 It is my great pleasure to welcome you to our first symposium and that is the first symposium of the Atlanta University Center Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective. My name is Cheryl Finley, and I'm the novel director. And I'm here to welcome you to Preserve a Legacy Art Conservation at the Atlanta University Center. I'd like to begin by just giving a little bit of a background for, I want to say kind of why we're here today and some of the really wonderful things that came together to bring us here today to this point. I began just about six months ago here at the Atlanta University Center. And one of the very first emails that I received from the chair of the Department of Art and Visual Culture, Dr. Yoko Ginzara, was an email with a forwarded email from a man named Ted Stanley, who was an African-American art conservator who specialized and works on paper. And he was retiring after an illustrious 35-year career. He had worked initially at the Library of Congress of Washington, DC, and then later went on to Princeton University and retired at Princeton University. He actually came to Spelman College nearly 20 years ago in 2001 and presented in conjunction with the Department of Chemistry as a way to really try to inspire others here at Spelman and the Atlanta University Center to consider careers in art conservation. And what resulted from that email exchange was that his papers and journals related to works on paper conservation were donated to the Woodruff Library just across campus down the promenade. And so I just wanted to give that background to give you a sense of where we are today and why we're here today and the history that relates to art conservation that we're really excited to share with you over a series of six panels today. And we'll be concluding with the last panel and looking closely at the works that he has donated in an exhibition at the Woodruff Library. I also want to nod to our title at another anniversary to conserve a legacy. It's actually also the title of an exhibition and a project that was begun by John Reynolds, the former director of the Yale University Art Gallery and Richard J. Powell, who is a renowned art historian the first African-American department head of art history at an Ivy League institution. And someone who has recently penned an amazing and really fun article, a rather essay that's been included in the new catalog focused on the Obama portraits that will be published just next month by Princeton University Press. And to conserve a legacy was a really important landmark exhibition because it was also an art conservation project that focused on the collections of art from historically black colleges and universities. This exhibition traveled for the period of approximately a year and a half from 1999 until 2000. So I think we're kind of celebrating the 20th anniversary of that project. And I would like to suggest that our speakers here today also are very much connected to that really, really important legacy. I also want to acknowledge the work of Renee Stein at the Carlos Museum at Emory University. Rachel Rao and I met Renee at the very beginning of the semester and had the pleasure of taking students from Spelman. Interestingly, mostly students from the chemistry department along with the chair of the chemistry department to a conservation event that was held at the Carlos Museum this past fall. It was Renee Stein who connected us with the Early Conservation Professionals Network and Caitlin Lee who has worked tirelessly along with Rachel Brown and myself and Lauren Harris in bringing this program to you today. I also want to acknowledge the interest of Dr. Kimberly Jackson, the chair of the chemistry department. And I also wanted to put a word out for interdisciplinary that's something that we at the AUC our collective are very interested in. While we are a brand new initiative based at Spelman College but for the Atlanta University Center focused on art history and curatorial studies, we'd like to think of the kind of instruction that we wish to afford our students as instruction that is interdisciplinary. That is it combines things like art history and business or art history and chemistry or curatorial studies and anthropology or art history and English to make up careers and other kinds of academic initiatives and artistic initiatives that satisfy the needs of our students today in the 21st century. And of course I would be remiss if I did not include conservation in that interdisciplinary mix. So I want to just pose a few questions before I turn over the podium to our first panel. And I think we can ourselves together throughout the day of the sessions think about ways to continue to pose questions in the field of art conservation. And so one of the first questions I have is how would the history of art look different if there were more black conservators? Which works would be conserved and how would this affect cultural heritage preservation? What is value and how? What gets collected or discarded? Which works are available for scholars, students and artists to study? Today we're going to take a close look at the conservation experiences and projects from experts as well as curators with an eye on select works from the renowned collections at the Spellville College Museum of Fine Art and the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. And that's another really important reason as to why we are here today. Not only why we are doing the work of to conserve a legacy here at the AUC today, but also why the AUC art collective is here as well to think about the kinds of artists, people like Hale Woodruff and Nancy Lisbon's prophet who came before us in the mid 20th century and built the collections at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum and also the strong tradition of teaching the arts at the Atlanta University Center. We're going to have time to talk over lunch and we also will have time as we cover ground in what I'd like to think of today as a movable feast from Spellville College to Clark Atlanta University to the Woodruff Library. We hope to inspire you to consider art conservation as a field of study and as a career. I know that there are many professionals here from the early conservation professionals network that will share their experiences with you as well. So we're really interested in inspiring new students who are studying here at the AUC but also teachers as well and others who are involved in the interdisciplinary arts. We also hope that this is a chance for us to all meet new leaders in the field to make connections, to consider how we might mentor one another. And we'll also conclude, as I mentioned at the very beginning, at the Woodruff Library with a special viewing of Ted Stan's collection of conservation journals and materials. I'm really excited to thank you all for joining us today and I'd like to acknowledge the very hard and industrious work of Rachel Brown and Lauren Harris of the Early Conservation Professionals Network in Katelyn Lee of Spellville Technology Services, our guest conservators. Thank you so much for traveling from afar. Our invited speakers are partners at the Spellville College of Museum of Fine Art, the Clark, Atlanta University Art Museum, the Woodruff Library, the Department of Art and Visual Culture, Spellville College, and we would not be here doing what we're doing today without the generous support of the Alice L. Walton Foundation. I want to conclude my remarks by asking you to please silence your cell phones. If you are Instagramming, which I hope that you are, or tweeting, which you might be as well, but if you're Instagramming, we are at AUC, underscore art collective, all together in spaces. I'd also like to ask that you please refer to your programs for full presenter biographies. And without further ado, I wish to introduce our first panel today. The session is What is Art Conservation? And on this panel, we will have the starship of the Ligarity, who is the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Objects Conservation at the National Gallery of Art, and Shannon A. Brogdon-Grantham, who is a Spellville College alumna from the class of 2009, and a photographs and paper conservator at the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute. So without further ado, we welcome you to join us. And thank you so much, all of you, for coming today. The presentation will focus on the practical aspects of conservation and how to get it to the field through graduate school. And Shannon's presentation will focus more on explaining what conservation is, and some of the things that we do in conservation, beyond the things that we already think of. So when we think of