, and AIC as a professional organization.  These individuals tended to stop by the booth to pick up some of AIC’s brochures, fliers and bookmarks to pass along to clients or ask specific questions.  Then there were others who, while aware of conservation, were not familiar with AIC.  Once they understood that AIC was to conservation what AAA was to appraisers, they often gave a sigh of relief to know that there is a place to turn to find us!  It was illuminating to talk to these allied professionals and learn more about their views on conservation and conservators.  In addition to these individual interactions that will hopefully turn out to be productive for AIC, the opportunity to talk with and reach out to the other exhibitors was also valuable.  There were auction houses, art storage companies, insurance agencies, and others who now know more about AIC.

It was important that AIC was represented at this meeting but we were not the only conservators there.  It was nice to catch up with colleague Yuri Yanchyshyn of Period Furniture Conservation who had a beautiful booth displaying before and after images of some of his furniture conservation treatment.  Yuri has been working with AAA for several years and has been a good ambassador for our field.  Also in attendance was conservator Gordon Lewis of The Fine Arts Conservancy whose wife is an appraiser and has a long history of working with AAA.  Having more conservators exhibit on their own at events like these and on behalf of AIC is good for our profession as a whole.  While Eugenie and I were there representing AIC, we did have questions about our own specializations and practice and we have even received one potential job lead from someone we met at the conference.

The meeting was titled Tomorrow’s Challenge: Valuing Art & Design in the 20th Century and when there was no traffic in the Exhibitor’s area we were able to listen to a few of the talks.  The Keynote Address by James McAndrew a Forensic Specialist from law firm Gunfeld, Desiderio, Lebowitz, Silverman & Klestadt LLP was titled A Decade of Transition in the Trade of Art and Antiquities.  He discussed the role that everyone in the art world (including conservators) has to play to reduce sale of stolen and looted art.  Other sessions at the conference included topics such as:

  • Following your Appraisal through the IRS
  • What Museums Collect Now: A Curator’s Perspective
  • Serving as an Expert Witness
  • Condition is Everything!
  • Ask the Folk Art Expert

If you know of a professional organization that holds an annual meeting where AIC might exhibit, please send the information on to Ruth Seyler in the AIC office.  The probability of having a booth is, of course, increased if you are willing to staff it!  There are never enough hours in the day and it can be hard to take time off from the work waiting in our studios and labs but helping AIC with outreach is good for us as a profession and, you might even find it good for business.

Connecting to Collections Online Community

 

The expertise of conservators is an important aspect of the Connecting to Collections Online Community, and you are encouraged to go online and register! Currently 850 members strong, Heritage Preservation moderates the Connecting to Collections Online Community (www.connectingtocollections.org), a place to network with the goal of helping smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources. Live chat webinars, group discussion boards, and links to online resources are available on the community. If you have any suggestions or questions about the community, email Elsa Huxley at ehuxley [at] heritagepreservation __ org.