 Good afternoon to those of you who are still in the afternoon. I want to welcome you and we'll just go through this opening briefly. If you need answers for problems with your collections, go to the CTC Care online forum and you can post them there. You need to be registered, but that's very easy and it's not a problem. And we've been getting a lot more questions and answers there, so do use that resource. We have the community website which is here. You can like us on Facebook, you can follow us on Twitter. And you can contact me anytime. This is the email to use and I'm happy to try and be of assistance. We've had a change in schedule. So the mannequin's webinar which was scheduled for next month is going to happen in mid-April. So these are the next two webinars. One on caring for artifacts found in archives collections. You know those little bits of stuff that somehow gets swept in like somebody's toys and stuff like that. And then the mannequins will be April 14th. I also wanted to let all of you know that the trailing questions from last month's webinar are probably posted by Friday. So if you had questions that weren't answered and that we had caught, then they'll be answered and posted along with the recording, which is already posted for the furniture webinar. And if you have any questions, like Mike said, please put them in the questions and comments box and I'll catch them and we'll answer them at the end of the webinar. So today's webinar is... Refit. Okay. We're going on to the next thing. This is Mike. It appears as though we have just lost our presenters. They've lost their connection. So we will try to get them right back in and hopefully we can get this underway very quickly. So please stand by. Okay. Our presenters are back. So thanks for your patience. Okay. So without further delay, Wendy and Jamie, please go ahead and begin whenever you're ready. All right. Sorry for the technical difficulties, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jamie, paper conservator. And I'm Wendy, paintings conservator at ICA Art Conservation in Cleveland, Ohio. So thank you also to Connecting to Collections and the Foundation for the American Institute for Conservation for making these free webinars possible. There's a lot of great resources on the C2C website, so we hope you'll check out the other great talks that are archived. In this presentation, we'll be discussing what you can do to care for framed objects in your collections. To give you a little background about the ICA, just so you have an idea of what our experience is, the ICA is a non-profit regional art conservation center, and we have conservators in paintings, paper, objects, and textiles. We were founded in 1952 by a consortium of Midwestern museums, but the ICA now serves a really wide range of clients, including museums, historic houses, libraries, archives, corporate collections, and private collections. Primarily the ICA focuses on conservation, which is single item treatment. So something is damaged and we fix it. The conservators at ICA are all members of the American Institute for Conservation, and we adhere to the standards of the profession by documenting everything we do to an object, both written and photographic. Another important tenant of conservation is reversibility, so we try to alter the object as little as we can, and we use reversible techniques to ensure as much of the original object stays intact as possible. So today's discussion about framing falls under the more broad category of preservation, which encompasses collections care as a whole. Preservation includes handling, environment, and storage, and policies related to these aspects of collections care. So these are the things that you do every day on a holistic level to ensure the overall safety of your collections. So specifically, why is framing important? And quite simply, framing serves to protect your objects and provides a way to get them safely on the wall. However, done incorrectly, framing can actually cause quite a bit of damage. Many objects that come into the ICA's paper lab, for example, exhibit damage caused by poor mounting and framing. And I'd like to jump in right here and just point out this painting on the left. It could not have a more simple frame, but this very simple wooden basic frame is providing the important function of protecting the edges of the painting, allowing it to be handled safely, and making sure that you don't accidentally get a dirty fingerprint on the white paint surface. So in this presentation, Wendy and I will address a number of topics having to do with storage and framing that are encountered in a lot of different institutions of all shapes and sizes. But we'll start off by giving an overview of general environmental parameters that hold true for all collections. Then we'll show some examples of storage solutions for framed objects specifically. I will discuss issues related to works on paper, and then Wendy will talk about framing paintings. And then finally, Wendy will give some tips and tricks for caring for the frames themselves, especially for those who have some historic frames in their collections. And I just want to say that any book or article or website that we will be discussing, or material that we'll be mentioning, that's all spelled out in your handouts. So for many of you, this might be a bit of a review, but we thought that it was important to go over some general guidelines for the environment and collecting institutions. And the first is light exposure. This is a lot more important for works on paper than for paintings. Paintings are fairly resilient to damage from light. That's not always the case, but mostly true. Works on paper have more stringent parameters because they are far more sensitive to damage from light. So for works on paper on display, the light level should be about five foot candles or 50 lux. And this assumes that the object is exposed to gallery lighting conditions, which means roughly eight hours a day, seven days a week. And while all light is damaging, ultraviolet light causes the most damage to works on paper, so it is possible to use low UV light sources, such as LEDs, or to put UV filtering sleeves on fluorescent lights, which emit a little bit more UV. So while it's best to have storage areas where all the lights can be completely turned off when not in use, that is not always possible in some smaller institutions where spaces might have multiple functions. Functions is an office or something like that. So we'll discuss tips in a few minutes for storage of framed works on paper in lit storage areas. In addition to light, maintaining appropriate temperature and humidity are also really important for works on paper. Ideally, the range is 68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit and 45 to 55% RH relative humidity. However, what's more important than trying and failing to meet unrealistic parameters for your particular space is maintaining a relatively stable environment. And if that means that you need to accept some gradual seasonal shifts or a slightly lower or higher range, that's far better than wild swings, which can result when you're trying to maintain an unrealistic environment and stressing out your HVAC system. So to get an idea of the normal range for your particular space, we recommend that you use an inexpensive household portable temperature and RH reader and track trends for several seasons. That'll give you an idea of whether you need other mechanisms for regulating the environment like a dehumidifier, for example. So as we mentioned, paintings are a lot more resilient to light, but the other ideal parameters pretty much remain the same. So as you can see from this image, there are a number of materials that are used to make up an easel painting, and there can be different supports, there can be different media on the paint binders, but all of these various components will expand to contract differently as temperature and relative humidity fluctuate. So therefore, just as Jamie said, the best thing you can do for your painting is keep it in a very stable environment. And in an ideal world, your paintings would