 Okay, welcome everybody. This is Mike Moro from Learning Times. We're just about to start. I just wanted to welcome everyone and inform anyone that if they have any technical issues with the Zoom platform today, please communicate with us using the chat window and we will provide support. If you have questions for our panelists, of course, you can feel free to use the Q&A pod located at the bottom of your screen. Without delay, I'll go ahead and begin the recording and we will pass things off to our host, Robin Bauer Kilgoe. Go ahead, Robin. Hi everyone and welcome to another C2C Care webinar. This one's called Collections, Care and Social Justice. I'd like to start by acknowledging that this webinar is being moderated on the traditional lands of the Mikasuki Inseminable people and their ancestors. And I pay my respect to elders both past and present. As Mike said, we are here to have a really fun conversation about this subject. Basically, the conversation for today is based around Collections, Care and the preservation of protest art. During this conversation, we are hoping to connect caretakers with one another to raise awareness of issues related to protest art and to inform the preservation community about the amazing work that is being done. I'll be keeping an eye on our chat box throughout the time. So obviously, like Mike said, that's a spot for you guys to communicate with each other or to the panelists if you'd like to. We also have a Q&A box. So if you have a question for our panelists, please use that Q&A box. It's much easier for us to kind of keep an eye on what questions you might have. So I want to start out our conversation by having our fabulous panelists actually introduce themselves and talk a little bit about the collections that they manage. I'm going to kind of go around the circle as it appears on my screen. So let's start with Whitney Broadway. Could you go ahead and introduce yourself and talk a little bit about the collection that you manage? Absolutely. My name is Whitney Broadway. I'm the collections manager at the Orange County Regional History Center. We are located in downtown Orlando, Florida. We are a regional history museum covering all of Central Florida, but what I will probably mostly be talking about in this talk is specifically our one Orlando collection that was gathered in the aftermath of the Pulse Nightclub shooting almost five years ago. I was one of the original staff members that was a part of collecting at the different memorial sites and inside the nightclub and have been kind of with that project and that collection since it's original inception. Great, thank you. Heather, Shari, could you please introduce yourself as well? Sure, great. Thanks for having me. I'm Heather Shari. I'm a history professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I'm co-director of a project called the Urban Art Mapping Research Project. We're a fairly large multi-disciplinary, multi-racial, multi-generational team that includes undergraduate students and graduate students and three faculty members. And as I said at the team project, I'm the person who's not teaching or in class today, so I'm here to represent us. We've been working on documenting and analyzing street art in our community for about two years and we bring lots of different perspectives to this, but none of us are actually trained archivists and so we're learning this on the job. We've been working for the last seven months on systematically documenting street art globally, creating what we call living archives relating to the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism. So we've created two digital archives, the COVID-19 Street Art Database and the George Floyd and Anti-Racism Street Art Database, both which are crowdsourced and use OMECA. We made the decision early on that we wouldn't actually preserve physical objects, doing our work entirely in the digital realm. So we're seeking to really compliment the work of people who are doing this important job of preserving physical objects. Street art is I think really amazing in terms of how it responds to this very transformative, transformational historical moment and we see lots of different responses. We see disbelief, distrust, justified anger, hope, a vision for a more equitable world and all this conversation is taking place on walls, on the pavement, on stop signs, on dumpsters and so the idea of our project is to really document and analyze all of this street art but it's very ephemeral. Some of us sometimes disappearing literally overnight or even in a matter of hours. So we really wanna capture the complexity of these experiences and responses in this archive so that we can in the future look back at this historical moment that it's ongoing and see this visible complexity. So we've documented about 2000 pieces between these two databases and they're growing through crowdsourcing. Of course, we're living in a time of a pandemic so we're really reliant on our communities around the world to help us document work. So finally, I just say that we consider this to be an activist archive, one that we hope will go out in the world and do social justice work but we recognize that we have to commit to the long-term activation of this archive to really make that happen. So that's something that we think quite a bit about. Thanks for having me here today. Thank you. Janelle, go ahead. Absolutely, I naturally follow Heather because I am lead caretaker at the George Floyd Memorial at 38th in Chicago in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the south side. We've recently launched in mid-October 14th which was George Floyd's birthday, the George Floyd Global Memorial which will serve as an institution that kind of governs the work that we as community members are doing on the ground in partnership with George Floyd's family. I started caretaking June 1st, 2020. So I've been in the game for about five months. So I think I'm the baby of everybody here but I love the work we've collected somewhere around 2,000 to 2,500 pieces that we are working on conserving, preserving, archiving and everything is community-driven. Everything is community led and we exist within the context of an active protest zone. We look at the pieces as every piece being first and foremost laid as protest and so we navigate it as such. As caretakers on the ground we have two grounding principles or guidelines and that is one that everything is somebody's offering and therefore nothing is thrown away and two that the