 to you, your host Susan Barger from the FAAIC. Go ahead Susan. Hi everyone. We're going to go right into things today. You can keep up with our community on what's going on with Connecting to Collections Care by joining the listserv, which only gives announcements. This is the email address for it. You can follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can always contact me. This is my email address and I'm happy to answer questions and that kind of stuff. If you have questions and you want about Collections Care, join the discussion forum and post your questions on our website. I have an army of conservators who answered questions, so be sure to take advantage of that. Our next webinars are Please Taking Care of Grammar's Grave on Cemetery Care and that will also have some stuff on stone sculptures, monuments. So that's in some ways related to what we're doing now and there's one on Kickstarter campaign. And then you have a little bit of a break for the summer and we will have a webinar on ivory and ivory issues on July 27th. One on emergency planning for collections with living animals. And then we're still working on the fall, but there'll be one on NAGPRA issues in November, one on digital imaging and metadata. And just check our website. All that stuff will be posted when it gets closer to the time. So without further ado, I'm going to hand you over to our speakers today and we're going to talk about outdoor sculpture. So here we go. I'll start over. So Karen Ficks, Joni Botkoal and I work for the Historic Architecture, Conservation and Engineering Center for the National Park Service in the Northeast region. We work from Maine all the way down to Virginia. A large part of our work is caring for outdoor monuments. We work on all kinds of outdoor sculpture. And so today we'd like to give you the inside scoop on the Historic Structure. We're going to, there's a lot to cover today. So we're going to, sorry, we are going to first identify metals common to outdoor monuments. And then we're going to discuss the types of deterioration commonly found with those metals. We're going to go more specifically into bronze because that's the most common metal about door monuments. And then cover plaques, which is also very common for outdoor monuments. Then we're going to look at stone, identify types of deterioration, and then discuss stone maintenance. And then finally go over safety and documentation, which is something that we spend a lot of time on. And then finally our final thoughts. But first let's find out a little bit about you guys. We have some poll questions, Joni. So we just have three short questions for you. They'll pop on your screen. It looks like some of you already know the drill and are answering the questions. But the first poll is basically about what type of institution or clientele do you represent. I'll just give you a minute to get through that. And whenever you're ready Susan, it looks like a lot of folks are at museums. We don't have too many cemetery people. The second poll that we have is about who does the work. Are you actually physically responsible for doing upkeep? Or somebody else? Are you sort of in charge of overseeing somebody else who does that work? So a lot of folks, the both of you are actually overseeing contractors who do it, which is interesting. So this is good. What we kind of designed this talk to do is to help folks who do work with contractors have a better sense of the language they need to be using in these discussions and also identify red flags, people who are suggesting doing something with a collection that doesn't sound quite right. And then also of course people who do the work themselves may be exposed to some new ideas, things they haven't tried before through this talk. So the third question that we have for all of you in getting to know you is what are your monuments made of? You may or may not know this, but if you do, we're curious. Okay, bronze. Well, that's and stone. Yeah, that's really what we expected. And so actually this whole talk is really heavily centered towards bronze and with a smaller section, sort of mentioning zinc and iron, some of those other things that some of you have in your collections. And then also with a whole other larger section on stone. So it's perfect. We got it right. So we're going to move on now. And Karen's going to start some talking about some of the metals that you may have in your collections and how you might recognize them or what's special about them. Thanks. Hi, everybody. So we're going to do a quick little quiz since that's what we're doing. See which metal you think each of these are? Just do it in your head. There's no physical pole for this. And here are the answers. So we're not going to really talk about stainless steel because there's very few monuments that are made from that, except for more modern ones, which we're assuming is not the focus for you, for our audience. But we will talk about zinc first. These are primarily found in cemeteries. They're kind of hard to identify, but the best way to describe them is that they have kind of a blue-gray color and the surface is smooth. And they are a very brittle metal. It's a crystalline metal. And so if you were to draw a line down along the side of the monument there, you'll see that the soldier is kind of leading backwards. She's taking a break. And when we took that soldier off the monument, you can see there's a large crack underneath his feet because zinc is so brittle it can't even support its own weight. And so it started to crush downward. And another thing that sometimes people do, oops, that people sometimes do for zinc in order to give it some support is poor concrete in the middle of it. You see that down on the bottom right. But this is not a good idea because it just causes more problems. So don't do that. Cast iron is another one. You're going to see a lot of cannons made out of cast iron or sometimes plaques. You find them in battlefield parks and cemeteries, military monuments, things like that. And cast iron rust. And so you need to coat it continually. The upper right picture, the white, a little bit of white that you see sort of in the center, that's the primer, which is obviously no longer protecting the metal. And the paint is the black. The cast iron has begun to rust in the center there. And so you would apply an appropriate primer. There are a number of them out there. And then paint it. And there are other ways to do, to coat cast iron, but this is the way that we typically do. So bronze, as was said, this is the majority of your monuments. So we're going to spend a little more time on that than maybe you want. Quickly I want to go over a few of the things on how they're made because that will become important later when you learn to identify deterioration in bronze. So bronze is an alloy. It's a mix of different metals. And at the top of the screen you'll see a typical recipe for a historic bronze that's not set in stone. They can differ depending on the foundry. And that's usually a foundry secret. And these are melted together at a very high temperature and poured into a mold, which is what you see in the upper right. Just below that, the figure that's brown with sort of a white halo around it, that's an example of a mold. It's a cutaway of a mold so that you can see what's happening on the inside of it. There's a very thin red line between the white halo and the figure. In order to make this bronze, the mold is turned upside down and the molten metal is poured in and it goes into that area where the red line is. Those things that you