conservation, we automatically think of collections here, but there's also outreach. There's the context around the object that we have to care for and have to research, because it's very hard to understand objects that context is lost. Where American flag, it doesn't make sense if it's no American. So we do things of making sure that context is preserved along with the object. So how does our conservation graduate school work? So there are different art conservation programs for different things. The main four that focus on art conservation really focus on books, textiles, paper, and objects, but there are also conservation programs that focus on what would be termed as historic preservation because it tends to focus on buildings and built environments, so I included them as well because they also help preserve the context as well as the historical place. So on the East Coast, there's Buffalo where I went. There's Delaware where Shannon went. The NYU program, which is a four-year program. Buffalo and Delaware are both three years. Columbia program, which is two years and it's focusing on historic preservation. And the UPID program, which is also two years and focuses on historic preservation. In the South and the Midwest, there's the Tulane School of Architecture, obviously focused on architecture and historic preservation. And the School of Art Institute of Chicago, which also focuses on the built environment. On the West Coast, there's the UCLA program, which focuses on ethnographic objects and archeological conservation. And then in Canada, there's Queens University, which does admit American students which were lumped in with other foreign students for Canada, so there's not very many spaces there for us, but it is a wonderful program that focuses on objects, books of paper, and paintings. And once a year, students from most of these programs meet to get to talk about what we're working on and share information about what our programs have turned up and what research we could do collaboratively. So applying for graduate school, the best website I could recommend for that is the University of Delaware's program. They are very clear what their requirements are, and if you can meet all the requirements for Delaware, you can have a rest. So you need art history, studio art, chemistry, you need to do English and all the other requirements for undergraduate, but the Delaware program is very clear both thing on and once you get those, you've gotten everyone. So that makes it a lot easier. You need to take the graduate record exam, which I don't recommend taking until you're ready to apply. It often takes students in multiple applications to get into graduate school. All of the programs are small, so none of them take any more than 10 students at a time. So it's very competitive. It does take sometimes a lot of time and effort to get in through the application process. So I don't recommend taking it until you're ready to apply because that score is only good for five years and you don't want to have to retake an exam that costs money and time and it's not my favorite school. And all of the application forms are available online and you'll have to do a written statement to really explain what you want to do with conservation and with conservation and what you're bringing to the field. In digital or printed portfolios, the programs kind of vary between what they want on that. A lot of them are moving towards digital because they recognize that it is often hard to carry art, especially if you have to travel from school to school. So a lot of them are moving towards digital. The application fee, which varies by school, but is no more than $100 and letters of recommendation, which you need to start early because they have to be there before your application is there and you don't want to have to do anything last minute. So once you've done all of that on top of your pre-program experience, and anything that we do before school, we refer to as pre-program, and those are internships, jobs, fellowships. You need a certain number of hours to apply for school. The minimum is listed as 400, but often people apply with 1,500 hours or more of experience hours before school. But once you've gotten through all this and you've made it to the point where you need an interview, you have to bring things with you. So that's something you need to be aware of if you're gonna pursue this. So you have to bring a presentation of your conservation experiences that includes collection care, conservation treatment, working in museums, even doing, I included like being a tour guide at my campus museum because we talked about the art. I answered questions about how we care for the art of our museum and things of that nature. A physical portfolio of your experiences, just to find it, that'd be complicated. And a physical portfolio showing your hand skills so that can be sewing, drawing, painting. I think a student recently brought in nail art because she does acrylic nails, and so that was included in her portfolio because that showed her hand skills. That's a very small area to be working on to make such beautiful work so that really showed that she had to find all the skills. And expect to have your color matching tested if you can't, if you're coloring one, I'm sorry, you can't come to conservation. You have to be able to see the difference between colors because we do a lot of in-painting of work. So if you can't see the color very well, it's very hard to get that to match. To ask, if you ask questions, you were in the schools just as much as they were in your and to meet the current students in a relaxed environment. Once you are there, they try to bring you into an environment where you can meet the students in a space that's not the school so you can ask questions of them and you feel comfortable asking of the staff and faculty or others things that you expect a student to know and not necessarily practice. Like we're in a good bar time, which is important. So the general coursework of Buffalo, which is where I went to my line of clued, sharing the talk more about the Delaware program, I think it was interesting in knowing that specific at this point. So the Delaware Buffalo program, almost like, the Buffalo program is three years. The third year is an offsite year. So the first two years in Buffalo, you learn all the specialties. So you spend time learning how to work on paper, books, paintings, objects, photographs, textiles, and we are at the field is evolving. Time-based media is coming up more and more often. Artists are using digital materials in their work or making only digital works. And so we're having to incorporate understanding technology and time-based media more and to the curriculum, so we're trying to bring that more into all of the programs that way everyone's prepared to deal with these works. Because depending on which museum you are, they may be classified in different areas for depending on what the artist has classified in the context. And then we do a research and technology project just to better understand the process of how something was made. It can be anything that you're interested in within limits. I know one of the students right now is handing a goat skin to understand how leathers from goat are made. So she's doing all the different processes that would have been used traditionally to tan goat skins because she's interested in that material. So it's really just whatever you're interested in. And then in your second year, you moved into your specialty and you focus more on that and do a thesis project based on your own interests and what you would like to treat. So for example, I did a diorama from Tuskegee I was very interested in treating them. I wanted to be part of that project. And so that was my thesis project. And Caitlin, who's my classmate, works on a instrument that came from Africa because she was very interested in ancient and modern as well. But clearly ancient instruments and how they work and their care and what conservation treatments are practical for those and respectful of their original use and origins. And then your third year, you're on site. That can be either with a museum or a private conservator or split between both. So I think of my classmates, three or four with private conservators were at least a part of their time. It just depends on where you are in the country. A lot of the museums are focused in the Northeast. So if you would like to not live in the Northeast, you do often have to go private practice and own your own business, which is also something that people may just want to do in general. So now to a more fun part of the presentation, it's not just how to do it, but things that I did in