people are more sacred than the memorial itself. With those grounding principles that means I'd estimate we'd have about 90% of what was laid throughout the course of 2020 summer, fall, a week of winter and then now we're back in spring but we have about 90%, I say 5% probably got stolen and another 5% got taken away from the elements of weathering. So we leave the pieces out there as long as possible because again it's protest first and then when things are on the verge of either being destroyed by the elements or because of mold or rods or something like that then we take them in and start to conserve them with the intent that they will eventually go back out for the public to engage. It's the people who laid those offerings down and it's the people who deserve to continue to experience those pieces and so we're working diligently on ways to be able to navigate that through Minnesota winter and then looking forward to spring when hopefully things get a little bit easier in terms of being able to display what people continue to lay down. It's a living memorial, things shift and change between plants, protest signs, art, street art, every day the space shifts and changes because of what people are laying down and I tell people that if you lay it down we'll take care of it. That's great, thank you. And I do think you talking about environment is something we will come back to because this panel is interesting because we got anything from the swampiness that I currently live in to what you guys have to experience with the weather at the coldness and fluctuations and all that. So we're gonna come back to that point in a few minutes. Katherine why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us what your collection is. Hi, I'm Kate Ridgway. I am the state archeological conservator for Virginia. I work at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. I've been a conservator for about 23 years now and my job is sort of two-fold right now. So one part of my job is I'm helping with if the Robert E. Lee Monument on Monument Avenue if depending on how the lawsuits go that are currently in the courts if that ends up being moved then I'll be helping with that process. Mostly my job there is to help with the time capsule that's in the pedestal. And then because we're a state agency we've been helping to create guidance documents that are available to anyone who wants to go and check our website but we wrote them originally for the localities in Virginia that are dealing with trying to figure out what they want to do with their monuments in their community and how to make those community decisions, including this idea that a lot of these monuments have graffiti that is now historically important and where previously we might have given advice on graffiti removal that's not necessarily the case where this is concerned. And also I'm just a general resource for conservation help as far as any localities that need help with safe ways to remove monuments and anything else that they would need help with. So while I normally am dealing with our collection we have about six million archeological artifacts that is not at all what I'm working with right now. Like right now it's all sort of public art monuments sort of stuff. So that's sort of my role in all of this. Great, thank you. So obviously as our audience probably just heard we have a mixture of different types of organizations represented here today. Either those who started out as collecting institutions or those who have now been born out of a collection you know what I mean that has come up and now we now have an organization that will management. How do you feel like, this is for any of our panelists how do you feel like your role to contribute to the work of caring for protest art collections? So how do you think your role directly contributes to that actual caring aspect of it? Would anyone like to take that on a little bit? I have a certification question. Sure. Do you mean our role within like what are we doing with protest art or like our role in the larger picture of protest collections? I think larger picture I think is kind of what we're looking at, right? I feel like, and I'm not saying that we were the start of it there were several institutions before us but I feel like there was a building of basically the interest in collecting contemporary protest items or memorial items that was not once originally part of most museum or library focuses. So I think that everything that we are doing and other institutions across the country and across the world are currently doing right now with documenting different movements of Black Lives Matter protests getting the signs from different picketers and conserving sites of solidarity and memorial sites. This is like a brand new way of a way to preserve moments in history for cultural institutions. Anybody else have any other thoughts? Yes, I do, since I am in active protest zone. And I forgot to mention as well earlier that the Midwest Arts Conservation Center is providing us guidance in the Pillsbury House and Theater. It provides us a room for conservation work. So I wanna get shout out to them. But as far as protest, so early on during the Minneapolis uprising the people had deemed this intersection as sacred. And as people laid down flowers and food and cigarettes and sage and dolls and rocks and crystals, t-shirts, bike helmets, whatever it was that people were laying down as a part of their expression of pain and hope, every element that was laid as an act of protest contributed to the sacredness of the site. So what we do as caretakers in many ways, imagine it's almost like a priesthood, if you will. It's like our job is to preserve the sanctity of this protest and how these pieces continue to live and tell the story. I say to people all the time that each piece holds the pain, the grief, the tears, the cries, the anger, the shouts, the chance of the protest in the pieces. And so when you come to the memorial and when you come to visit the intersection of 38th and Chicago, you will experience the energy that those pieces hold. And so our role as caretakers, actually in many ways, sustains the protest because we sustain the pieces out of which that carry the protest and that carries the memories of the uprising and that at any point, anything new can actually be laid down because people continue to grieve, people continue to creatively express their pain and their hope, people continue to protest against racial injustice. And so we hold space for that