be maintained at a constant relative humidity, which would be somewhere between 40 and 60, and a constant temperature, which would be somewhere around 68 to 72 Fahrenheit. Now, of course, as we all know, in a real world, a perfectly stable environment is impossible. Paintings are particularly unhappy with large fluctuations in relative humidity and temperature within short periods of time, and they respond much better to slow seasonal environmental changes. In general, paintings on canvas react more quickly to changes in humidity, but dimensional changes to paintings on wood panel often cause more serious damage, such as warping and splitting. So it should be said that if you have multiple types of materials stored in the same space, you should defer to the more fragile objects. It should also be noted that the exhibition recommendations for works on paper state that an individual object should be rotated off display after six months and rest for five years before being displayed again or one year every 10 years, just use those general numbers. This is mostly to regulate the long-term exposure to light over the life of the object. However, what if you can't rotate objects off display, or if your storage area is a multi-purpose space, like we discussed earlier, where the lights are on regularly? Well, one option, very simple, very easy, is you can make a simple cardboard cover that fits over the top of the frame and covers the image. It should be slightly larger than the object to allow for taping the sides without taping the frame. Hanging hardware should be left exposed so that it can remain hanging on the wall or on a rack. Label the outside with the object information and perhaps a small image so that it can be identified without opening the cover. If the object is directly under a light or right across from a window, you can actually cover the cardboard and aluminum foil for maximum light blocking. But of course, if the object needs to remain in a public space and you don't really want to have aluminum foil covered cardboard pieces hanging out in your public areas, you can also make a cover with blackout fabric, and you can now purchase blackout fabric at most fabric stores by the yard. And then you can invite patrons to lift the fabric to view the object. But for the most part, if the object is not being viewed, it would be covered with the light blocking fabric. Okay, so we're going to now, having talked about environmental parameters, we're going to talk a little bit about storing your framed collection. Now, as all of you know, I'm sure storage is just an enormous topic and we'll be focusing specifically on affordable ways to store your framed pieces. In your handouts, we have some references that will answer broader storage questions and including Rachel Arnstein's very good Collecting to Connections webinar on storage for just a good general overview. Now, if you have very particular storage questions, I would recommend consulting either the STASH website, and this is Storage Techniques for Art, Science, and History Collections, sponsored by FAIC, and accessible through AICUs website, or the excellent book, Storage of Natural History Collections, published by the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. Now, since frameworks are designed to be displayed vertically, it's best to store them that way as well. They can be hung on wire screens or racks, and we have included in the handout a reference to the National Park Service's conserver gram on how to make a storage screen for your framed piece. And this is the image here, this is the diagram from that conserver gram. And it can be made quite easily with materials that you can get from the hardware store, such as garden fencing material and wooden 2x2s. And the advantage, one really nice advantage of screens is that they can be used in unconventional storage spaces, since all you really need is a free wall. Screen and a subset of screen storage is rolling rack storage, and this is really good for oversized pieces and for paintings with ornate frames. Screens and racks can be very long, which is good, because then if you're oversized piece you have a lot of room for it. And racks also allow you to suspend pieces, which means you're not endangering the lower edge of an ornamental frame. Then specifically rolling racks will allow many items to be hung together in a small space. The disadvantage of rolling racks though is that they're expensive to purchase and to install. And on the screen here actually or in the slide you're seeing rolling racks from the ICA storage. And we didn't purchase these, these were actually donated to us by the Aquanart Museum when they upgraded their own storage. This sort of multipurpose storage system allows paintings to be stored vertically, or also in the case of fragile paintings, which might have say lifting paint on the surface horizontally. And note that in both the drawing and also in the photograph, the slots are several inches off the ground to protect the pieces from any sort of water incident. And here's now another example of cabinet or shelf storage for framed art. And what you're seeing are sturdy boards, sorry, sturdy board dividers between the pieces. And what you'll note is that the boards are all larger than the works of art. And you can also see what happens if you don't put dividers between pieces. They're on the right, where we have the white wooden frame, which is resting up against a larger painting, where there's a lot of high impasto and this high built-up area of the paint is traditionally quite delicate. And here's another image of an institution that we work with that's using board dividers between its framed pieces. And I really like this image because it shows you both how well labeled and yet how low budget their solution is. And note that all of these paper pieces are glazed, so we're not so concerned about the institution using basic old cardboard as their sturdy board dividers. So now I'm going to turn the talk back over to Jamie and she's going to talk to you about properly framing your paper pieces. So most works on paper will need to be framed to be hung on the wall for display. There are a lot of options for displaying unframed works on paper, but that is a topic for a whole different webinar. So we'll stick mostly to framed objects. When framing works on paper, it's very important to use the right methods and materials. I'll discuss the proper construction of a mat package and in general the types of materials that we recommend. There's a full list of materials in the matting and framing resources handouts that are on the download section. In addition, I'll go over when it might be important to unframe an object and touch on the idea of standard size mats and frames as a cost and space saving solution. So first off, here's a general schematic of a standard mat package. You have the glazing, the window mat or spacers if the piece is floating, the object attached to a backing board, and then at least one additional backing board for protection. Another schematic is in the handout, a different schematic. So sometimes you'll see a vapor barrier included in framing schematics, which is often a piece of polyester film or some other kind of water impermeable material. So here's a cross section of a mat package to illustrate how all the layers fit together. Most important to notice is that the object should always be spaced away from the glazing. The image on the left, up in the upper left corner, shows how a photograph that was directly up against the glass stuck to the surface and was damaged when it was removed. In the cross section, you can see the glazing, the window mat, the object, the board to which the object is mounted, which is also sometimes called a backing board, and then the additional protective backing board, which in this case is coroplast, which I'll discuss in a minute. Wendy will also discuss backing boards as they relate to paintings and the same idea holds true for works on paper. The protective backing board is just that. It's an additional buffer between the object and the outside world. We recommend a corrugated polypropylene