graduate school. So my first summer and every summer you had the option of doing internship. It is not necessarily required, but it's very much encouraged and it's something that is very meaningful and fulfilling. So my first summer I was at the Mississippi Museum of Civil Rights and the Museum of Mississippi History, which just opened in 2018, 2017. And there I was able to treat artifacts that are related to both museums. There are two separate museums that they share a building. And so I treated a Civil War Confederate dumbbell and one of the lanterns that was at the meeting in which it was decided that Alabama and Mississippi could not join the union as one territory that they needed to be two separate states. And then in 2017, I helped update the Buffalo Realm, which is just a candy handbook that we make by students, for the students of where to find things in Buffalo because you do have to move to graduate school and so it's often very hard to know where to find a mechanic, where to find the most closest grocery store if you need something directly, you just move here. So we make that list for the incoming students to know where things are that work for the other students in our reasonable price. However, Buffalo is, I'm only the third Black student to go to the Buffalo program and the one before me went there in 1999. So the realm was created after she went to the school. So there were some things that were not in the realm that I needed, like where's the beauty store? We had phallus listed and phallus is not a beauty store. It is a beauty shop and where to find a beauty shop and where to find, I also include where to find a barber because I like my kitchen cleaned up and I didn't know where to find a barber that knew what to do with my hair. And so I added that to the realm so that way the students after me would have that information so that way they wouldn't have to go out seeking trying to find that information in a new city. And then myself and other classmates drafted an open letter to our faculty and staff requesting the department take a firm or stand on diversity and inclusion. And we incorporated that open letter into our website and into the application materials. So now in your written statement you have to address how you feel about that and what you plan to do in your working practices to be culturally sensitive. We often treat particularly in objects. We treat things that are not from our culture and so we may not always understand everything around it. We do our research but often you just don't understand because you don't know it's not yours. So getting that thought process even started to be sensitive to where this comes from and its history is something that we wanted students to address before they made it into the programs. And then I pushed for participating in diversity and cultural sensitivity training with Dr. Harold McFarland who works with all the graduate schools on diversity and inclusion initiatives. Again, conservation is not a very diverse field. We are working to change that but when there's change there's often mistakes that happen. So we are trying to live it those as much as possible and make sure that we learn from them as the field changes. And then back to pictures. So in 2018 I did a summer internship at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York and there I got to work with lasers to treat objects. They have a dozen of these Assyrian release that came from the Palace of King Ash and Asher on the 2nd and they were installed in the 1950s when the rules around art were a little more relaxed. So they are attached to the wall with plaster and mortar which has been appropriate because if there's ever an earthquake in New York City these will fall off the wall because the plaster is not prepared to hold on to that. Each one is about a ton. So if that happens then away they go. Hopefully there's no people in the way. But right now they're working with the Bank of America to remove them from the wall put them on a much more safe and moveable support system and remove the mortar and plaster from the front services. Because it was just kind of slapped over the front and then if it covered something they just gave it to make it match. But when you know better a few minutes. And then while I was there I got a visit from my classmates from Texas Southern and if anyone knows John Biggers who started the art department Texas Southern this is a sketch at Brooklyn Museum of a mural that we have at Texas Southern. It's called The Web of Life and it is once a eight feet tall and 30 feet long. So it was really nice to go to an institution and see materials related to my school and then get my classmates to come visit while they were completing their master's of fine arts. And then 2018 through 19 was the beginning of was my third year experience. And I did that at the St. Louis Art Museum. This doesn't exactly look the coolest but it's a once in a lifetime kind of thing. So the circle in the middle of that street which isn't all that impressive looking is a sculpture that we had to embed in the road which I hope to never do again because that was the main way to cut through the park to get to the highway. The city hated us for three months because they could not come through but we installed this work. And it was really fun working on it. I got to use dry ice to clean it and then to make sure it didn't flash rust in which it's wet and cold for a long enough that it can rust very quickly and then you have to start your cleaning process over which we didn't want to do. We had to use blow torches to make sure it was dry enough to make sure it didn't get rust. So that was kind of fun to do. And then I did a 20 day option which at Ruff Loads you have the option of taking a month out of your third year to go to another institution and do research or work there. So I was given the opportunity to work at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures which should be opening soon and will have anything related to films on display in part of the Academy's collection. So I worked on a grill one from 1984's Grill Ones and the Stunt Mourn Alien Head from 1979's Alien. The original head is lost but I got the Stunt Mourn so let's move on. And then I graduated in 2019 and it goes kicking with a nice big smile. And then I know our conservation isn't for everyone. It's one of those fields where you really have to love it to pursue it because it is a lot. There's a lot of things that have to happen before you get to school and you have to make it through school and then you have to start your career from there. So if it's not for you that's perfectly fine. My feelings will not be hurt. I just want to offer advice that works for any discipline because I feel like these are very important things that I kind of missed out on before. Before I really got to my undergraduate and I think that if I had them early they wouldn't carry me much further. But I'll give it to you now. Be your best advocate. You know it's best for you. You know what you need. Say something. I took an internship at the National Museum of African Art and it was an uncated internship in Washington, D.C. and I am not from a rich family. So I emailed the director to say have I missed out on any funding opportunities? Is there a job that you know of that will allow me enough flexibility to come at least two or three times a week but still be able to pay my rent? And they were able to find funding that I could use because I told them I needed it. Otherwise I would have been trying to figure out how to pay rent in this expensive city without funding. So say something and people will help you if you say something. Start master copies of your CV and your resume. Every time you want an award or starting a job just add it to it and keep it going so that way anytime there's an opportunity that's short notice you don't have to waste time trying to format your resume. It's already together, it's already there and then you can copy and paste what you need for that specific job from your master copy. So that way it makes it a lot easier for opportunities that are short notice where my first internship for the Smithsonian I didn't find it until five days before it would do. So if I would have had to put my resume together I don't think I would have got the application on time. So having that master copy made it much simpler and quicker and often opportunities come up where you have to move quickly. So you want to make it as simple as possible for yourself to do that. Or you don't want to forget what you've done so that when it's already there you're not going to forget what opportunities you've already had, what awards you've already won. Just trying