as caretakers and ensure that there's always a place for people to come and lay down whatever it is that they're gonna lay down. And not everything is always physical. Some people give offerings of song and dance. Some people give offerings of service. Some people give offerings of manning the barricades or cooking food for the community. Everyone's offering looks different and our job as caretakers is just to create that space so that people can continue to protest in whatever way they know how. I really like that idea of how this is an active thing, right? It's not like an event that just happened and stopped and how your guys role in working with these active collections and active locations is creating that space so that people can start, can keep expressing themselves and what they feel about these movements because I keep thinking back to, I volunteered for a World War II archives back when I was in college and that was people coming across stuff that their grandparents had saved, right? So it was like years later and we were far removed from the events and it was way too much Nazi paraphernalia that I ever wanna see in my entire life because it was World War II. And, but that's happened so far along and this is such an active thing and we have to make sure that we keep creating those spaces for people to keep sharing their feelings and thoughts. And I think that's an important difference with the collections that you all are working with. So just to move on a little bit, what do you see as the role of preservation care-taking in the social justice movement as a whole? So again, we're talking about an active thing happening and what do you think the role of actually us preserving it? Do you think that's an important role? Obviously we all kind of do because we work in that field but how do you kind of look at it from a wider scope generally speaking? Do you have any thoughts? I'd love to jump in if I can. I just wanted to piggyback on what Janelle said. I think that was so powerful. The idea about really sustaining this movement and keeping it alive through the work of documenting and archiving and preserving whether it's physical objects or doing that in the digital realm. And I think that idea is what really drives us as well. This idea of really sustaining this movement, sustaining these voices, amplifying these voices. And I think with street art, the narrative is at risk of being changed, right? Because there might be some really powerful graffiti that goes up in a moment of tension. Sometimes anti-cop graffiti or sometimes I've seen just really simple but powerful graffiti that says things like mama or stop killing us. And then we've noticed how that can be very quickly buffed or it's erased or it's painted over and sometimes the narrative has changed. Sometimes the, like I remember seeing arrest all for and then it was changed a few days later to we heart uptown, right? So the narrative can be so very quickly co-opted and I think that's part of the reason why it's so important to document all of these voices and expressions as they come in, especially in the case of looking at George Floyd and the uprising that has occurred in the aftermath of his murder, just thinking about how BIPOC voices and experiences are so underrepresented in the archives and seizing this moment to really think about how to document this wide range of voices and experiences and to do that really carefully while letting the narrative be complicated and messy and allowing for this like for this conflict to really continue to live and to have a sort of power in resonance. Please go ahead, Kate. As someone who works in state government we tend to have to be more neutral. And so part of our job has also been to make sure that as the movement goes forward that people aren't hurt by taking down these monuments that we work with the communities to say, okay, we're doing our best to do this as quickly and safely as possible. And helping those who have different feelings about the monuments understand that this is happening and these monuments are going away and that doesn't necessarily mean they're being destroyed and finding the right way to remove them to a different space and make them tell a different story. And it is, which is a really can be a really difficult thing for helping all of the members of a community feel they're being heard because as state government we work for all the taxpayers. So we wanna make sure that while these monuments aren't front and center anymore they're taken to places where they can still tell a story. So there's one monument that is probably going to the Valentine Museum which is the Jefferson Davis monument that was pulled down and they're actually because they own the house in the studio where that monument was created they're putting it back in the studio where it was first created but they're putting it back in the orientation as it fell and keeping all of the graffiti on it to show how it ended up. So it won't be upright, it'll be on its back if you've seen the pictures in the newspaper. So helping these monuments find some kind of home in the end is also ends up being part of the job. So we don't have a collection per se but we're helping other communities deal with their collections as sort of a group that is trying to help advise. Go ahead, Janelle. Yeah, I kinda wanna piggyback off of both those comments especially around BIPOC voices because the reason why we are doing the conservation and preservation work on the street I call it street conservation because we need to be able to tell our own story. And there have been so many protests in the past where the street art was collected and given to a major institution that it's predominantly white the industry is predominantly white and they mistold the story. And so when I began tending to the memorial during the first week of the uprising community members were like whispering into my ear and saying, look, we gotta tell our own story. We have to build our own institution. We have to keep everything together. And that was the charge I was given before I even got to this space of actually doing this work. I didn't even know this work existed but it was like, okay, that's the charge. Let's figure out how we tell our own stories because for too many years, for too long whiteness has co-opted the narratives and the stories of black folks and brown folks and indigenous folks. And it's not okay. And part of the work that we're trying to do with the George Floyd Global Memorial is actually be an