see sticking out of the sculpture, those are called chaplets. They're made from iron and that's a way to keep the core figure from moving around within the mold. And that core figure is made out of sometimes a gypsum plaster or clay or sand. It's really a way to keep the form of the figure in position and to be able to withstand the heat. So most larger bronzes and those that have a complicated form have to be cast in sections. They can't do it in one single unit. So on the upper left, you see some examples of how that's done in this drawing. These are called Roman Joins. And on the right and on the lower left, those are images of a statue of Abraham Lincoln on a horse. And you see on the right his horse's head has not been attached yet and the foundry worker is cleaning off some excess metal. And on the lower left, his arm with his hat is laying there on the ground as well as his boot. So those will all be put back together. And here's a real-life example of Roman Joins. Where those red arrows are, those are each Roman Joins. This sculpture itself is about 40 feet tall, so obviously had to be done in pieces. And the image on the upper right that's square on his forehead, that's an area where they may have opened up in order to clean out some of that core material because the foundry is supposed to remove that when they finish the sculpture. Sometimes that doesn't happen. And especially the form of his hair is very tight and small. And so they have to sort of dig in there to get that all out. And sometimes they're not able to. So then they dig these little or open up these little patches in order to do that. So now we're going to go over some of the things that can happen to bronzes. This is not all inclusive. This is just a few of the things that happen quite often. Inherent vice. This is what is referring, and this we're referring to things that are inherent to the process that can actually be detrimental to the process. So on the left, this is a relief, bronze relief, that wraps around a granite obelisk. And on the left you see that light gray line through the center of that. That's a split in the bronze that had lots of holes for whatever reason. I don't know if they happened after this was cast or during the casting, but they filled it with lead, molten lead. And on the lower left you see a bronze bar as well as a steel or iron bar, which is used to brace and strengthen cracks so that the relief doesn't fall apart. So these are not appropriate methods and they mask poor foundry work. So on the right, upper and lower, you see a couple images front and the back of the same relief while we were in the middle of repairing it. We melted out all the lead and instead used a bronze epoxy. It's a regular epoxy, but it has bronze metal in it. So it's a like metal. And we use stainless steel bars to brace it. And I just want to point out the words carbon steel, mild steel, steel, iron, these are all words that are used interchangeably and they don't necessarily mean the same thing. They are indicative of the carbon content of that particular metal. But stainless steel is different and that has about 10% chromium in it and that helps prevent it from rusting where the others will rust. So if you hear me use iron or steel, that's one thing. Stainless steel is something else. Okay, now remember the core material that was in the mold? Sometimes when they don't get that out, in this particular case, it's in the figure's feet. The water will get into the bronze and that core material will expand and put pressure on the bronze. And you can see in the top three images, the bronze has started to split from the pressure. So in the lower two images, we drilled weep holes in there and flushed out the core material with a hose, just some water to pry and pull that out. And back to the core again. There's something called the galvanic series. This is sort of a spectrum that talks about how metals relate to each other in their ability or inability to corrode. Those that are on the top of the list are referred to as being most noble, meaning they don't rust, they don't corrode, or they do very little. The bottom metals like zinc and aluminum down there, those are least noble and they corrode fairly easily. Now when two metals are near each other on that list, the one that's at the bottom of the list will corrode first. So if you look at this right here, bronze is mostly copper and so it's in the middle of the list. And those chaplets that you saw in the core, those are iron. And they're supposed to have been removed by the foundry, but sometimes they don't because they're very small and they get missed. And those are iron, so that's at the bottom of the list, so they're going to corrode and they will leave rust all over your figure, which is where all these circles are. Those are areas where chaplets were not removed. Another example of the galvanic series where there's metal to metal corrosion, this sculpture was made from a steel or iron armature and the bronze sheet was wrapped directly against it and around it and then welded shut. So over time, as water gets in through small spaces, the iron armature began to rust and the evidence of that was first on the bottom right, you see bits of rust that have fallen down through the center of the sculpture, which is hollow and then sort of pooled on the base of the sculpture. And in the middle right, you see an example of the iron armature and how rusty it got. And above that, the top right, that's a split in the corner of one of part of the bronze that was as a result of the iron pushing against it because iron and steel can rust and expand up to four times its volume. So it puts a lot of pressure on anything nearby and it just split that open. So you have to remember that when you have two metals that are possibly corrosive against each other, there has to be a barrier coating of some kind. And that barrel in the middle is just some of the rebar or some of the iron bar that we took out. And another example of metal to metal corrosion, many times plaques and sculptures will have a steel threaded rod attaching them to a pedestal or a stone mount. Once you see the two examples on the lower right, those have rusted and so that plaque is not secure anymore. And above that, the sculpture, the rod that's holding the sculpture to the pedestal, if that's rusted and comes loose, then the sculpture itself can fall over in a strong wind. So those need to be replaced with stainless steel so you don't have rust. So now we're going to talk about vandalism. The biggest part probably for bronzes and vandalism is theft. And when when you have projecting forms on your sculptures, such as a sword or rifle or a bugle, you know, anything like that that's small enough, they can grab it and pull it off. And they take it to a scrap yard and melt it down. You'll never see it again. So if you and your stakeholders decide that you want to replace that, you have to determine definitively what that original look like. And you see these two images on the bottom right. Those are newspaper clippings from when the sculpture was originally installed. So you get some idea of what that look like. But you still have to do more research. The images on the left, the small images, those are all newspaper articles and catalogs and things like that. We did research on this subject of the sculpture, General Stedman. Is that who it was? Yes. General Stedman, who he was, where he was in the military, what kind of uniform he wore, things like that. And then once we got to a point where we felt comfortable with the way it would look, we took it to a