to think back to a job three years ago about what your new needs were, it's kind of difficult. And then lastly, don't pre-reject yourself from opportunities. So if it says that it's for a doctor or a student obviously don't apply. But if it's saying that you need a fibrous experience and you only have two to three, apply anyway. Because often they will overlook the fact that you may not have enough experience if your other qualifications aren't enough. Or if they feel like you can learn what you need to learn on the job for that position. And then if you're rejected, don't be discouraged. It takes time, maybe that opportunity was already thought of for someone else and they're going through an interview process because they have to. Just ask for information on how to make your application stronger and very often opportunities will give you that information of why they didn't choose you or what they think you need to grow on. So that's a lot of good after now. Thank you everyone who made this day possible and who are funding everything that had to happen for this to be an option. Any questions or answers? I was thinking, do you want to take them afterwards and put the two of you together? Thank you for inviting me to come and speak. It's actually a great honor and pleasure to come back to my alma mater and speak on what it is I do and how I got there and it's very normal to be here. So my name is Shannon Broughton-Grantham. I am the photographer, paper conservator at this Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute. So where I work is, it's not, people always ask me when I say I work at the Smithsonian, oh what's your museum to work for? So I actually, I work for a research facility that's part of the Smithsonian, have about nine research facilities and so through my work I essentially get to work with all of the museums. So it starts with giving me such a wonderful introduction to how one gets into the field and I'm just gonna go in and my presentation will dovetail with that and showing some of the actual data, the day-to-day things that a conservator does and I'll also talk a little bit about my background. But I always like to start with this definition as from the American Institute for Conservation's ethics and guidelines for practice and it essentially defines what a conservator is and it's where professionals who are skilled in the scientific treatment and preservation of cultural artifacts so that could be a family Bible, that could be a Rembrandt drawing, that could be a sculpture, you name it. And I always like to show this when I talk about conservation because we talk about it being a three-layered stool with ethics being the seeds to get up art, history, science and studio art, those are the courses that you have to take in order to get into graduate school and of course ethics, everything that we do is guided by ethics. But I feel like it's really more like this when it comes to three-layered stool because it's not just those three disciplines and ethics, there's also other things that we are responsible for in our professional work which is preventive conservation. So a lot of times because the field is so small and there are a lot of jobs really heavily concentrated on the coasts, but sometimes you might find yourself in the Midwest or somewhere else in the Southeast and you might find yourself being the only conservator and maybe the conservator and the collections manager caring for an entire collection. So you have to know preventive conservation which is caring for an entire collection and this more holistic preservation materials, not just individual treatments. Of course we also do a lot of outreach and advocacy, we're constantly doing outreach like such as this or even advocating for our field for better pay or jobs, that type of thing. And then professional development, I think there's an eight career you go into or you're constantly have to be developing yourself professionally and growing as a profession. So that's something that we're always doing. And then of course other duties as required that could be anything, but a lot of times we find ourselves mentoring or teaching which that's something that I really value and enjoy and I've gotten an opportunity to do a lot of in my career. So just a little bit about my journey. So I graduated from Spelman in 2009 and I discovered conservation kind of midway through my matriculation here at Spelman. I started out as a biology major. Thinking I would go into medical school, I was really interested in forensics and then between my sophomore and junior year I took an art class just to fulfill the prerequisites and that we had to do for general education. And I realized, I was like, oh wow, I really like drawing, I really like art. I had always been involved in art when I was in high school. I took theater and dance and all that and I did do some visual art classes in high school. But I guess I had just pushed it to the side a little bit, thinking in the medicine this is what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna be able to make my family proud. And so I changed my major from bio to art and to my parents chagrin. And I wasn't sure what I was gonna do but I still wanted to go to medical school. I still was interested in art and science. I was like, there has to be a way to put my art in science. And one of my professors who actually happened to be my art advisor, Dr. Akula McDaniel, learned about this program at the University of Delaware for a summer program, kind of focused on art history, art conservation and the humanities, arts and humanities summer institute. And she's like, you should apply for this. I already written your letter of recommendation. All you have to do is send in your information. So I did and essentially the rest is history. Now I found my way in conservation. I specialize in photograph and paper conservation. And that's essentially where I got my start. But between graduating from Spelman and getting into grad school, I still needed to get conservation hours. So as Wostarsha mentioned, you have to have this minimum of 400 conservation hours. But in reality, people apply with thousands of hours. So I did a number of internships. I volunteered. But the bulk of my pre-conservation experience was done at the Smithsonian. I was at the National Museum of the American Indian for eight months, full-time internship. And I got a chance to work with these amazing collections of course, you know, with Native American Indigenous cultures. And then I also interned at the African Art Museum. And it was unpaid. But by that point, I already was going into graduate school. So I started grad school at the University of Delaware in 2012, thinking that I might consider paper or textile conservation or photograph conservation. And of course, the way the programs are set up, you rotate through the blocks. So when we got to photograph conservation a lot, I knew that I was like, that's what I'm gonna do. And so I specialized in photography conservation. I did my summer internships at, I went back to NMAI and worked with the Fuller Archives for my first summer. I worked in a private practice conservation studio in Boston for my second summer. And for my third year, I went to the Center for Creative Photography in Cheesaw, Arizona. And now, I am back at the Smithsonian. I graduated in 2015. I got a fellowship at the Personal Museum of the Sculpture Garden for looking at contemporary photography. And that spring of my fellowship here, a job poster came up at the Museum Conservation Institute and they had never had, so the Smithsonian, despite it being so large, only has two photographic observers on staff, including me. So this job was essentially like a brand new position. They never had this type of position before. So, oh my gosh, this is a dream come true. And as they say, the rest is history. So I selected photography conservation because I've always been fascinated by it. And I like to share this as part of my story because as with many people, photography is such a huge part of all of our lives. I mean, every day we probably take photographs. But when I was a kid, I used to spend so much time with my grandparents and my great aunts. And so I had a chance to look at all of the family photographs. And I was just so fascinated by how you could capture this image of someone from, you know, decades before and you still have this image and you can still see them, see who that person was and what they looked like. So, and the other thing I like about it is photography is considered a democratic art. It's very accessible. You can, everybody has photographs, so it's not something that's really foreign to anyone. And, you know, the holding the