institution that goes and recruits young black folks and young brown folks and trains them up through a collection that is for us by us to say, hey, here's a space where you can learn how to tell your own story. And we're gonna grow you into it. So I call it the School to Conservation Pipeline because it's what we need to be doing in our own community. And so I think that's what makes what we're doing so powerful and important and why it needs to be seen and our stories need to be told. I think, oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh no, I was just gonna add, I think that is also important what you just said. I lucked out, we're right out of grad school. I got to work for a Native American museum. And it really taught me to be quite frank as a white middle-class girl that for these people to tell their stories is what you're there for. And that I was essentially there as a placeholder until a tribal kid at the time would wanna take my job and they could take over my job and I would be quite happy but it was there ready for them, ready to go. You know what I mean? Like I was the placeholder. I was just kinda holding the spot to set things up for that to happen, you know what I mean? And I was totally cool with that because it was an awesome collection and I learned way too much in that early part of my career. But thank you for giving that perspective because I think that's important to remember about these types of collections that they are telling a story and the people who they represent is their right to tell that story for sure. Whitney, what were you gonna say? I was just gonna say I have so many, everyone has said so many things that I have so many thoughts and feelings about like I feel so much a kinship with Kate as far as you're talking about that you have to, in your institution, you have to stay neutral and our museum is also a part of Orange County government. So we've also faced that for staff, we would love to say certain things but we have to stay neutral. And so I feel like having been a part of so many institutions and like Janelle and Heather were talking about being a part of, in my personal career, some of the institutions that have historically really not had BIPOC stories in their collections because they were founded by old white dudes and it was old white dude history and just that everything we're talking about just makes it clear to me what a breath of fresh air Janelle is as far as what you have created that I feel like a lot of us are working to try and collect current events and protest and change while within an already regulated structure which sometimes clashes and you have created something new and a lot of the things you talked about about caretaking the sites were things that our staff was, we started learning as we went as going to different memorial sites across town we became the caretakers of those sites. As far as, we also started creating a, basically our motto was that, people have left these here as a part of the morning process of the entire community. Our job is not to come in here and swoop in and take everything, trying to wait until the very last minute before something gets completely destroyed by the elements and create a safe place by cleaning up old glass and rotting flowers and scraping off wax off the sidewalks from candles and kind of becoming, getting out of our museum role and becoming site caretakers as a site of healing but still at the end of the day, what we were doing is what you mentioned, Janelle, we are at the end of the life cycle of these memorial items, they were coming, we're doing what we can, what we think is best but at the end of the day, they're coming into a museum that is still struggling to decolonize itself and it's collection and we are already working in a set rigid schedule that doesn't really allow us to perpetuate a living protest memorial area like you can. So I wanna keep this conversation started but I'm also, it's almost 1.30 so we're gonna have to keep, we're gonna have, this is like, we could have turned this into a three hour long seminar but we're gonna stick to our hour long idea and maybe this will spur some future programming in some way. I do wanna, I'm paying attention to the chat, I'm paying attention to the Q and A, we will come back to some of these questions that are appearing but I wanna talk a little bit more about practical stuff of dealing with these collections because that is a huge part of it. Someone made a comment in one of the questions saying that none of you really has archivist experience. I think there's a smattering of some training for some of us but some of us are learning on the job as we've said. What are some of the practical considerations that you've had to deal with in terms of collections, objects you are caring for? So let's think to, I'm sure there's various things that you all have collected and I'm sure there's some horror stories and some triumph stories. So who would like to start talking a little bit? I'll jump in that right away since we're running low on time. So we have all kinds of pieces, gigantic pieces. I think our largest piece is 10 by 30-ish and that is because it came from a billboard and we're collecting a whole bunch of billboards that are coming down but then we also have the large installation of the fist, et cetera, et cetera, dealing with the weathering, dealing with mold, doing mold remediation. So if you were to come into our street conservation room, what you will see is we bring in new pieces from the outside, I usually like bring in, pull it in with a wagon or a car if it's a lot but then we divide it up into sections. There's, if it's wet, we lay it down on blotter paper and make sure that it dries completely and then from there, things go into dirty, mold, damaged, complex or clean. Everything that's dirty, we make sure that it gets clean. If it's damaged, it goes into a certain pile where it's gonna get stabilized. If it's molded, it goes into a certain pile so that way mold spores don't spread before we can actually get to it. There are complex pieces like where, let's say someone decided to laminate a particular piece of work and then that piece got wet on the inside but then someone else melted a candle on top of that and then another piece got connected to it because then melted candle. So when we talk about complex, like that's what we're looking at and we bring it all in as one piece. And so that's when I say, Nicole, help. Nicole, who is the Director of Preventative Conservation