foundry and they casted it. We molded it and they casted it. And then we attached it to the sculpture itself and had the strap was missing. So that's on there as well. And then on the right, you see the finished sculpture after it's patinated and waxed. So another form ofandalism, which is really common, is graffiti. On graffiti on bronzes, the problem with this is that when you have particularly spray paint, that covers the bronze. And so you have preferential corrosion occurring where there is no paint. So when you do get the paint off, you're going to see a difference in corrosion and in the color. And same thing for the Sharpie marker, scratching. If you have a thick enough coating on it, it might not be a problem, but that's usually not the case. And scratching is really difficult to disguise. So your best bet is to get rid of graffiti as soon as you see it. And you can power wash this if you want, but not a very high PSI, because it'll just drive that into the pigment into the metal. So this one is an example of coating failure. There are two coatings typically used on bronzes. The first one is an acrylic. This is a clear acrylic coating that was developed, I think in the seventies. It's very popular. The monument on the left is not actually an outdoor monument. It's a indoor in the lobby of a high school. And of course, students like to pick at it and scratch it, what you see on the lower left. And to that right, to the center of the slide, you see the Incralac peeling away. And that's what can happen. It's particularly evident on this, since the bronze is smooth surface. And it's indoor, so it doesn't weather. But you can see how Incralac can just peel away, and then you no longer have a protective coating. And the sculpture on the right is outdoors. But another thing that can happen to Incralac is water can get underneath it, and it starts to blanch. So if you don't have a clean surface before you apply the Incralac, or if for some reason it gets abraded, water will get underneath that, and then the coating is no longer protecting. The second kind of coating is wax. We're going to go over the waxes in a few minutes. But this particular one you'll see in his hand, more water has gotten under this as well. Maybe it wasn't applied quite thoroughly enough, or maybe there was too much applied or not enough. But for many reasons, this can happen. But it's again, another case where you want to make sure that you have a clean surface before you start coating it. And you want to make sure that you're getting all the interstices of the form, and that you're not putting it onto heavy. So now we're going to talk about corrosion, something called bronze disease, which doesn't happen a lot. But if you're in a marine environment, you might see it more than others. It's a problem where salts in the air and the moisture in the air react with the bronze, and they form a hydrochloric acid. And it starts to build up as either a waxy buildup or a powdery green buildup. And on the lower right, you see we were just doing a chemical spot test just to confirm that that's what this was. It was chloride. And those need to be cleaned off. Another form of corrosion is through animal and human activity. If you live in a cold environment like we do here in the Northeast, there's a lot of deicing that happens. And because this particular sculpture is right at ground level, it's not on a pedestal. A lot of deicing salts get thrown nearby the sculpture itself, which is not meant to be. I'm sure they weren't being malicious, but that happens. And also it becomes a target for animals, for dogs to do their business on. And that corrodes the bronze. So if you can get some way to protect that, you know, a barrier of somehow around the sculpture, that would help. Otherwise, it just has to be cleaned off quickly and rewax, recoded. Another form of corrosion is bird guano. Pigeons love to be in tight little sheltered areas. These two sculptures on the bottom are are hanging off of a building wall. And they have rods that attach them to the wall. They're only about six inches. So it's a nice tight little space. And once I start nesting back there, they're going to continue nesting. And their guano and urine falls down the sculpture and stains it and corrodes it. These are ammonium salts. And it's very corrosive to bronze. And another form of corrosion, which is something that's going to happen on anything that's not coated. In stage one on this image, the foundry applies a patina, which is a color, that the artist has determined it should be. And then once this goes out into the outdoors, if there's no coating on it, it's going to begin to corrode. And the first stage, stage two actually, is sort of a thin, reddish brown layer called cuprite or copper oxide. And then the third stage is when you start seeing black. And those areas that are sort of sheltered like the base underneath his body or below his eyebrows or under his chin on his neck, they don't get as much rain. And so the corrosion that occurs between the rain and sulfur dioxide in the air and atmospheric pollutants, all that sort of builds up and forms this black coating. And then the final stage is copper sulfate. This is a bright green that you see on outdoor bronzes. And this is not intentional. That's not what the artist intended. Well, some may have intended for it to corrode. But for the most part, they wanted to be stage one. Stage four is when it's corroded. And that is soluble. And so when you see green, realize that that is all going to run off with the rain and you're losing metal. And I wanted to distinguish between the green you see on a bronze culture and the green you see on copper roofs. Copper roofs are strictly copper. It's not an alloy. And so the coating that you see on them is actually a protective coating because there are no other no other metals from that galvanic series to corrode with. It's just copper. And so those are protective, but bronzes are not. And here's a real life example of that 1999 one on the left. These are grave markers. That's the pictures caught in a weird angle. But 1999, it's just beginning. You see sort of a reddish brown cuprite. And then in the middle is 1946, the raised letters are beginning to hit the copper sulfate stage, but the rest, the body of the grave marker is still sort of cuprite. And then 1920 grave marker, it's completely copper sulfate. And you can see on the soldier sculpture where that is, the copper sulfate is the green, and the copper sulfide is the black. And that's all streaky there. And that's not appropriate. That's not what we want. So now Joanie is going to talk to you about the maintenance and treatment of bronzes. Okay. So this is a pretty long section, I'm going to do a section of it, and Margaret's going to do part. I'm going to talk just briefly about repatination, and also about different approaches to cleaning. Beginning with repatination. So chemical patination Karen briefly mentioned happens at the foundry. And but it also happens when you're repatenating something. And so there's the weathering patination, and then there's the chemical patination. And chemical patination today uses the same techniques as it has for a long time, as you can see from this image of some old hairy guys with cigarettes doing it. And then Karen, who is not hairy and does not smoke cigarettes doing it. So those chemical patinas are reactions of heat and chemicals and the metal substrate. And sometimes we selectively or spot repatinate like in that sculpture that you saw just in the slide before this, and with Karen of the soldier who looked