called coroplast, which serves the dual purpose of also being a vapor barrier. A vapor barrier is more important if a work on paper has to hang on an outside wall. So normally we recommend that all works on paper hang on interior walls to reduce their proximity to fluctuations in the environment, which are a lot more noticeable on exterior walls. However, that might not be possible if you're an institution which resides in a historic house or some other kind of historic building. And therefore it's doubly important if you have to hang works on paper on outside walls to include a vapor barrier. We have a lot of clients who ask should we spend those extra dollars on museum grade mat board? And the answer is absolutely yes. These are the materials that will be in direct contact with your object in perpetuity. So here's a few examples of what can happen when poor quality materials degrade and damage an object. You can see degraded board transferring acids to the paper, discoloring the sheet. In the lower right we have some masking tape that was used to attach the object to its mount. It's become discolored. The adhesive has sunk through the paper to the front of the sheet causing some damage there. So objects should always be mounted to museum grade boards with paper hinges applied with water soluble adhesive. It's important for boards to be both acid free and lignin free. Lignin is a component in woody plants that helps them stand up straight. As it naturally degrades, lignin becomes acidic. So this means a board that is labeled acid free but still contains lignin can actually become acidic over time. Papers and boards made from 100% cotton fibers will be naturally lignin free because cotton is not a woody plant and so therefore it has little to no lignin. Many people think about the window mat and they kind of forget about the backing board, but in fact more of your object is in contact with the backing board than with the window mat. So it's just as important to make sure that both are high quality and you can see in the example on the right how the acid has transferred from the acidic backing board to the back of the object. Of course UV filtering glazing should also be used and there are all kinds of non-glare anti-static fancy museum glazing and in some cases that might be something that you want to use. But in general the majority of the time just a very basic simple UV filtering glazing conservation clear is what it's called for glass is what you want. It's far less expensive and it really serves to protect the object just as well from UV light which is what we really care about as any of the other fancy, fancier products. The glazing can be glass or acrylic depending on your needs and there are pros and cons for both. An obvious downside to glass is that it breaks and it can damage the object when it does. However it's a lot less likely to scratch and if you have an object with friable media for example a pastel or a charcoal drawing or you have a very lightweight paper, glass is static free and it won't pull the media off the surface or cause the sheet to come into contact with the glazing due to static cling. Acrylic glazing has the advantage of being much lighter which might be really important if the object is oversized. Obviously it doesn't shatter light glass so it's a much better option for objects in high traffic areas like a narrow hallway or for something that is traveling. However acrylic scratches much more easily and it needs to be carefully cleaned with a soft cloth and non-ammonia based cleaners only. Of course regardless of which glazing you use never spray the object directly on the glazing to clean it. Always spray the cloth and then wipe down the glazing with the lightly dampened cloth. To keep dust and dirt from entering the matte package you can seal the glazing to the protective backing board with a high quality polyester tape creating a nice microclimate. This is recommended especially if the piece is traveling but if the matte package is not sealed then a paper cover can be attached to the back of the frame to keep it clean and keep the dust out of the back. Again there's an extensive materials list in the handout which lists all these types of materials that you can use. So of course framers of your did not really use any of these methods or materials so anything that's framed more than 10 or 15 years ago is suspect and the object should really be checked for poor quality materials and proper glazing. On this slide you see some of the signs to look for when trying to determine whether an object needs to be unframed due to condition issues. While any of these issues by themselves could be reason enough to remove an object from a frame often several of these problems will be present simultaneously. However I would caution if you are going to unframe an object remember that it may be very fragile when it comes out of the frame so you need to have a plan for where you're going to store the object before you take it out of the frame. If you don't or if you don't have a place where you can safely keep it you might be better off just leaving it in the frame. So even though this talk is all about framing I thought it would be good to at least mention unframed objects tangentially. So storing unframed objects does require some kind of drawer box folder system so that objects do not get damaged and are protected out of their frames. Obviously unframed objects take up a lot less space so if space is at a premium but you need to display objects you can use what we call presentation mats. And a presentation mats includes the backing board, a window mat, and an additional mat board cover that can be folded to the back when the object goes into the frame. Presentation mats can actually be easily displayed in a case without a frame and then when they're not on display you can fold the cover back over the top and they can be stacked on top of one another for storage. Presentation mats also work well in a standard sized frame system so if you have standard sized mats then you can use standard sized frames which allow for multiple objects to share one frame glazing and protective backing board. That means you have fewer frames to purchase and store and when it's time for one object to come off display another object can take its place. The newly unframed object can go back into a drawer or a box and get a well deserved rest while its replacement can have its cover folded to the back and spend a little time on view. You don't even have to change the hooks on the wall. So that's the conclusion of the works on paper section so I'll hand it back to Wendy who will tell you all you ever wanted to know about paintings. Alright so we just went over what makes a well framed work on paper and now we're going to do the same thing with paintings. And this poor painting in the slide has some problems. It doesn't have a backing board so the back of the canvas is exposed and unprotected. The hanging wire threads through screw eyes and we'll be discussing the problem with screw eyes shortly. The stretcher keys aren't secured and the painting is held in the frame with nails. Here now courtesy of the painting specialty group of AIC is a diagram of a happily framed painting and you have this diagram in your handouts. So we're going to go through what makes this painting so happy by looking at all the steps of properly framing a painting. Okay so the first step is a little silly but we really did see this painting in the painting's lab at the ICA. The frame was clearly not intended for the piece since it was too small. However someone really wanted to use it and to make it fit they cut off the sides and they attached the frame by nailing it through the face of the painting. And in addition to the obvious problems the frame isn't doing its job of protecting the edges of the painting. And you can see this here where the tacking margin is actually starting to tear. So first off or I guess second off once you're sure that your frame fits. It's a good idea to put some sort of cushioning on the frame rabbit. And this is the lip of the frame that the painting actually rests against. At the ICA we