at the Mid-Bus Arts Conservation Center. She or Melissa, who's like her sidekick and daddy who's an intern, they'll look at those pieces and we also have Maggie who's a neighbor who's a conservator as well. Join us and then Heather who is an archivist. Y'all, it takes a village. Let me just put that out there right away. Like it takes a village is not something that I am building. It is something that we are building as a community, neighbors and all but like multiple people will be looking at a singular piece to determine what's the best next course of action. A couple of weeks ago, we had a fire that took place. It was arson, somebody intentionally set memorial pieces on fire. We took what we could from that fire brought it into conservation and then we all just stared at it for a minute, took it in because we as conservators have to allow the pieces to speak to us. This is not just the process that we move through quickly to get it done. Everything tells a story and we have to allow those stories to speak to us. And then we decide what's the best way to preserve the story that has been told here. So with the burnt pieces, we actually did no cleaning because we've learned that cleaning is irreversible. So some pieces we decide that we're not gonna clean think pieces that are crumpled maybe. We decide how much is the crumpling is part of the story of the protest versus how much of the crumpling actually takes away from the piece being able to be read and fully understood. And so then there we'd go into dehumidification or no, a humidification process, sorry, a re-humidification process to be able to undo it where we put it in a bucket, maybe put a blotter paper, a wet blotter paper at the bottom, spray some ethanol in there so it doesn't mold, put the cap on top and allow the piece to actually absorb some of the water so we can actually start some of the work of flattening it out but we don't wanna flatten out completely. Again, that's irreversible. We wanna be able to allow each piece to tell its story and weathering outside in the context of a protest is part of the story. And so if there's like a giant mud footprint on a piece we don't wipe it up, we don't clean it up because that's part of the story of the piece. And so we're really doing a group effort and it takes multiple minds to ensure that and the science of it all coming from the Conservation Center, from Mac, but the science of it all to ensure that we're actually taking as little steps as possible so that we don't erase the stories that the pieces are being told with science. You've hit upon one of the key things, well, a couple of key things that you've hit on in the comes to the world of collections management which is kind of the world you're entering into. Number one, most of us are generalists, right? Like I know who to go talk to and like the Cole's a great example. I can be like, if I have a specific thing or a paper conservator or something like that I know who to go reach out to, you know what I mean? That's one of our key, that's one of our cool secret skills is we have like this cadre of people we can go reach out to and talk to when we come across that crazy thing that we don't know how to handle. So that is perfect. The other thing that you mentioned was how the story of what these objects go through they all become part of the object, right? So we want, generally speaking you want old things to look old. This is not Antiques Rojo. We don't want everything to look pretty nice and new. You want that to happen. And the fact that these things are getting damaged because they are part of a protest site and getting handled like a normal thing is part of their story. So that's exactly how it should be managed and dealt with that is totally correct. Whitney, do you have a thought? Yes, I, Janelle basically said everything I would have said about what we did during our collecting, fantastic. I wanted to add a couple of standout examples of some things we dealt with. And someone was asking about archival experience. I've had a mix of about 10 years of pretty equally mixed processing, cataloging and conservation experience for archives photos and objects and objects of very general capacity. But we had some, you know we obviously were battling weather in our outdoor, they were all of our memorial sites were outdoors exposed to the sun, the rain. Most of these memorial items were staged during the summer. So very rough weather considerations for Florida. But specifically probably our most challenging artifact in that sense was a Hawaiian delegation brought a 49 foot lay to present to the city. And that lay was cut into three pieces in place that the three main memorial sites. And when I say lay, I mean like the twisted leaves and then they were twisted into a rope that was about this thick with beautiful shells with every victim's name written on it. And we collected all of these lays but there was only one lay segment that we put all of our effort into and trying to preserve because there was one lay that the site it was taken to it was draped over the sign for Orlando Health, the hospital. So it wasn't sitting on the ground actively rotting like the other lays were when they were placed down in the grass. And I will say when we collected it we were covered in a swarm of baby spiders and tiny hatchling bugs, all seven of us that it took to lift it off of the sign. And then so we like sat it in our like disused outdoor restroom area that's attached to the museum for it to debug and air out and try to dry. We talked to professionals all over the world and they all said, well, just lay it out on the roof to dry and we're like, we're in Florida. If it sits outside for an hour, it will get rained on. I was gonna say, there is no drying in Florida. There's no drying. It just remains human. We're looking at a thing that's one third of 49 feet long. It's not something, but we dried it out as best we could and then we custom designed and built basically a hermetically sealed box with desiccant packs underneath it and we coiled it as best we could in like a bundle that ends up being about this big. And that's its permanent resting place. It's like that in storage. When it goes on display, we just pick up the whole box and we put it on display and we're not exactly sure how long that will feasibly last. But we're hoping that it will last as long as possible. These like the plant conservator from the Smithsonian told us don't bother. You're not gonna be able to save this, don't bother. So we didn't like