almost like he was weeping. It's distracting. It's confusing. And we may repatenate just to even out that dark black and the green just in just in spaces. And on this slide, we see some of the tools that we use to do that repatenation. So we've got heat in the upper left, we've got the chemicals here on the upper right. And so what you have there is the liver of sulfur is often actually a new patination. That's often comes straight from the foundry with that it's a blackish brown color. Potassium permanganate gives you a cool brown, the ferric nitrate gives you a warm brown result and the cupric nitrate gives you a green that looks a little bit like that copper sulfate we keep coming back to. And then along the bottom of the slide, these are examples of possible finishes available from a this is just a slide grabs from a patination chemical catalog. But these four at the top are the foremost common patination colors and chemicals folks use. This is an example of a full repatenation that was deemed necessary by the stakeholders because of the uneven age patina all over the sculpture. It had become distracting and disfiguring. And it was decided to repatenate. And so on the right, you see the repatenation in progress there. There's that streaky green and black, and then the brown is the repatenation before it's been coated and buffed. The upper left is the totally completed project. And at the bottom, there's a slide there, which is just the haunches of the horse. And if you look at it closely and you can tell on your monitor, there's sort of a greenish tone that's still there. And that's just to illustrate that this takes a deft hand. You really want to avoid what we call the chocolate bunny, which isn't totally evenly colored, flat with no modeling, no depth finish, and then just coating it up with a bunch of really shiny coating at the end. That's not the result that anyone wants. And so if you do have to repatenate something, you need to have somebody doing it who's really skilled and sensitive to the surface. Moving on to cleaning, the things that you need to clean bronzes are a water source. We use this anionic pH-neutral detergent called Orvis. And then you'll see there are some different scrubbing tools here. And the important thing to take away from this slide isn't that you should be scrubbing the heck out of your bronzes. It's that this is actually a bronze wool and a brass brush. Those are going to be softer than the bronze surface. You would never want to use steel wool or steel brushes. They're too hard. They'll scratch your surface and they'll leave residues behind that will rust over the surface of your bronze. So one of the ways in which we clean our sculptures here at the Park Service is just using those very materials that we saw. And we use the washing, the water and the soap and the soft brushes to remove the soluble corrosion like the famous copper sulfate. And also to remove surface contaminants like dust and pollen. And so in these pictures you see us using those soft brushes and water, the pH neutral detergent. And then, but this is just one way that we wash. Another way for washing is power washing. This is really only an option in bronzes that are in stable condition, not in a weak or very deteriorated or very porous bronze. The force of the water could do damage to a weakened bronze. However, if you've got a good strong bronze and it's hard to reach or it's really sticky with pollen, it's hard to get clean. This is a great solution for that. You still need to use caution. You need to use the right PSI. You need to be the right distance from the material. But power washing is a great solution in a lot of cases. Another option and that we've used is steam cleaning. This is a really gentle way to remove old wax coatings to actually melt some off. You can see on the right hand slide there the wax is turning white and literally just dripping off of the sculpture. And it's a way to get, again, the pollen and the dust off along with that old which coating that may be tenacious and otherwise may have been removed with solvents, which would have required wearing personal protective equipment, a face mask, a respirator. It would have required putting all the solvents into the atmosphere and environment and the steam just eliminates all of that gross stuff. Another solvent free way to remove old coatings is laser cleaning. Lasers can remove old coatings and corrosion layers, but they require safety precautions listed here on the slide. They also require training and they take time. It's a slow process. But again, there are no solvents involved. You can hire a laser cleaning expert. There are companies that specialized in monument cleaning with lasers or you can collaborate with an institution who's willing to train and loan you a laser like we did in Concord, Massachusetts here at the Minuteman site with the Isabella Gardner Museum's conservators. And the third, rather not the third, but the last cleaning technique that we're going to address is something that's becoming pretty popular right now. It's CO2 blasting. It uses teeny, tiny, dry ice particles as an abrasive and it's gaining popularity because it's, again, it's solvent free and you can remove old coatings. Even old coatings as tenacious as old inkrelac. It's relatively time and cost efficient. It's very gentle. The Getty Institute has done extensive research and testing on this. They've actually bought all the equipment required and are using it on their collections regularly, but it's also easy to rent all the equipment that you need and get it from outside suppliers, which is what we did in this instance where we were cleaning the very large scale inkrelac sculptures up at St. Gaudens National Historic Site in New Hampshire. Now I'm going to flip the slide here and Margaret's going to talk a little bit about what we do after we've got the bronzes nice and clean. Okay, so after you remove all of these coatings, you have to protect the metal surface from all of the things that Karen discussed. And there's a couple of different ways that you can do it with a couple different things and one of the most common is a wax protective coating. And there are two different ways you can apply wax. You can either apply a hot wax or a cold wax. Now when we say hot wax or cold wax, what we're referring to is actually the temperature of the metal that we're applying it to, not the wax. A hot wax is a mixture of different waxes that we make ourselves, usually melted in a crock pot. It can be white, like you see in the slide there to the left, or pigmented brown, in this case on the right-hand side. We would pigment a hot wax to even out any blemishes that we might see in the sculpture. It just creates a little bit more of an even surface. When we melt all these different waxes together, they then harden into these blocks that you see there. Hot waxes have a high melting temperature, so they're a little bit stronger and more resilient than the cold waxes. Cold waxes are paste waxes. You get them in jars and they have a solvent base. Waxing protects the sculpture by preventing moisture from entering the surface. It saturates the surface. I'll show you a little. We have some videos, but first we're heating up the surface of the bronze with a torch, and then there's a block on the right-hand side, a block of unpigmented wax that we're applying. I have some videos. Okay, Susan, I think we're ready for the first one that shows us. So here I'm heating up the surface with the torch and I'm touching it with the pigmented wax block to see if it's hot enough. It's kind of like when