use a polyester felt that has a pressure sensitive adhesive backing. And on your handout again we have the brands and the suppliers that we tend to like. So lining the rabbit avoids abrasion to the paint layer by the frame. And this is something this sort of a rabbit abrasion as paintings conservators call it is something that we see all the time. And those white white scuff marks at the top of this painting are caused by the rabbit rubbing against the paint layer. Okay so I imagine that everyone has seen paintings held in their frames with nails. It's a standard way or has been a standard way to frame easel paintings. The problem with this though is that if you need to unframe the painting you usually cause some damage to both the back of the frame and the back of the stretcher. So what we recommend when you go to frame a painting is to use either mending plates or offset clips. And the mending plate is the example on the bottom right and the offset clip is the example on the top right. The advantage of offset clips is that they come in many different sizes and are ready to use. And there at the top you see a selection of offset clips that our preparators have and it goes I think from one eighth of an inch all the way up to one inch. But the disadvantage is that even with so many different sizes you still may not have quite the size you need. Or you just may not be reframing paintings all that often and you may just not want to invest in all of these different sizes. Mending plates on the other hand have to be bent. But as a result you can bend them to exactly the size that you need. Now personally I find them really challenging to bend and I hate doing it. But I've been told that with enough practice this can really be mastered and you can get really good at it. In both cases you'll note that both the plates and most of the offset clips have screw holes in both ends. However, you only want to put the screw into back of the frame and not into the back of the painting. So pressure is going to hold the side of the plate or of the clip against the painting. D-rings have lots of advantages. You'll note that the D-ring here is attached with two screws. However, there are even larger D-rings with more screw holes that can be used for heavier paintings or heavier frames. And if one of the screws pulls out the hanger is still secure and the piece does not fall off the wall. If you have rack storage it's easy to hang the painting off the D-ring using the S-hook and that's what you see there on the right. Hanging from D-rings is preferred especially for heavy pieces since there's less chance of failure because wires are known to break over time. However, I imagine most of you know it's also more complicated to hang from D-rings and for many lighter pieces hanging from a wire is just fine. If you hang from a wire make sure to weigh the piece and choose a wire with the proper weight rating. And since you're in the process of weighing and have figured out how much your frame piece weighs, make a note of the weight on the back of the object and obviously not on the object itself but on its backing paper or backing board. Alright so here's the problem with screw eyes. The paintings department here has treated a number of paintings where the screw eyes have pulled out of the frame causing the piece to crash to the ground. Now often when this happens the frame takes most of the damage which is still not great particularly if it's a historic or important frame. In this particular case however the canvas was brittle and the force of the impact caused it to tear along the edges. And since the canvas was no longer attached to the stretcher along the edges it was no longer held taut and all of these distortions develop that you're seeing here on the right. Stretcher keys occasionally fall out if you have a painting that's on a stretcher and they get stuck at the bottom of the painting between the canvas and the stretcher bar. And the distortion you see in the top image is caused by a key being wedged at the back of the painting. So that little dent and then there's actually the entire outline of the stretcher there or the key there. So to avoid this we secure the keys. The way we do this here is to drill tiny holes in the keys and then secure the keys with monofilaments. Now if you haven't done this or even if you have there's a reference in your handout that lists an online article which you can download from the AIC Painting Specialty Group on Securing Stretcher Keys. And I will show you how to do this drilling holes and nylon fishing line but we'll give you also some other options as well. The best single preventive conservation step that you can take for your paintings, aside from keeping them in a stable as environment as you can, is to put on a backing board. Now the one caveat here is that you can't be in a tropical climate with an uncontrolled environment because then the backing board is going to help create just wonderful conditions for mold growth. So paintings conservators say in Florida who are working for private clients will often forego backing boards. But for everyone who's in a temperate climate backing boards are the way to go. Here at the ICA we use Coroplast backing boards and the Coro is a stable polypropylene because it's lightweight and it's fairly affordable and we attach it using these wide-headed last screws. In your handout there's another link to an online article from the AIC Painting Specialty Group that discusses a number of different materials and methods of attachment for backing boards. So for example, if you have a 17th century painting that's on its original 17th century strainer you might not want to be putting screw holes through it and there are ways to attach the backing board with Velcro. Now the thing about backing boards is that they're really, it does a lot for you, it does a number of things. It protects the back of the painting from impact damages and on the left you see bullseye crack patterns that is a typical result of these sort of blows or impacts. The painting on the right was damaged during transit and it was actually in its crate when a piece of hardware came loose. The face of the painting or the painting itself was glazed with plexiglass so the front of the painting was protected but the painting didn't have a backing board and the hardware punctured the back of the canvas and so that's what caused this little damage through the sitter's finger and if it had a backing board this would not have happened. Backing boards also protect the back of the painting from grime accumulation which over the years or decades can really build up between the structure and the back of the canvas and I chose this image because it's such a little tiny painting but you can see all of the terrible gunk that's being removed from it. It's hard to imagine it even all could have fit back there. So a backing board will help prevent this. Backing boards reduce canvas vibrations during transit and here you see a group of really wonderful construction workers who are attaching a backing board to this mural because the mural was going to be moved to a new school from a middle school that was about to be torn down. So as it's being loaded on and moved across town on this flatbed truck it's obviously, just given its size, there's obviously going to be a lot of vibration and the backing board helps minimize this. The very most important function though of a backing board is that it creates its own sort of little environmental buffer which then creates some protection if the painting is subject to rapid environmental changes. Now as Jamie noted, easel paintings, oil paintings, acrylic paintings do not tend to be light sensitive in the same way that works on paper or for that matter textiles are and usually they don't require glazing. However, there are sometimes when you might want to glaze a painting. On the screen is a painting of the artist's mother and it hangs in a student center at a large university that's going to remain unnamed. It came to us because someone scribbled a mustache on mom with a ballpoint pen. So we treated the painting and she went back to school with a piece