taking no for an answer and we did our best effort. We also collected items inside the Pulse Night Club after the FBI released the scene. We had created a relationship with the owner and we went inside the club to collect some very iconic pieces, one of which was one of their bathroom doors where many victims were trapped and shot at through the door. The door has a large glass window in it. And so basically the evidence of the shooting is preserved in bullet holes through glass, meaning that to collect this door, it was very fragile. And if that glass shattered more or fell out, that kind of object evidence would be lost. So again, we got on the horn with lots of conservators. The Smithsonian conservators, the one that suggested that we basically inject acryloid B-72 in the cracks. And that's what they used to stabilize a glassware when basically repairing any kind of glasswork like stained glass. So our chief conservator and myself spent about two hours on either side of the door injecting B-72 and until all the fine line cracks in the glass door. And then we sandwiched it in basically foam and then a board vise to remove the door and then move it to storage. And our plan is not to open that until it needs to be open because the more we handle it, the more risk we have of breaking that glass. So I can't actually say whether or not we were successful, but those have been kind of our two big conservation journeys. So, Kate and Heather, do you have anything you wanna relay when it comes to like practical stuff? Again, you guys are dealing with slightly different items and different parts of the country, but I wanted you two to have a chance to also share. I'd love to chime in just really briefly. I mean, the challenges that we have are really different and I'm so impressed with the work that you all are doing. It's different with the digital project, of course, and we don't have to encounter insects and we don't have to really put ourselves at danger in any way. And I think that the challenge that we face is that, and this relates to the questions that are coming up in the chat about neutrality, is that we're crowdsourcing. We have to crowdsource. We're in a pandemic. We're trying to collect globally. So we're really dependent on lots of people in the community to help us find these images and collect them. And there's lots of bias in terms of what people think belong, right? And there are lots of different ways of defining what is street art. And I've noticed just anecdotally that people are more likely to photograph pieces that they think are beautiful or that convey messages that they might think are comfortable. And I've even had people say to me, oh, well, you probably don't want anti-cop graffiti or something, but we do because we're trying to capture this full array of voices and expressions. And so I think that there's sometimes some self-censorship that goes on on behalf of people who are documenting street art and making decisions about what to send in. And so our call to people is to really broaden their minds and think about all the perspectives that we wanna capture and to realize that a simple piece of text that says BLM is just as significant to us as a gigantic wall that has a beautiful image on it. So that's one of the challenges, I think, with trying to collect things digitally is to really work diligently to give equal weight to all of those forms of expression. And just to quickly add, there's, with Robert E. Lee, some of the challenges have been more about the safety of the people working on the monument and not even the normal safety issues we would think about which would be rigging and it's a giant many ton sculpture. But that also we're in Richmond and the monuments are a very divisive topic right now. And so it's also about making sure that the people who are working on these monuments are safe. In case anything happens, we hope obviously that nothing happens but there have been even issues having people want to participate in the process of removal of these monuments just for fear of their safety. And I think also for fear that it will affect their businesses to be associated with what's going on in Monument Avenue. And so these are considerations that don't normally come up with monument conservation. It's more about how are we gonna block off roads, access and things like that. And another issue is that there's a certain visual with Robert E. Lee because we have to separate him into sections to move him because he's so large and he can't travel on the highways as large as he is. We have to separate him into sections and there's a certain visual there that the public who may not understand that the process is reversible and that these statues come apart in pieces may not understand that it's not necessarily as destructive as they think. And so we don't want anything negative to happen in the public spaces around Robert E. Lee if he moves. And so, and protecting the people who are working on him and the people in the area. So those are some considerations that you have not don't normally come up with monument sort of conservation issues. Thank you everyone. The question box is hopping right now. So I'm gonna go ahead and start looking at a couple of those. Janelle actually hit the one that I wanted to transition to which was questions about ownership. Who owns these objects? How are we getting proper ownership of them? You had a really good answer in the chat, Janelle that I don't know if you wanna summarize real quick about when you talked about ownership of items. Sure, I'll summarize. I'm still trying to answer stuff on the chat. So very, very great questions. Yeah, simply with George Floyd Global Memorial ownership was a huge issue until we actually didn't even begin archiving until way late because we didn't want people taking photos of the pieces and those photos and living on their camp their personal camera and then they can go off and sell and make money off of a movement and we didn't want that to happen. And so, and we've actually had people kind of try to come and take pieces and auction them off. And so we've been very protective around the question of ownership in black culture whatever there is a memorial the pieces that are laid go to the family and the story. And so because of that we brought the family in as caretakers about two months I reached out to the family and they reached back and said hey, love what you all are doing. Let's engage. And that's why we built the George Floyd Global Memorial and two of George