you have like a corn cob and you put butter on it and the butter melts into the corn cob. It's very similar concept. And I'm moving the torch around continuously so as not to burn the surface. You can actually burn the surface of the metal if you keep it in one spot too long. And there's a little bit of a closer look. Now it's just starting to melt. And then when it melts, you can rub it in with a brush over the surface, getting a real even coating, making sure that it goes in all the pores of the metal. And as you can see, it saturates the surface of the metal and makes it darker. It will dry a little bit lighter than this, but in general, you get a darker surface. Here's Joni. She's using a hand torch, which is a little bit of a smaller torch that you can use in smaller detailed areas, tighter corners. She's going to use a little bit of a different method here where she kind of taps in with the end of her brush because she has a more textured, highly textured surface. There she goes. There she's really rubbing it in there. And that will protect the surface. And after this is applied, you would apply a cold paste wax as a sacrificial layer that you would apply yearly to protect this hot wax surface. This hot wax surface you would use. It depends upon what kind of environment you have. You might have, if it's in an urban environment, you might have to do it every three to five years. It depends. You'd have to see how that goes depending on what you'd have to inspect your surface. This is applying a hot wax that has been mixed with solvents, but two relief bronzes that are on stone. This is an example of where you would not want to heat up the bronze. You would want to apply the wax cold because if you were to heat up the relief, you may crack the surface of the stone. So you wouldn't want to apply any heat to this. This is an example of infra-wack, which is an acrylic coating. This is applied using a brush and then a spray. You have to wear a respirator while doing this because it has solvents in it. So this is an excellent coating to use if you have a bronze that is in an area that you can't get to it to maintain it very often because infra-wack coatings can last a long time. They can last up to 10 years if maintained properly. And then here's an example of a paste wax in a jar as I mentioned. This is above the top picture is an image of the brush that you apply the paste wax with and the bottom is a polishing brush that you would use to buff the wax after it's dried. We can also apply dry pigments to a paste wax to do some extra cosmetic work to a bronze at the end of a treatment. And here's another video of an application of a cold wax. So this is the same bronze after the hot wax. You can see it has an overall darker appearance. And now I'm applying the paste wax over the surface and then we'll allow this to dry and then buff it using the buffing brush that I showed in the previous slide or cotton claws. And this would be something that you would hopefully do on a yearly basis. And here is a before and after of each type of treatment. The top is a hot wax and repatination with hot wax and an increlact treatment at the bottom. Plaques, many of you probably have plaques. And basically plaques you have to look at the aesthetic results that you're getting. On the right, we have a plaque at the top that's been painted to kind of to mimic a gold bronzy look. And the paint is peeling and it just has an overall dull looking appearance kind of like a copper penny. It just doesn't look good. Right below that, the plaque has been cleaned and the surface of the letters has been rubbed with a rotary grinder. And this grinder, what it does is it seals the surface of the bronze so that you can't re-treat it. You can't patinate it. And so that's going to be, you can't really change the appearance of the plaque again, which is unfortunate. The middle, the mediocre as we call it, the top one has a very dark pigmented wax coating and you can't even read the letters. And below that has a very uneven appearance to it, very dull. But what we'd like to aim for on the left-hand side is a very even natural patina on the bottom and more even readable letters in the middle. And at the top, as you can see, a waxed, readable, even appearance. And now Karen is going to discuss stone. Okay, back. So here's another quick little quiz for you if you can identify which stone these are. No rush in your head. And there's the answer. We're including concrete as part of this just because there's not really a separate category for that. And just keep in mind that there are many, many different ways, different types of stone, even within that singular type, like granite. You know, you have red granite, gray granite, white granite, all kinds of stuff. So now we're going to talk about deterioration of stone. We're back to inherent vice. This is a sculpture that has a concrete core within the granite pedestal. They do that a lot so that you don't have to use stone through the whole pedestal. And the concrete, the Portland cement that's in the concrete, that's a part of it, will react with water that comes in through maybe open mortar joints or maybe the scene between the bronze and the pedestal is open. And so that Portland cement reacts with the water and starts to seep out through those open mortar joints. And initially it's soluble, but eventually it reacts with carbon dioxide and becomes very hard and difficult to remove. And basically the only thing that is successful is the acid and that's never a good thing. So marble, this is a marble sculpture. Part of marble is calcium. It's calcium carbonate. And so the calcium and the marble reacts with sulfur dioxide in the air and humidity in the air. And in those areas that are protected from rain so they don't get any kind of runoff, this reaction forms these black crusts called gypsum crusts. And as they get bigger they attract atmospheric particulates and dirt and pollen and they just keep getting bigger and bigger. But the good thing is that this is a soluble crust. It's apparently easy to get off. In the middle image you see an example of the gypsum crust and on the right we have a garden hose with a very fine mist just continually rinsing that area and that all goes away. So the copper sulfate that we keep talking about, the picture on the top is the entire monument and you'll see below the bronzes, green streaks, that's the copper sulfate. It runs down onto the stone below and if it's not removed it can go into the stone. So the best way to do this is with a poultice. It's like putting a facial mask on the monument. It's usually clay, sometimes paper, and it has either water or some special chemicals mixed into it to make it wet. You just put a very thin even layer of that across the area that's stained and just let it dry. And as it dries it cracks and falls off and then you brush that away. And you probably have to repeat that many times because it's pretty tenacious but eventually you will get it off. Concrete sculptures have usually a rebar armature and so there are areas that are smaller than is needed to protect that rebar. So her arm is a very thin section and so the rebar is exposed to water pretty easily and like we said before the iron jacking where the rust expands puts pressure on the concrete and blows that off. So you want to fill that with a similar material. So here we are coming up with different mixes using pigments and different aggregates to try and match the original appearance. And that same sculpture, the base was tagged quite frequently and so the way they handled that is they just kept