of plexiglass glazing. So glazing can be a good way to protect paintings in unmonitored public spaces. Paintings on wood panel can respond to environmental fluctuations with warping and splits in the wood support and of course this damaged the support or problems in the support translate to problems in the paint layer. So a common practice among paintings conservators is to put panel paintings and microclimate sealed vitrines and this is particularly if they're going to go out on loan and might be subject to climate extremes during transit. So in these images you see paintings being fitted into aluminum trays that are then glazed and sealed with tape. The whole package is then fitted into the frame and sometimes you have to do a little retrofitting on the frame either build out the back or maybe route out the frame a little bit to get this slightly larger package now back into the frame. Here we use Smallcore, the Smallcore company to make our trays and to cut the glass or the plexi to fit and their contact information is in the handout. And really as a general rule any type of fragile painting where you want to minimize environmental fluctuations can go into this type of retrain. Sometimes fragile paintings that are never going to travel are still fitted into a retrain like this so that the owners can feel more comfortable about having it out on display. So to sum up here, you may have a number of paintings in your collection that are framed like this, not so well. But you probably won't have time to unframe every painting and do everything that we just discussed, particularly if you have a collection of 100 or 200 paintings or even just 50, it's time consuming to do this. However, for the bulk of your framed paintings if you can do only one thing for all of them and remember if you're in a temperate climate put on a backing board. Because you can put on a backing board and this doesn't require unframing the painting and it will give you the most protection with the least effort. And while you're in the process of putting on the backing boards check the hanging hardware for any brittle wire or for loose screw eyes or D-rings and if you find them you might want to replace them or you do want to replace your hanging hardware. Now if you have any reason to completely unframe a painting then you can do everything properly. So you can go the whole nine yards. You can line the rabbit, you can put it back in with Z-clips if it's a painting on a stretcher you can try on the stretcher keys and then of course new hanging hardware and a backing board. Alright, so coming into the home stretch here this last portion of the presentation will be about some simple things you can do to take care of your frames. Sometimes in collections frames are considered strictly functional items but of course original and period frames as we all know can provide important historical information about the artwork or the artist and they can enhance the work aesthetically as well. And what you're seeing here is a painting in a frame that was probably made by the artist and you can see how the colors of the frame and the painting complement each other and even the building shapes in the painting are echoed in some ways by the step profile of the frame. Now a really neat thing happened as I was working on this talk. We had this 19th century painting in the lab. The painting itself had come to the ICA several years ago and it was in its original but extremely damaged frame. So the owner could not afford to have the frame conserved but he loved the painting and he had the painting treated and he purchased a simple modern frame so that he could hang it on his wall and enjoy it. He kept the original frame though and all of its little detaching pieces and parts and this year he brought the frame in for conservation as well. The treatment has been completed just very recently and I think you can see how entirely different the painting looks in the two frames in the modern frame and in its original frame. So in terms of taking care of your frames remember that before you do anything you should look them over and make sure that you're not seeing any areas of insecurity. And right here for instance you're seeing microflaking on a gilt surface and this is a fairly common condition issue for certain types of gilding. Okay I think this goes without saying but during your examination if you find detaching or detached areas save them because it's not usually hard, it's usually not that hard to reattach pieces. It is however very time consuming to recreate missing ornament. If you have a lot of 19th century frames in your collection you probably know that ornament on these frames is usually not carved wood but rather something called composition or compo. And compo is an oil-based putty that is pressed into molds. And as this putty dries out it tends to become brittle with age and therefore it's quite frequent that you can find loose and detaching pieces. And on the left you see an extremely luxurious hand-carved wood frame and on the right is a very nice high quality compo frame. Here is a close-up of compo frame ornament in cross-section and an image showing the early casting process. Now in the later part of the 19th century the production became much more mechanized than what you're seeing there on the left. And if you're interested in the history and manufacture of 19th century frames there's a great article by a frame and furniture conservator Hugh Glover and you can, that's available as a download and the link is in your handout. Okay, so you've determined that there's no insecure surface finish or loose ornament. Then it's usually safe to dust your frames with a soft brush. And here's our conservation technician Ann and she's dusting with a goat hair brush. We also have a lovely very soft badger brush. Both types of hair just cannot be nicer and both these brushes can be purchased in art supply stores either badger or goat brushes. If the frame is really dusty you can dust it into a HEPA filter vacuum high efficiency particulate air filter vacuum. And here notice that Ann is using a smaller brush to get into the nooks and crannies and that our vacuum has a micro brush attachment as well. Dusting with a soft brush is probably all you should do in terms of cleaning guilt frames since gold leaf can be so delicate. Guilding is very easily abraded by being rubbed too hard say with a cloth or a slightly damp cloth and here you see a large section of white gesso where the gold has just been rubbed away on this frame. But if you have a painting or if you have a painted frame or a wood stain frame that has a secure finish and is really grimy after you dust and vacuum you can sometimes use high density sponges to remove more grime. These sponges will crumble a bit often when you use them so you usually have to dust or vacuum afterwards to avoid leaving bits of sponge on your frame. And information on these sponges their polyurethane sponges used in the cosmetic industry is available in your handout. When you have losses to the surface finish the bare wood and especially the white gesso can be really distracting and you can see this particularly in the left image. Just toning in especially the bright white gesso can make the frame look much more cared for. And another advantage of toning in losses is that if you have flaking or lifting as an ongoing issue you'll notice new losses as they occur. So it depends a bit on your confidence level and you might not want to start with a frame like the one on the left if you're going to do a little bit of toning in. There's a lot of loss there and the high gloss tortoise shell like finish is going to be a little challenging to match. On the right however there are just a few losses and if you just do a little bit of toning they're going to completely disappear. So here's Anne again. She's using a number two watercolor brush and a very limited palette. You need to work of course as everybody knows just within the area of loss the good news is that almost any color you mix that's close to the original and that gets rid of the white will be just a huge improvement. So dusting a little bit more