photograph in your hand is such a special moment. So I felt that that was even more of a reason to be able to preserve those materials because they are so precious. When people have natural disasters or fire in their homes a lot of times, excluding human life, of course, I think they want to go back and get their photo albums. So that tells you a lot right there. So just to go on a little bit about how Spellman shaped me, as I mentioned, I did the Arts and Humanities Summer Institute in 2008. In my senior year, I had to do an internship, like semester-long internship. So I did that at the Emory University, my Carlos Museum with Renee Stein. I also had the opportunity to work at the Warwick Woodruff Library as an archives assistant on a photographic preservation project. And then I did the second round of the Arts and Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Delaware of course, my graduation from Spellman with my VA at Art. Another thing that I like to credit as part of my journey is, when I was an art student, Dr. Arturo Lindsey taught a number of the art and art history classes, and he always talked about this concept of a shea as an aesthetic criteria and a shea being life force that's in everything. And so when I learned that, I found it to be quite compelling to go along with this idea of preserving works of art and what you're preserving as part of that work of art, you're preserving that context, you're preserving that artist intent, you're preserving the tool marks, you're preserving those things that are tangible but also intangible. And I found that to be quite transformative and it really aligned well with the path that I felt like I was embarking on at that time. So I wasn't sure. I didn't know what was going to become of me if I did art comes to me. I have no idea. I didn't know any other African American conservators. I think of them just a few conservators in the South so I didn't have a lot of examples to look to. So I was like, well, this has to mean something. And so as part of my senior thesis, I wrote about Carrie May Mings' from here I saw what happened and I cried. Of course, that's a photographic body of work and I became interested in Sojourner Truth's creation of her own image, excuse me, and just how you can use photographs to tell these stories but you also have these source images, these objects, these physical objects that tell so much as well. And then, so I'll just go into a little bit about my, what I do, paper which is paper and photo conservation. I always like to talk about paper being this magical felted sheet of fibers that are laid down on the fine screen from the water suspension because paper is essentially the most ubiquitous material in all of our lives. It's everywhere. And, often we don't think about what it is but because I work with it day in and day out I'm constantly thinking about the materials and how it's made and how we preserve it for long term and longevity. And I always like to show this gift of hand-paper making the studio in China because it really illustrates how one goes in and all the physical nature of creating something such as paper which now it's created by machines but initially it was created by hand. And then, of course, it's a fiber's material so it's made up of different types of fibers, very good papers made of cotton and linen fibers and then you also have the more common papers made of wood pulp fibers. And then the types of work that you can create from paper. The four on the left are from Smithsonian collections and you can see the variety there. You have drawings, you have paintings, you have handwritten notes by James Baldwin and I like to include this paper dress because it's not in our collection but maybe one day it will be but it's made out of paper and someone wore this dress made out of paper. And then, of course, photography, which is my heart, it's a material that was made to evolve as a medium so initially it's made on glass, paper, or film support but now it can be an electronic chip or it doesn't even have to come out of your computer or out of your phone. But it was invented in the early 1840s and most people who've done darker photography know what the magic of creating a photograph is like and just to share some of these beautiful images from the Smithsonian collections, we have these lovely tangerine type images of people who never would have imagined that their image would still be around and still have such a great impact on people today. But I also like to show the diversity of the medium because you have something that's created on a metal support with silver, mercury, and gold and then you have something such as this cyanotype here that's created on a paper support using an iron-based process. And of course I would be remiss if I didn't share a little bit about the practicalities of working as a paper photograph conservator. So constantly thinking about what these materials are vulnerable to, they're just like humans. They're vulnerable to the things that we all try to stay away from, high heat, relative humidity, pests, water damage, pollution, light, and acidity, but of course mishandling and inherent bites. These objects were meant to be used and shared so sometimes they are mishandled or they're not stored properly and these are some of the effects that you can see from that type of damage. But as a conservator I have an opportunity to help mitigate some of those issues either through intervention of conservation treatments such as immersion, washing, a photograph to remove degradation products or remove an unstable attachment or doing lost compensation for in-painting on this early, excuse me, 20th century crown orchard. We also do collection surveys of rehousing. So not just this is going back to the preventive conservation where you're doing more holistic collections of care. So not necessarily doing treatments but doing something that will prevent or mitigate future damage because you can't necessarily treat every single object. So we have this collection of Edward Boynbridge's Animal of the Motion Class Play Interposives at the National Museum of American History and we're currently working on a collection survey to figure out how to best rehouse and to make them more accessible to visitors as well as something such as a 10 type which is a photograph on an iron support. Iron is a very unstable material as I just talked about. It's a very unstable material and it will rust. So if it doesn't have a proper enclosure that eventually you'll have to see damage on something like that. And then a lot of my work, since I am in a research facility, we do a scientific analysis and research and all of this informs how we care for the works of art, either how treatment or display or storage. And so I've been working on this long-term project looking at the color, light sensitivity of color photographs. So taking color readings before something goes out on exhibition to set a baseline for what the color is supposed to be or what the color was when the court went out on exhibition and then taking readings after it comes out on exhibition to see if there's a change. As well as looking at materials. So this object that I have on this image is a photographic quilt and it's rather large so we have to examine it in sections and we wanted to understand the printing technique that the artists use. So using an optical microscope to do that. And then of course preparing objects for exhibition. So I had the wonderful opportunity to work with two signed documents, the 13th amendment and the emancipation proclamation to original signed Abraham Lincoln documents for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And we were preparing them to go into this specialized exhibition case that would monitor and maintain a specific relative humidity and temperature. And we had to do all of this imaging and preparation before they could go into those cases. So I had a chance to work with a number of colleagues and interns to prepare these objects to go on view and they're now on view in the Sling Room Freedom Gallery. And I would like to thank, again, thank you all for having me here and thank everyone on the list on the screens. Thank you very much. I'll let Shannon and Ms. Darsha. I think what we'd like to do with the time remaining is to open the floor for questions but also I think before we do that if there's anything that the two of you wanted to discuss amongst yourselves regarding your journey to the field and the time that you've spent it in the field itself, that might be something that we'd all be interested in knowing and I think about part of the conversation you were having yesterday. Absolutely. So I guess I can start by saying that