painting over it and so you have 20, 30 layers of paint that just keep building up and whatever water gets in from above then is trapped within the concrete base and eventually it's going to push away at the paint and you have all these disfiguring like in this image you can see it on her right side. So you want to take all that paint off and on the lower left whenever you're doing something like this you want to do a test in a small area first so there are no surprises with whatever method you're choosing to treat this object. And in the middle right on the bottom, sorry in the middle on the bottom, these are a couple of graffiti barrier products that we're testing. This is a sacrificial coating so once you remove all that paint you would apply this sacrificial barrier and that provides protection to the stone so that if it gets tagged again it's just a matter of rinsing that off and reapplying the barrier. Another example of graffiti, the vandalism of graffiti, when you see graffiti on stone you don't want to power wash it because that drives the pigment into the pores of the stone and you never get them out and you want to take graffiti off as quickly as possible because once it's there it attracts more graffiti. And this is an example of an area, a monument where they did not remove the graffiti quickly enough and the dark areas you see where Margaret's pointing at and Joanie's looking at those are graffiti ghosts that's what we call them where you see the ghost of the graffiti even though there's no longer any paint on the surface it's in the pores and you could also see some well maybe not on your screen but there are areas where the power washing was used and you can see how it abraded the stone because it were too close or they had too high of a pressure, too high psi, one or the other or both. And now back to bird guano. This can be particularly difficult on stone because these salts can etch the stone and stone that's subjected to continual wetting and drying will drive the salts into the stone and salts expand and so that puts pressure on the poor walls of the stone and will blow out your stone. So you need to remove that and the best way to do that is through poulticing because that way which is what we did for the copper runoff. This way it sort of soaks the guano up off the surface and draws it out because it goes from a wet area to a dry area it's attracted to that and eventually it'll all come out. Neglect is a big part of the problem with monuments. We all have budget problems but mortar joints are fairly simple to take care of even though they seem to be something that is not taken care of. So if you have open mortar joints a lot of things can happen, water can get in and travels everywhere a lot of dirt and debris will get stuck in there. The other part of bad mortar joints is on the upper left the brick wall. It has to be an appropriate mix that's soft enough so that it will sacrificially wear away before your stone does. Mortar joints are not meant to be permanent they do go away but you want them to go away before your building material goes away. And in the lower left this is an example of us doing lead sheet into the joint. If it's just a small area and you want to get it done quickly or it's just not very much room to do a whole mortar campaign you can just hammer some lead in there and it works just as well. And now Margaret's going to talk to you about bio deterioration. Okay so here I am applying a biocide to the top surface of a stone monument. As you can see there's a lot of biological growth like in fungi, algae, usually to the top planes to stone monuments, very common. What we're doing this case is we apply an appropriate biocide and we then use mechanical removal, scrub brushes, bamboo skewers, those types of things to remove it. And one of the reasons that it's important to remove biological matter from stone is because it has a couple things that it's doing to the surface. One is it's chemically hurting the stone because it has acids that are going into the stone and moving minerals within the stone. And two it's also creating almost a mat on the surface that's attracting moisture and pollution from the air that it keeps on the surface of the stone. So it keeps the surface moist which isn't good. And here is a outdoor fountain made of limestone that has a couple condition problems due to heavy biological growth. The surface has heavy growth and is staining and spalling due to that. So I had to clean it and then on the right hand side I'm applying a Consolidant after cleaning which re-adheres or bounds the stone rings together again. And stone maintenance, here's a better picture of me cleaning that stone. I'm using a stain cleaner. That's one way that you can clean biological growth off of stone. It's a very effective way. We use water, we use brushes as you can see in the lower slides, and different soaps. Vopex or this or to name a few soaps that we use. And on the top right there's an example of something that you can do to minimize some of this biological growth on your monuments and that's just simple weeding and removal of vegetation around the base of the monument. That's really important to keep things off of your monuments. And now I'm going to talk briefly about safety. Okay, Karen again. So whenever you're working on a default monument you want to make sure that you are comfortable working on scaffolding and that you have been properly trained. If it's an aerial lift, some cities, towns require that you have special training for that. Other places they just deliver the lift to you and you're on your own. But if you want to go to the OSHA website that they can explain more detail what you should know and can direct you to some different areas for training. They even have online training. And on the lower left, if you're working on tall scaffolding above a certain height, you want to have fall protection, which is a harness and a lanyard that attaches to the scaffolding. And you want to have a hard head so you don't knock yourself out. And in the middle on the bottom these ladies are working very close to a road. So you need to have visibility so they're wearing reflective vests. And on the right whenever you're using chemicals or any kind of solvents that are not good for you, you want to have a respirator with the cartridge that matches to whatever that chemical is and gloves that also match to whatever you're using. And then before you start your project you want to think about what it is that could go wrong. You want to know the risks. And you don't have to do this particular form. It's just a matter of thinking about where the fire department is, where the hospital is. You have water in case if you're using a hose you want to make sure you have water or fire extinguisher. Who's your local contact for emergency services and what kind of equipment do you need to do your job. And you need to have copies of the material safety data sheets if you're using any chemicals or products that you're not familiar with. Because those will tell you what's in them and what to do in case of emergency when something happens with that. And just briefly I just want to tell you that one of the first monuments I worked on my co-worker was using a torch and the flame kicked back around and hit her in the face. We didn't know where the hospital was. We didn't know who to call. We had no burn kit. We had no ice. So that was a learning experience. Learned from my mistakes. She was okay. And now Joanie is going to talk to you about documentation. All right. Documentation is actually dollars it sounds. It's