I guess detailed or surface cleaning with the sponges and then a little toning will all help improve the look and the condition of your historic frames. So in conclusion that was a lot of information and probably your brain is a little full and tired but hopefully you'll feel more comfortable managing your framed collections. Please refer again to the handouts for more information, resources and materials lists. We did leave a lot of time for questions so we hope you'll take advantage of that. Finally we just want to say if you need an actual human backup please feel free to call us at the ICA or check out the AIC's website for more resources or information including their find a conservator tool where you can search for a conservator right in your area and a reminder that ICA is a non-profit conservation center and part of our mission is education. So we're always happy to answer questions over the phone or via email as best we can for anyone who contacts us so we'll hope that you'll use us or AIC or any other local conservator in your area as a resource. Thank you and we'll be happy to take questions. Yes, thanks so much for listening. I'll read the questions and we'll go through and I'm going to try and keep track of what's going on that people are putting in now. So we'll go all the way up to the top of these questions. Yes. I understand that my volume needs to be turned up. Is that better? Okay. So the first question is is temperature and humidity for storage are the recommendations are you making recommendations should they be the same for storage and for or only for articles on display? Our cold storage vaults are kept at 45 degrees Fahrenheit and 25% RH. Would this be too cold for and dry for painting framed objects? I would say so there's a few questions there. I would say yes. The parameters for for storage are the same for display hopefully although that's not always possible and then if you have a storage area that has a lower RH that might be okay if it's fairly consistent. So our biggest takeaway is that we really want to make sure that the environment is stable and if it's a little lower or a little bit higher although with RH higher you get into potential mold issues what we really want is to create as stable an environment as possible for objects and Wendy I don't know if you have another comment there. Well and I think that and again the other thing is you know I mean it gets so hard to start tweaking HVAC systems but what you really want to do is avoid rapid swings in temperature and humidity so there have been studies of paintings that are in Great Britain in castles that are surely not in ideal storage or display conditions. You know they are humid, it's humid, it's cold but the walls are thick and the same actually is true for paintings and medieval churches and the temperature and humidity changes very gradually and that seems to be you know the better sort of environmental conditions. Okay so there's a question about what's the specific conservation composition that you should look for in blackout fabric? I don't know that there's a specific composition especially because presumably you'd be using it it's the same as why it's okay to use not perfect cardboard when you're interleaving frames because the piece is in a frame and it's protected by the frame so blackout fabric in general because now it's used a lot for drapery and you should be able to buy it in a fabric store and it should be labeled as blackout fabric so you probably want to go look in the area of the fabric store where you would buy things to make drapes. Yes okay should dividers be covered with carpet? I don't think that's necessary in the sense that because you're talking again about framed pieces so your works on paper are going to have glass or acrylic glazing and for most easel paintings in most cases it's going to be the cardboard that's going to be up against the frame as opposed to maybe the more sensitive paint surface and the carpet I feel like a smooth piece of cardboard actually is probably or a smooth piece of board is probably going to cause less problems than maybe some rougher carpet I mean I can imagine a time when maybe some you might be nice to have a few for special occasions It might come into play if you have an especially ornate frame that has a lot of high points and maybe in that case you might want to use something rather than a carpet you might actually want to use something like a harder felt which might be a little bit less rough than carpet that would be my only comment for that okay there's a question hanging on a storage cream could be useful too because then you don't need to I mean if you have that option because then you're not worried so much about the high points of your frame yeah there's a question here about what sort of padding can be placed on ornate frames but maybe the solution is to hang them yeah if you can hang if you have a really ornate frame and it's possible to hang it either on a wall or a screen that's the best option because then you don't have to worry about it leaning up against anything but when we do have we're moving paintings multiple paintings on a paintings cart we will put pieces of we have pieces of felt like a thicker industrial felt that we'll put in between to make sure that the frames don't knock into each other what about yeah you could use ethyl foam ethyl foam would be good too and sometimes if you are moving pieces even and it's not going to be permanent you could even wrap corners and bubble wrap something like that as well this will allow you to be able to handle those pieces without holding your breath every second okay should works of paper works of art on paper behind vertically or laid flat I have a number of uncolored prints in the collection so that are framed works that are framed should be laid flat or hanging if the pieces are in frames and they're attached appropriately with good hinges they can hang upright there's no reason that they can't hang upright but if it's a piece that is especially fragile if it's possible to lay it flat that's great but that also takes up a lot more space so it may be somewhat dependent on what your space can accommodate but it's perfectly fine if the piece is framed well and has good hinges to have it remain hanging upright in storage how do we determine if a mat is not archival other than obvious yellow in if you are able to take the frame apart there is a pen it's the abbey ph pen you can buy it through talus probably other places as well it's pretty inexpensive and you just touch it to the side of the mat board if it stays purple the mat board is alkaline if it turns yellow it's acidic so that's a quick spot test to allow you to see whether your mat board is alkaline or acidic how deep are typical oops sorry go ahead please onto the next question so when do you finish oh isn't there also a way sometimes you can tell by looking just at the cross section of your mat board yeah you would see the yellowing so if you have a bevel cut mat that has a window mat that's got a bevel in it if you see a different color in that interior of the bevel and it's usually yellow that indicates that the mat board is likely acidic and it's starting to degrade okay how deep are typical vertical storage bins depends on how much space you have yeah I mean a lot of that is somewhat space dependent you know if you can make them I don't know how deep ours here are we have a variety we have some very big bins and those are probably 5 feet deep but then we have others that are 3-4 feet deep so it really kind of depends on what your storage can handle and Stacy Durham asked what if the building is sandwiched between two other buildings so she said she works in a gallery that is between two buildings so with displaying art there be affected over time um wouldn't that just be according to how stable their environment was yeah I'm wondering if that's from the exterior interior wall I'm sort of assuming that's where the question is coming from if you're a building which is right next to other buildings then technically you don't have exterior walls you're right up against another building so the other way I