since being in the field for a little over a decade now which is hard to believe, I've seen dramatic changes in just the diversity and inclusion. I mean, it's not, again, it's not perfect but even just within the last few years I think it's getting better and there are a number of efforts trying to make this field a bit more diverse and a bit more equitable and having seen multiple iterations even my short time in the field of that type of an initiative I think we're at finally reaching a good successful point where things are happening and people are feeling like they have a place in the field and they can come into the field so I think it's a really good time to pursue conservation but again, last night we were talking about the number of African-American conservators in the field and you can help them on essentially two hands and one finger so that's still a problem. And we know all of those conservators are 11 of us and it's grown by a number of us in the last four or five years. Yeah, in the last four or five years. I think it went from five to 11? Yeah, so we saw a lot of work to do but we are, I feel hopeful about it and I feel that we're moving towards a good, at least the doors are being opened because that's part of the challenge is getting the doors open. A lot of the field is starting to understand that the issues that are preventing it are systemic and so it's not that someone's out there acting as a gatekeeper and saying that diversity can't come in, it's just realizing that some of the practices that have been in place in the field for decades don't work anymore. Where a lot of times people were working on paid before graduate school and if you do not have family support it is very difficult to get enough hours and still be able to do everything that you need to do in your life. And so the field is working towards the eliminating unpaid internships so that way if you do take an opportunity you don't have to weigh that opportunity versus paying your bills. And living, especially if you take one at an institution a lot of them are in the Northeast and a lot of those cities are incredibly expensive if you're there for a short time period and often the opportunities are for the summer and it's hard to find housing that you can afford in that time frame aims to be able to really grow and really immerse yourself in your internship without having to worry about everything that needs to go on outside of it. So a lot of the institutions are seeking funding or finding funding within their own institutions to cover interns, particularly if they come from all of your representing background. So that way the field does give that information into the field when you really expand what conservation is to be more. Let's start here. If I could just add something to that, then this is a plug. What we do offer funding for art history majors and curatorial studies minors for summer internships. And so I think I would like to pose a question and that is I was really fascinated by the trajectory that each of you has taken to get to where you are in your field and especially the starship in your presentation how you showed very methodically and meticulously the steps that you had to take and how you were inspired to do what you did and what one has to do in order to apply for graduate school. And so for our students and for our own education, I'm curious about how do you go about getting those hours that you need and sort of the paper that you need to show that this is my portfolio, this is the album that I worked on or this is what I've done. So we could say at AUCR Collective find internships, summer internships that we would be able to fund so that you would be paid, that your rent would be paid and that you would not be working essentially for free to be able to pursue conservation for an eight to 10 week period. How would someone go about looking for something like that and connecting to find an internship? Well my first internship was on campus at Texas Southern so I was able to work with the Harlem Museum, Harlem School of Dance and the Harlem Ballet. They came to Texas Southern to do an exhibit and I was able to work as their exhibit assistant and do some textile conservation. Part of textile conservation is making sure that the textile is going to be safe on display and that it's safe on its mount and so that often doesn't involve sewing the piece to its mount so that way it can't slide down and can't be taken off without removing those stitches and since I did have experience with sewing before, I was able to do that and really help that exhibit because we only had the small staff that we have but in terms of finding internships, I really recommend looking at the Delaware website. They update their internships very frequently as well as the AIC website. This is window turner A double? Right, our cons.udl.edu. And then the AIC website often updates what internships are available and we're trying to push them to include whether those opportunities are paid or not. There are some legal issues with the organization requesting that but I'm working as well as other people working to make sure that it's listed if that's a paid opportunity or not but that's culturalheritage.org and on the member boards and you can be a member of the website about paying membership fee but you can see what opportunities are being posted and know if they're moving near you or I have to just look at the website for museums in the area that I'm trying to be. They will often say if they have a conservation department and if there are opportunities through that field or my first internship outside of Texas Southern was a completely museum of art and that was technically a curatorial internship but I applied in my application materials but I didn't know very much that I was interested in conservation so although I was doing curatorial work I worked very heavily in conservation and we did tours. I made a tour for their application. We should use the iPads that you can borrow from the institution about conservation in the collection from a self-added tour to learn more about what has been preserved in their collection and then a second tour about what things were found in conservation through different analytical methods. So they have also paintings that they found once they X-rated that originally was a self-portrait but he painted over his own face with one of his friends that passed and so it was very interesting to see that he did make an interesting work and we could find the information for that with X-ray. So I would recommend just kind of or just call it. I often call institutions and see if they have opportunities because sometimes they don't think that the student is interested and so if you just let them know sometimes that you are interested they will tell you if their institution has something or maybe they have to go to a different institution or a private institution or something like that. Absolutely and just to add to that the Smithsonian of course has a website that lists all the opportunities but the best way to find out is to either call or email someone directly. If not a number of people will just cold email me and ask me to introduce themselves and say they're really interested in conservation. They are trying to get experience and sometimes we're able to take on interns if we have a project that's going on but a lot of times you just email the person and especially if you have your own funding it might be helpful to add into that like I'm a student, we have funding to support this that could help too because a lot of times institutions are hesitant to take an intern if they don't have funding and that unfortunately happens more often than not because they can't pay you, they don't want you to work for free but you still need to get experience and so even when I was a pre-program I took a volunteer position, it wasn't in conservation it was in collections management at a museum because I knew collections management is conservation adjacent so I wanted to get this experience but they told me that they couldn't pay me and I was able to do that but it's not recommended and it's not necessarily something that a lot of institutions will do because it isn't right to take someone on in an unpaid way but if you have funding and that's available to you then that is helpful to include in your email or your phone call to that person so if ever anybody is interested in learning about opportunities at the Smithsonian and you have hard time figuring out what might be appropriate for you you can just email me I can give you my contact information, my business card I'm happy to help in any way or with anything conservation related because it can be tough