almost a third of what we do as conservators along with planning and testing and administrative work and of course treatment which is the glamorous part. So in documentation what we mean by that is we mean photographic documentation and written documentation. Any sort of treatment that you undertake or you oversee someone undertaking there should be before, during and after treatment photos taken from all sides and angles. That may include details of specific condition issues like some of the things that Karen and Margaret have discussed, spalling, staining, corrosion, biological growth. All of those things that you now after this talk will recognize and be on the lookout for should be photo documented and they should also be documented in writing what the condition is at the outset, what steps are taken to remedy any condition issues. And also documentation is a chance for the conservator doing the project to make recommendations for the future. For example, how often should be rewaxed, how often should this be cleaned, materials that should be used in cleaning. It's a chance for the conservator to give a little guidance for the future but it's also a chance for that conservator undertaking the project to pass information along the future conservators and stakeholders about how decisions were made, what treatments were used and what materials and chemicals were used, what changes may have been made to surfaces so that in the future folks know what's been done and they know where to start. If we get objects all the time that have old treatments, old glue, old paints, we don't know what they are, we don't even know what's going to take them off. We do a lot of testing. If you have a really good documentation document then moving forward it's going to free up a lot of time and resources to just move on to the next step without wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what's been done in the past. It's a really important thing even though it's a little bit dry. And then final thoughts, Margaret's going to share a few final thoughts with you and then we're going to get to those questions you've been asking. We have quite answers for quite a few of them and others we may need to research a little further and get back to. Here's Margaret. Margaret, we're not hearing you at this time. Margaret? Okay, sorry everybody. Margaret is, we're aware that Margaret's audio is off and we're working on getting it resolved. Please stand by. Do you hear me? Am I still there? Am I on now? Yes. Am I? Can you can hear me? Yeah. Oh, okay. I don't know when I went out but okay great. I'm sorry about that. Basically, I'll keep this brief. To maintain your sculpture because if you maintain it on a regular basis then you will keep your cost of treatment down eventually because you won't have the large, large big treatments that you will have to do to keep your sculptures looking good. This also helps with this kind of broken windows syndrome. It prevents your sculpture from looking bad. Therefore graffiti and things like that will be less likely to occur to your monument. You keep it looking better. And finally give your object the same respect and care that you give anything found in a museum. It's part of your collection. Make sure that you treat it and maintain it like you would anything that you find inside because it is part of your collection and it deserves the same care and respect. So thank you very much. I don't know if I'm on. I can only think. Okay. Yes, thank you very much. I'm sorry answering some of these questions. Maybe starting from the more going backwards. I see her mic is on. Susan's is not. So we can start to answer some of them. Let's just start the bottom and work our way up. Do you recommend a non-conservator applying a layer of cold wax for maintenance? There's Susan. Sure. Do you want me to read this? I'll be putting up the evaluation link. Okay. We can read them. Okay. Early on we had a couple of things about materials. Kristen Evangelista says that we have lots of sculptures made of quartet and steel. What do you have to say about that? I can do that one. There's been a lot of discussion in the last two years on the object specialty group listserv at AIC about approaches to quartet and steel. I'm not exactly sure what specific question there is about it, but the gist is that weathered patina is something that most people are going for and a good way to clean it. Just regular maintenance clean it, removing guano or again pollen is pressure washing and surfactant gentle detergents. They use that at the Hirshhorn on one of their really cherished weathered quartet and steel sculptures. Other than that, if you've got real corrosion problems, you need to talk about draining. I know that at the Nelson Atkins Museum they are using cathodic protective systems to prevent corrosion to bases that are in contact with moist ground. This is something that really does not get coated generally because that weathered patina is sort of the point of quartet and steel and what the artist is usually going for. That's my response to quartet and steel. Kelly Hines in Chicago says we have one sculpture that has a resin section. Any tips on how that would be cared for? It would really depend on what the resin is. Is it a resinist's epoxy? That could be a lot of different things but the gist of it is this. You wouldn't be treating it necessarily the same way that you would if the rest of the sculpture was bronze or stone. You would be treating it differently. You wouldn't want to apply heat to a resin. You probably wouldn't want to put an unsympathetic coating onto the resin that might react with whatever that resin is made of. You would want to make sure that you were washing it with something again that was really gentle if it needed washing. You may want to do mechanical removal of anything that was stuck to it. Just dry brushing. And Guru Fateh Khalsa says I'm interested in marble as well. I think that we did do a little section on marble under the stone section. I'm hoping that that answered his questions or her questions. Yeah. And also the next webinar on cemeteries will also probably cover that. Kelly Hines asks can you add aluminum to the list for questions? So aluminum sculptures, do you have anything to say about them? I think you'd clean it in a similar way with just washing again gentle detergents, soft brushes, we wouldn't be coating it as we would bronze. Do you have any further thoughts on that? Aluminum a lot of times has a very tenacious corrosion layer on it. It's very difficult to get off. In most cases you're not going to get it off. It's kind of a white layer. So if you can keep it clean so that doesn't form, that's your best bet. But we don't usually coat aluminum. It's just left. I don't know if that helps. And regular maintenance. The other thing we wanted to say is go out and look at your sculptures that you're in charge of. Go and look at them at least annually. Look for those scenes that you saw early on in the presentation that Karen showed. Are they sticking together? Is there anything leaching out? Are there accretions? And nip that stuff in the bud. If you hear from somebody that there's graffiti, it's just a couple of days. Just watch your sculptures. If you're concerned, I see somebody asked a question about a marine environment. If you're concerned about salts and chlorides and bronze disease, take pictures. Photo document it for your own self. Has it changed? Okay. When you answer questions, Kristen Evangelista asks if you can tell who you are. Kate Swisher says, this all sounds very expensive. Any