would maybe interpret that question is that your environment is going to be somewhat dependent on the environment of the buildings next to you that's not something you can necessarily control so again we're trying to be realistic we know that not every environment is going to be perfect but really what we want to focus on is being as stable as possible and gradual shifts as possible okay there was a kind of a large discussion going on about coroplast and whether or not it is um stable one person said that they had coroplast that after seven to ten years was crumbling and other people thought it might be off-gassing because it has trade secrets so so we use we use only virgin coroplast and virgin coroplast has very few fillers in it it's usually not opaque it actually is somewhat translucent so that's good and it means that it doesn't have extra stuff in it like it doesn't have recycled plastics in it or anything that is coming from unknown sources it's purely virgin plastic so that's the only kind of coroplast that we use and that is of course a little bit more expensive but not a whole lot and that seems to that lasts and holds up well yeah that's been my experience too um there were some questions about sealed packages Louisa Connor in Dublin said that she'd heard of risk of mold growth and sealed frames with non-porous backings in the environment environmentally uncontrolled environments that's sort of like the tropics too right yeah that's it's coroplast backings may not be the best option for really humid or tropical environments although one option is that you can put art sorb sheets into a frame package if that's a concern and those are humidity control sheets that are conditioned to remain at a specific RH so if there is a concern that you're going to be sending something into a really truly uncontrolled environment then that's a possible option is to include a piece or a sheet of art sorb conditioned to a more moderate RH into the frame package and with regard to easel paintings and backing boards um you're not totally sealing this up with tape so you're really just putting it in with a few screws so again unless this is extremely humid mold growth doesn't seem to be a problem another option rather than using coroplast some paintings conservators a number of painting conservators actually will use the the archival blue board and that will be a little less impervious a very reasonable option for works on paper as well if you're concerned about it especially if it's not something that's traveling you can use the corrugated blue paper board and then a paper backing for a dust cover that's a perfectly fine option as well there was some discussion about acrylic glazing not being a vapor barrier that is true glass is more of a vapor barrier than acrylic there is some movement of moisture through acrylic that is not the case with glass so it is not a complete vapor barrier and Heather Galloway said that CCI has done research on stability of coroplast and they've recommended some pigmented coroplast because it blocks more light that's just a comment I thought I would highlight it there's a question about where can we get virgin coroplast we know where to get it locally here in Cleveland we get it from Team Plastics but I think Team Plastics has locations all over I'm not entirely sure but we get it from a local plastic supplier so the same place where we get our plexiglass where we get our coroplast so hopefully they would be able to help you yeah can you explain more in depth why no backing boards in an uncom I think we've answered this why no backing board in an uncontrolled temperature tropical climate is it so yeah I think we have it's mostly that you are going to be in moisture and already you are at a pretty high humidity it's going to be dark back there and you are going to be creating encouraging mold growth I mean there already if the climate is too tropical and too uncontrolled there's going to be danger of mold growth even without the backing board but the backing board will just act as a little bit of an accelerant so you don't necessarily want to do that then there was a question about as labels from previous museum exhibitions on the stretcher board and it was suggested that you could photo you could copy the labels and print them and put them in mylar and attach them to the back of the backing board do you have any yeah that's a standard practice I'm glad somebody asked that because there's often a lot of great information on the back of the painting if it's actually on the back of the painting support either the fabric or the panel you know a stamp or something then usually our photographer will take a photo of that or you can take a photo of that and put a reproduction on the back so that people aren't having to take the backing board off to see that if it is actually on the stretcher then sometimes those can be removed easily and those can be a mylar sleeve and taped to the back of the backing board sometimes they're stuck down in ways that don't come off particularly easily in which case we might put a piece of mylar over the label and then attach the backing board and take a photo and put that on the backing board but yes you definitely don't want to lose that information on the back that's often interesting about the exhibition history or provenance history and you may want then copies of it also in the object file and then there was some lamenting about finding a time to do this and the staff and money do you have any suggestions about that? Yeah I think that you know again we're just giving the information of what ideally we would love to see happen but of course we realize that that's not possible for every work in your collection so really prioritize and if you have this information if you have these few materials like you know the offset clips and things like that around the next time you do have to unframe a painting then you can put it back together better so we're not saying that you should go into your collections and unframe every painting and every work on paper and do all of this right now but we're saying that as you go along and as you manage your collections over time it's important to understand what you should be doing so that when you do have to take something apart for some reason or unframe a painting for some reason you can then put it back together correctly. And some of the things too I mean often an issue is in addition to staff time which can be just so difficult there's also space to do this but you can often well I don't know about often but one thought might be to apply for a very small grant just somewhere locally to maybe bring a conservator in and do a staff training session just let's all practice putting on backing boards and if you have graduate interns or college students who are volunteering for you volunteers with your collection this is the sort of thing that people can be trained to do and you can get better with practice so you can do a concentrated focused time after finding some money for supplies a little bit of training some of the preservation assistance grants are good for both materials and training maybe not doing it tomorrow but maybe planning to do it for putting in a grant and then doing it the following year who or what company do you recommend for reproduction period frames it depends sort of where you are we've used a place in Boston in the past called A Street Frames they've done some nice period frames for us a lot of times you can find people locally who still kind of do this sort of work it is hard to find people who guild like do true gilding if you wanted a true guilt frame but yeah I mean I would start with A Street Frames in Boston they've been really great for us and see if they can help you there have been several questions about what you suggest for unframing photographic materials when do you unfram should you leave them in a frame if they're generic and they're not talking about cased images you're talking about more modern things yeah I would say that the one caveat with photographs is that sometimes the mats are actually part of the construction piece itself so the mat is signed it's part of the