to navigate the field especially when you don't really know what the possibilities are for it can be to navigate the field and one or you need to do your internship may have played through you'll be each found mentor or multiple mentors and how that helps launch your exploration Absolutely, so I would not be here without the support of my mentors one of my mentors is sitting back there Jada Harris, I'm sorry to call you out but she was my supervisor when I was at the Woodruff Library working on the archives project and she's been one of my biggest supporters throughout this entire journey as well as my mentors that I met at the University of Delaware before I even knew I was going to go into conservation they provided me with information they connected me, they knew I was coming back to Spelman to finish my matriculation career in college and they connected me with Renee Stein at the Carlos Museum so I could do the internship there during my senior year and then of course other internship supervisors that I've had that are now colleagues at the Smithsonian it would not be possible without those people I can't say that I've had positive experiences with everyone but I find that when you have someone who is supportive of you and is kind of helping to open the door for you it makes it huge and I very much would not have accomplished everything that I have without mentorship from Texas Southern I was very fortunate that I'll be a ward law who is the museum director and art history professor and she used to be a curator at Museum of Fine Arts Houston she took me under her wing and put up with a lot of my mess because I tend to find opportunities at the last minute and so she would stop everything that she had going on to make sure that she could get a lot of recommendation on time and would read my application materials for things and make sure that everything's going well that I was doing what she thought would present what I was wanting to do the best and then once I did get to the Smithsonian a lot of my supervisors were incredibly helpful and we reviewed my application materials to graduate school and sort of left breadcrumbs for me in a lot of ways for other opportunities but they couldn't directly tell me about things because the Smithsonian is a federal institution so they can't always directly tell you that there's an opportunity that they would like you to apply for but sometimes conversations would happen around me specifically to let me know that a contract was coming up but they couldn't tell me that I needed to apply for a contract they would just mention that it was coming and then I could get my materials in place to apply for that contract and that helped me stay in DC longer I was originally only supposed to be there for four months for a single internship but I was there for almost two years working different internships and contracts which really helped me get into school because I had enough hours and I had hours where I could show the progression of a project from inception to completion instead of just saying oh I worked on this one thing for the summer but someone else finished it I could say I started it this summer and it took me a year to finish it for this time which I felt like really made my application too strong and it really was without them and I think I would have still been at home being built on my career and having a life We have time for maybe one more question from the floor before we break through the next panel Hi, it's Jasmine Thank you both for your presentation There's so much with conservation as you both have explained and I'm curious as to what are some of the more meaningful experiences that you had in your internship fellowships like I know in the art industry like it can be very challenging to kind of navigate the right spaces to get to the right places and sometimes it's contingent upon a certain name behind an institution or a certain mentor who's at an institution or even just certain programmatic opportunities So what is your example or your idea or what in your experience has signified a good conservation experience that really got you to this level to where you're working now like what made that difference and you making it in the industry? I think for me it was just applying for things and taking a chance because so when I was a fellow at the Hirschhorn this position that I'm in now came up and the way it was posted it was posted as such that anybody who had expertise in photographic conservation had at least been post-graduate a year could apply but because jobs are so scarce and so far between I was like well maybe I might not be able to get that but not pre-rejecting myself and recognizing I had all of this experience having been at the Smithsonian as an intern at multiple times and then as a fellow and that helped bolster my application so I think if you have an idea of the type of institution that you know to work at or work for strategically aligning yourself with that institution could help I don't know, I mean yes I have experience and expertise but I also do that institution well and I think that could have made me a stronger candidate in the collaborative work that we do at my unit because I work with all of the museums so just kind of putting in my mind I want to be in this type of place and really working towards that Conservation is a lot like other fields where it builds off previous experience that you've already had so I would say my first experience in Texas Southern so we have historic murals on campus it's part of our graduation requirements if you want to be an art major that you have to complete a mural and they can be on campus or they can be elsewhere but most people have chosen to do them on campus and the former president had some of those murals painted over because he thought they were eyesores and so he brought in an outside conservation firm to do a survey of all the paintings on the walls to better understand their condition and understand what could and could not be saved and the historic blueprints had not been updated in decades and so things that used to be always in our conference rooms and offices so I was one of the few students where all the murals were so it was my job to take them around and show them where all the murals were and get them access to different people's offices and once I started seeing what they were doing in conservation and understanding that that was something I wanted to pursue I borrowed a lab coat and a clipboard and told everyone I was there in here and would answer the top five most frequently asked questions because I memorized the answer and to the point that they finally said do you want to be our intern and actually work and I was like yes I would love to and that was my first conservation experience so then when I was applying for other ones I could say I've already done hands-on conservation I may not have worked on that specific material before but I have an understanding of how to work in conservation so I could learn from your opportunity and then apply that to everything going forward so I think just like wing with yourself in there on that first opportunity so that way you can use that as you're building blocks towards what's coming next Wonderful so I'd like to ask everyone to please join me in thanking Shannon and Lestarzo we're going to take a break for about 10 minutes and there are still refreshments outside maybe you can get up and do a little stretch we'll resume with our second panel which is entitled Consequences of Conservation at the Spellman College Museum of Fine Art one of the things we're really really excited about in today's symposium is the opportunity to engage with real life conservators and real examples of works of art from the Spellman College Museum of Fine Art as well as the part of the University of art in Sam and so Ann Collins Smith is going to be joining Lestarzo and we'll be looking at two works a work by Romeo Bearden a work on paper and also a quilt from G's Bint that's in the collection at Spellman College and the last thing I want to say just before stepping away from the podium I'd also like to acknowledge the Bergen Family Foundation in their support of today's symposium and really connecting us to the emerging conservation professionals network as we got a notice and said early so if you're Bergen it was early in the morning for me so thank you please take a few minutes and we'll resume in just about 10 and I am so just like three minutes and I'm all historical but I was just yeah no absolutely no I'm fine I'm fine okay do you mind if I start? no good morning everyone we're going to begin and as we quiet down I just want to say a couple things make sure that by the end of