Floyd's direct relatives are sitting as board members and co-chairs of that institution. We chose a nonprofit institution because with a nonprofit, nobody owns it. It's just being governed by the institution and governed by a board. And the board members can continue to shift and change within the context of the community over time for posterity. And so that's the route that we as a community have chosen to go because ownership is a big issue except with a lot of the larger pieces an artist does have their rights to their piece if they want to keep it. And so in the event that an artist does wanna keep their piece or keep ownership then we just stay in dialogue with the artists. It's been so simple and so easy. It's been good. You've go ahead, Whitney. We dealt with a lot of similar issues and I think I might be able to answer someone else's question about religious items at the same time. That the memorial sites that we were collecting at obviously everything inside the nightclub we had agreement with the owners of the nightclub but there was also a memorial site outside of the nightclub and then on city property around our main lake and then at a performing arts theater. So what we did as far as ownership goes was we first contacted the city for the lake site the performing arts theater and obviously we already had a relationship with the nightclub owners got their permission because legally it was items left on their property so they had the legal authority to basically sign our deed of gift paperwork for our staff collecting we were doing but then we placed signs everywhere in the lead up letting everyone know our plans that we were planning to come through collect certain items to be saved for history that we were not coming through to wipe out these memorials and for trying to explain what we were doing what we were planning on doing also with our contact info asking people to reach out to us if there was anything that we end up picking up at the memorial that they either want us to put back or they want returned to them and we were worried that there would be a community backlash or that there would be difficult a lot of difficult instances but really it's been it was a fairly straightforward process we had a few people reach out about items that they were looking for that they either wanted back or wanted moved to another site because there were a couple of memorial sites that we did have to clear the site as in the city is like this can't be here anymore so we were the people that cleared it and someone contacted us like hey I left a poster out there for my son could you move that poster over to the Pulse Nightclub Memorial for us instead of just having it in our collection and we did that we've been it's been very easy to accommodate basically everyone's wishes we've also had a lot of religious items and someone asked in the chat what do we do with items that weren't meant to be basically removed or collected I think I kind of hit on that but as far as religious items go we have a lot of Catholic rosaries so any rosary that was deemed not necessarily going to be added to the collection we have reached out to we basically set it aside with our continuing talks with Catholic leaders to have them properly disposed of there's also basically some other religious items that we've either worked with religious leaders to make sure it's okay for us to have them in our collection or to just kind of put a call out to have them returned to whoever left them yeah I think that you know just like I said dealing with all these things is something to really think about and ownership is something that's really drilled into our heads when it comes to registrar work and collections work so it's important to kind of consider that as we look at it this question popped up or I'm sorry does anyone else have any other thoughts when it comes to ownership or anything else okay this one I thought was real interesting and you kind of talked about it a little bit Whitney where it says has anyone come across someone who is upset about their own offering at a memorial site being removed even if it is to be saved for a long-term collection so has anyone had to experience that and kind of how have you handled it sure people being upset about their pieces being removed yes so there's this one lady who left her bassinet of her child infant child who died at the memorial and somebody decided to take it upon themselves to remove it from the memorial and take it steal it dispose of it I have no idea how it left but it was gone and apparently when she returned one day to the memorial and saw it gone she was crushed and devastated because it was the bassinet of her infant child who died and so when we talk about these pieces actually being sentimental and belonging to people and why we hold them with such sanctity and sacredness that's why because people are leaving things that matter to them and so and that's something that I don't even know how to return or get back and that's a loss there I think that there is a piece that's at the memorial for Demetrius because at the George Floyd memorial is not just pieces for George Floyd like there is things for a lot of different black people who have died unjustly are being laid at this memorial and one is a brother Demetrius who was murdered years ago by the police and a bunch of young people collectively made a peace for him his mother decided that she wanted to actually put it in a larger institution and so we're like great that's fine if you wanna take it off the street and put it in an institution cool but then I told them the stories of how some of these larger institutions actually mess up our stories and someone went back and talked to the mom and said hey are you sure that the institution that you're putting it in is actually gonna do justice with your story because if you're not sure then let us know and actually the mom decided to step back and actually not pull the piece from the site and we're still waiting to find out what will happen with it but in the meantime, we're committed to caring for it but yes, people do have again the ownership of their pieces when they're removed by someone else it is a painful process to go through or if they're damaged we had the iconic wheel mural was tagged twice and we had to restore that and the offense and the pain of that but all of that is in perspective of these things are things and items. George Floyd was a real human being who was murdered on that street corner by the Minneapolis police