recommendations for grants to conserve outdoor sculptures? If you do regular maintenance, this is Joni. Like Margaret said, if you do regular maintenance, you're not going to need to have a huge expensive outlay for some giant undertaking. Washing is not expensive. The detergent is very cheap. You use literally like a tablespoon in a big jug of water to clean a whole sculpture. Those brushes are five, six bucks a piece. Even the waxes are not very expensive. Those little handheld torches that you saw the video of me using, you can just get them at the hardware store. Doing wax treatment or doing regular maintenance annual cleaning is actually not a very expensive project. And as an aside here, if you want to buy Orvis, if you have a ranch supply, you can buy big tubs of Orvis for the cost of buying a little tub for cleaning quilts. So because they use it to wash horses and cows. You can check that out. Garifate asked is there any pigment, what are the pigments used for tinting wax? If you're talking about the brown wax, the hot wax that we use, that's not actually a tint that's added. It's based on a brown victory wax that is used in sculpture. But if you're talking about the areas where we were trying to touch up something that was not quite what we wanted, those are just dry pigments. Gamblin is a brand name. Yeah, Dick Black. It doesn't any good fine art store. Okay. And Carrie Johnson says, how long do you have to typically wait between applying cold wax and buffing it? If it's in an area where it's very hot, if you're like in Arizona and you're doing this, you're going to wait 24 hours at least. If you're up here in the northeast, it can be an hour. If you touch it and it still feels tacky, then it's not dry. You need to wait. A cool wind will help you get there faster. Basically, all of the solvent has to evaporate out before you start buffing. There have been a couple of requests. And you send me a list of supplies and resources, and then I'll post them with the recording. Yeah, some of the basics. We can put together some of the basics. Yeah, to keep a handy kit for regular maintenance. That's what Anna Canuso says. Regular washing and waxing. Yeah. And so we have a question about what kind of consultant would you use? Would you recommend for Stacey Holder ask that? That's a little bit of a complicated question because it really depends upon the type of stone you have for that particular statuette. We had a thin section done today, analysis of the stone, looking at the grains and grain size characteristics and all kinds of things to make sure that the stone was what we thought it was. And then we chose an appropriate consultant based upon where this moment was going to go, was it going to be outside, inside, it's pretty complicated when you're choosing a consultant for stone. There are certain consultants used for different types of carbonate stones, sand stones, that kind of thing. And then which one you use is based upon what is happening to your stone. Is it sprawling? Is it sugaring? These are different characters. That might be a conservator question. Yeah, that's when you hear the conservator and you trust their guidance. So, Kristen eventually asked can you repeat the names of soaps and biosides, but we can put that in the list. We can use all types, four of us, and two of the soaps, and the bioside usually is a D2 architecture lesson. We can put that in the list. Yeah. Lavia Paragini asked what brand of steam cleaner do you use? We have a big one from new jobs called a Robbie. We have a little one, her smaller job, which is a dental steamer from the UK called D'Rother. D-E-R-O-T-E-R. And we can put that in the list too. Yeah. Sherry Zambrano says would painted stone use the same type of cleaning? Painted stone. No. It never, it depends on what kind of paint it is and what condition it's in. You definitely like, if you were going to take stone and take scrub brushes to it, you probably wouldn't want to do that to a painted surface, especially if it was fragile. You may need to consolidate a paint before you could even undertake a cleaning. That would be another conservator. It would be a case-by-case basis, but no, I would say it would be very unlikely that you would approach a painted stone in the same way that you would approach any kind of regular stone, whether it's sandstone, marble, limestone. Yeah. Do you recommend a non-conservator applying a layer of cold wax for maintenance? Yeah. After going through training. A conservator can do it once and show you how to do it and then you can maintain your own sculpture. I think that that is perfectly fine. And we do that. We, as the conservation team, go to parks in the northeast region and we've held a lot of trainings within the region where the museum technical assistants and other stakeholders who are out there on the ground keeping track of things and attend the training. And then they do the three years. Every year they do a cold wax. Every three years we show up and we do the hot wax and then they maintain it in between. That's a common approach and it saves everybody a little time and money. Okay. I want to remind people about the valuations and which is up in the upper left-hand corner. And let's see. Kathy Hall asked, can you use such soap? Well, maybe. If you can get a copy of the Safety Data Sheet and see what's in it and maybe compare that to some of the soaps we've talked about. Because a lot of times they'll have additives and perfumes and things. You just don't want to do that. Dyes. The stuff that we're recommending is not very expensive. I mean it's probably more than dish washing so. That much. It'll last a long time. To rinse them well. They will leave a residue and they get very sudsy because people like sudsy soap. Especially for dishes. If you use a household detergent you're going to get lots of suds. It's going to be difficult to rinse them properly and that might cause problems when you're trying to apply a coating. And finally, if a bronzest corrosion from guano is it okay to clean and apply wax over the area to prevent additional damage until funds are available for future maintenance. If there's nothing else you can do if you can get the surface clean enough so that there's nothing left that you can feel when you run your hands across it then what you're still seeing is probably the metal actually corroded. It's not a deposit any longer. And so if you can clean it to that point and then coat it if you use the hot wax like we were talking about that will actually disguise some of that streaking and so you're good to go there. But the cold wax is also if that's the what we always say is all you can afford to do time and money wise is cold wax, just cold wax. So that would be if that's the best that you can manage that is way better than nothing and the cold wax will actually saturate the area a little bit too in disguise any etching or blanching that's happened to the surface temporarily. Yeah, that's a great idea for an interim solution. I think that's all the questions. This was great, thank you. And I will collect the list of supplies and materials and tools. I'll also copy the YouTube addresses that Mike posted earlier and the recording and the handout and the PowerPoint slides and I'll do that in the next couple of days. And I hope I'll see a lot of you for the cemetery webinar in a couple of weeks. And then also the Kickstarter one, if you have a big project you might try that. Thanks very much. Thanks, Susan. Thanks to everyone who tuned in and thanks, Mike. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Susan. Thanks everyone.