actual object so that's where you do have to be a little careful when you're dealing with photographs but again it's the same thing as for works on paper if you see a photograph and it's got a mat around it and the bevel the edge is obviously turning yellow and it's acidic then that's a problem it's the same sort of thing for works on paper the parameters are pretty much the same photographs are actually even a little more fragile so that would be I hope that answers the question is the frame considered less important or more easily sacrificed than the artwork if the frame situation is not bad for the artwork when would you not want to start with a better frame so wait I'm not sure understanding the question so you're asking if the frame is secondary to the artwork depends yeah a period frame you know a period of 18th century painting and its original frame those are equally important I think I mean those are where in a way maybe even conceived together or contemporary piece where the artist has also designed and executed the frame those can be sort of equally important I think I don't know yeah it's kind of a case by case basis I mean if it's really obvious that the piece is in a totally generic frame that has zero relation to the object whatsoever then you know that's the case where it's not so important to keep that particular frame but if we're talking about a piece that is in its original frame then that's something that really might be more important to consider how if it's causing damage to the object whether or not you can modify the frame in some way and that might actually mean that you have to go to a conservator or a paintings conservator or a frame conservator or somebody you do that if it's if it truly is an original frame and it's really important to keep that frame there are ways to modify frames so that they're more safe for the object okay so I think that answers the next question is what do you do which is what do you do if the frame is unstable we'll go into the next one are there non-animal hairbrushes that can be used for cleaning frames sure go to Badger are just examples of very soft hair when people want specific recommendations but really you can go there are some very soft synthetics and you can go to the art store and just start poking around with frames and ones that feel not too scratchy on your hands should be fine the other thing to watch for is usually brushes that are made a little bit better a little higher quality are not going to be losing hairs because there's nothing more annoying than dusting and then finding you've left a lot of brush hairs all over the object you've just dusted so those are two things I'd check for but a soft synthetic would be just fine as well and then you're just recommending straight watercolor paint for toning right correct that I think it's easy to easy to use you're not going to get into much trouble with it if for some reason you're not very happy with what you've just put on you can make yourself a little tiny or use a little tiny Q-tip and a little saliva and take it right off again you need to be within the area of loss but just plain watercolor on the list I've put in half pans of either Winsor and Newton watercolor or Schmincke watercolor sometimes if you feel like the watercolor is just going too transparent for you you can use designer's gouache which is basically just watercolor with opaque white so it's a little bit more opaque but yes that's what I would recommend if you are feeling really ambitious and you want to get a little bit of sort of gold look you can get shell gold which is round up gold you know gold leaf in gum arabic which is the binder for watercolor but honestly you don't really even need I mean it's nice to have shell gold it's fairly expensive in fact because you're using you know 22 carat 23 carat gold just yellow ochre will tend to be just fine for toning back losses because really all you're trying to do is get rid of the that bright white or a bright new raw would feel you're not trying to color match exactly you're just trying to get the general tone and just to tone back the white a little bit so don't be too concerned with matching exactly it's really more we have what we call the 6 inch 6 foot roll from 6 inches away somebody's going to be able to see that it's not exactly right but from 6 feet away which is where most of your visitors are going to be noticing your frame it should just kind of blend into the background so don't be too concerned about matching exactly okay how often do you recommend cleaning a doing surface cleaning with sponges so I think that I suspect that you're not going to need to do that very often you know I mean yeah you're probably I mean this would be I would I suspect that you know if you are a collecting institution and you are you know are performing sort of regular housekeeping and you know changing the filters on your air returns and things like that you know it's not your pieces aren't going to be getting really dusty and there certainly aren't going to be getting that level of dark grime that you saw in the images in my slide that was a piece that had been just been purchased by an institution it had been stored in a barn before that it had probably been next to a coal burning furnace so you know you probably are going to do that once remove that surface grime that dirt and then I think probably just you know regular light dusting as you notice dust on the surface you know so something out on view you may be noted as just with a soft brush not with the sponges okay we have we have a large number of framed works that have been stored about 40 years interleaved in very in with very tightly therefore many of the frames and works contained have been damaged by handling the glass crack due to poor storage at what point do you de-frame and or dispose of frames sounds awful well cracked and broken glass is really a big issue I mean the problem with the cracked and broken glass is that if you shift the piece you can be in danger of having the glass crack further and if it's a work on paper or a painting the glass can can go into the object and cause damage so I would say probably top of the line for when to unframe something is if you have broken glass the catch there is that you need to be really careful when you're unframing the piece that you don't cause damage to the object or frankly to yourself just be really careful when you're unframing works that have broken glass that you don't cut yourself but I say that's probably the number one instance where you would want to unframe something one way to do that is to take just packing tape and anywhere you see a crack before you unframe it anywhere you see a crack just put a piece of packing tape over that crack and that will at least hold it together so that you can unframe it about pieces of glass falling all over the place so that's one tip to unframe pieces that have cracked glass if the glass is already broken then every frame is going to be a little different so I can't really give a general general instructions there but just be really careful when you're unframing it that the glass is as supported as it can be so it may be that you need to unframe the piece face down the entire time potentially so that would be my advice there frames are really damaged here in this tight packing you may need to separate the painting or the work on paper from its frame but photograph them so that you know that they go together and then possibly as storage improves you might be able to rejoin them okay we're going to be ending in a few minutes so there are about five more questions to answer and will you guys answer them and I'll post them when I post the recordings sure, yeah, absolutely and so I want to say thank you to everyone the evaluation form is up here in the left hand corner and we really rely on those evaluations so please fill them out and we'll see you not next month but we'll see you in April and that and in April there will be two webinars because the webinar on mannequins had to be scheduled so thank you all for coming thank you Wendy and thank you Jamie and we'll see you in April, twice okay, bye bye