department he was lynched by the police in 2020 and if someone defaces the mural of George Floyd that is offensive but is far more offensive that the life of George Floyd was taken from him too soon. Thank you. I do wanna talk about and you guys have talked about it a little bit in the chat too about safety for ourselves both mentally and physically because this can take out a lot of us physically and mentally as we're collecting these items. I know Janelle you had mentioned in the chat about how you've been shot at and there's been other acts of violence done at you so I can't even imagine being in that situation and I hope that doesn't happen too often to you but I also wanna talk about the mental aspect of it because someone had a really good question of with dealing with such emotional collections does your institution build any processing time or self-care time? That's something that especially the folks with health and safety at AIC are very focused on and I think that's rightfully so. Has that been talked about at all amongst your institutions? Go ahead, Kate. For state of Virginia employees we have access to a certain amount of mental health care just by being state employees because they would like us to have that for obvious reasons but then above and beyond that I'm being allowed to take a lot more vacation time than I think I would normally be allowed to take just because this has been so different than my normal job and the things that are going on that are sort of related to this but not what the necessarily the original topic of this was is that we've had riots in Richmond and Richmond is a very historic area and so as the Department of Historic Resources we've been going and helping places that have been vandalized and so that idea that we're state employees and so we get photographed one way or the other depending on what site we're helping we find that we're being photographed by folks coming in and out of buildings for later use. So no, I'm not sure there's a lot of people who like the state government right now and so we just try and do what we can to help preserve what we can and help everyone understand why history is important and that's, I mean, that's what we exist for and so we're just trying to do our jobs and keep our heads down basically, yeah, so. Go ahead, Whitney. I don't want to compare our experience to Janelle's experience because we have never been shot at while we were collecting anything. The worst we got was someone spit on our chief curator while we were out collecting at the Pulse Night Club. But as far as emotional, it was so emotionally draining. It's still emotionally draining to work on the collection even though we're not out at memorial sites anymore because the memorial sites, there's only one, they're not accepting, they're not encouraging items to be left and it's under separate management. But when we started this project, this project wasn't, when we began collecting, it wasn't really thought of as something that would continue in perpetuity. It was thought of as a project that we will collect and maintain these memorial items and we knew in the future that these memorials were not gonna be permanent spaces with the exception of Pulse Night Club itself which has and has evolved and is out of our hands. But so it's, and also then the, just the county and that the media got involved, the idea of this public image of us out there, protecting history became really, and so our schedule started to be dictated by not us and it turned into about 60 straight days of 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. outside in the sun, collecting the memorials, waiting through people's messages of grief and death and coming back, having very kind of demoralizing staff meetings with upper level staff that weren't actually doing the work that we were doing and then next day go back out and do the same thing. I didn't see my daughter for months and I'm sure like the rest of our staff broke many times and it was more of just, this was something we had to do and I think we all just kind of, our mental health to the side, which probably wasn't. Yeah. Definitely wasn't for the best but that was my experience. Janelle, you have a final comment. We're gonna have to wrap up. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I got like 10 seconds. So I just really, really quick wanna say for us, we've actually made sure that health and wellness is something that we've wanted to integrate in for the beginning. I've had Mondays on my Me Days since September, 2018. I keep that. We're partnering with different church institutions and getting grant funding to help us with like mental health and healing care. So again, it takes a village because sometimes I may not be doing the good work that as good of a worker as I should be doing and also my family is very key in helping me stay balanced but I also want to respond with like the whole gunshot thing. We weren't getting shot at, we live in an urban context and there are some people in the urban context who decided to just settle their disputes with gunshots and so in light of that reality, whenever gunshots are ringing, we hit the deck and then we get up and keep going. So I don't want anyone to be confused that somehow some people were targeting us. That has not happened. People have not targeted us as caretakers. The community, we live in, people know us. They care about us. We lift each other up with or without guns. So I just want to be absolutely clear on that, that people aren't targeting us. Thank you for that clarification. I appreciate that. Well, it's 1.59, so I'm gonna have to go ahead and wrap everything up. Thank you guys so much for all the work you do. I mean, in all your roles, it's incredibly important. I can't, like I said, this has been a very, this has been a panel that I've been like, this is gonna be like a tough one, but really interesting and important to talk about. So I appreciate you all taking time doing that today. I shared all of your emails in the chat. We will have a resource document available on connectingtocollections.org and a video of this recording will be up probably in a few days on the AIC YouTube channel. So Janelle, I know you need to go. I don't wanna hold you any longer that you need to get going. Does anyone else have any final words or anything else they'd like to share? Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. Yeah, come and talk. All right, everyone, stay safe. Thank you, and we will see you soon. Thank you. Bye. Bye.