the day or perhaps this session or lunchtime that you get a chance to meet your neighbors at your own tables and maybe at another table maybe a way for us to not only introduce the field of conservation here at the AAC but also for us all to be able to make new friends and to network and I just had the opportunity to meet Sigourney Smuts who's just there raising her hand and she's at the Georgia State Archives Georgia State Archives and she told me about a paper conservation workshop series that's taking place later this spring in March so she'll speak about that a little bit later but there are really a lot of great opportunities just to get to know people here who are really dedicated to this field I also wanted to just point out that out front there are a number of flyers there's the quick start guide a career in art conservation the APCs of art conservation and this is something from the AIC and the ECPN oops so make sure you pick this up it's something that interests you and there are other materials from these organizations that can help to guide you if you're interested in even a business card here as well something small that you can take about conservation and so on so this is really something that's designed it's all fully immersed in the field I'd also like to acknowledge that Rene Stein again who was really responsible for putting us all together has joined us just there in the back of the room thank you so much for taking the time out Rene and also bringing all of your colleagues here I also wanted to acknowledge that Dr. Webb Bender's Mining the Museum class has just entered the room as well just sitting around in different tables here but this is Dr. Webb Bender at the front of the room and then Dr. Aspair who's also teaching here at Spellman College in our program in art history and curatorial studies the intro to the object a class she's teaching and also the black female body she's here too I hope I'm not forgetting anyone please okay good so without further ado I'd like to introduce our next panel this is a session 2 Consequences, Conservation and the Spellman College Museum of Fine Art featuring Ann Collins Smith who is a Spellman alumna herself in the class of 1996 she is the curator of collections at the Spellman College Museum of Fine Art and in this panel together with the starsha and the garity again please refer to the program for the extended bios they're going to be discussing works from the Spellman College Museum of Fine Art around this general theme of the consequences I think of conservation one work is a work by Romare Bearden his guitar executive from 1967 it's a mixed media collage and also one of the quilts from the quilters of G's Bend so without further ado we welcome you up here to the panel thank you so much alright thank you I see so many people in here excited because that's not good for my heart rate but I love this stuff right now about how conservation has informed my territorial practice when I was a student yesterday art was distributed throughout the campus and so when the Cosby building was being built the Camille Cosby building was being built that a fine art museum was to be established so I was on the crew in 1995 to go throughout the campus and do an assessment of the art that was on campus and so I got to see what was really in the Spellman College Collection the Elizabeth Catlett was an Elizabeth Catlett Concourse in LLC1 so art we were supposed to be living with art but of course that could be detrimental if we don't know how to care for the works right so one of the works that we cataloged was this Romare Bearden the name of it is Guitar Executive this is how it looked I guess when it was its most pristine and this is how it looks now so what are the differences that you see fading fading so do you know what caused that fading sunlight so this work was hanging in the administrator's office we will not out that person and direct sunlight right so this is way before my time really and so now I ask Estarcia say so what can we do and what did you say well when things have faded particularly blue it's very fugitive which just means when it's shifted to light exposure for too long it often disappears or darkens often kind of darkens to a brown but a lot of times it just disappears entirely where you lose that color and there's really nothing we can't do to bring it back so now with the piece in the condition that it's in it's all about how you exhibit it and understanding that every time you exhibit it you're exposing it to light so to make sure that when you do exhibit you keep it under certain light conditions so that way it's not getting direct sunlight it's getting a lot of light and then when it is in storage making sure that it's being stored in the dark so that way it's not being subjected to more light exposure and losing more of the pigment that's there and just really understanding what you have now and preserving what you can some some museums have been experimenting with different light sources to make it look like that blue is still present so that way you can see what it could have looked like but really at this point once you've started to save you just have to kind of accept what has been lost so there is also a conversation about doing a Sargent what would be a Sargent and what would we want to do that or yeah so with particularly with paper objects you know Sargent or facsimile is often a print of that work so you take a really good image of it with digital photography and you reprint that and you've noted clearly on the tombstone which is just the label next to it that it is a facsimile so that way the original can stay in a safe location and then some institutions have been playing with the idea of editing that image to make the blues the correct color again so you can see what it did look like and you compare those colors to the original documentation to make sure that it looks the same and then putting that on display and letting people understand that the original is being kept in storage for its own safety but that this is what it looks like here's what it was so that way people can have that information and be able to enjoy the work for a longer period of time without continuing to degrade the work College was a recipient of the bequest of the work of Selma Burke and there is a work that she created called Uplift and it was a public kind of monument piece she created out together with those and so one day there are some young kids on campus and one student ran into the work and kind of destroyed there are 10 of them there are 10 of them all throughout the United States we are still looking for the mold but someone here said oh I can conserve it I can use it and do this and so why is that really not in the commandments of conservation right so conservation is guided by a quote of ethics where we make sure not to be too invasive to the works and we make sure that what we do is retreatable so a lot of our documentation says reversible but a lot of things we do are not reversible if I dust something I cannot put that dust back but someone who comes behind me can treat that work again and remove new dust that is accumulated or undo a stitch that I had done so it's not that I can make the stitch never have happened but I can undo it so that way that piece can live on longer than if we had left it alone so to bronze a piece that is not originally in bronze is in a work we would not do that unless the artist requested now if the artist says I would like this piece to be redone in bronze then that's the artist's decision it is their work they can make that decision we are not the artist we never want to act as the artist even if we think the work could be improved we don't do that we only work with what the artist did we do our best to stick to their original materials and tint as much as we possibly can and if we can't then we make sure that the work can be undone later in the future thank you so in 2004 we began the museum with the art department began to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the art department so part of that was looking at the works that we had by the founders of the art department those are Gail Espacio Woodruff and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and so we embarked on this exhibition project and it culminated in an exhibition entitled Hail Woodruff Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and the Academy in 2006 we received a significant grant from the Getty Foundation from the Henry Luce Foundation for American art to conserve works in our collection so that we could present it and for it to be available for generations to come and so one of the works was about the campus distribution too so when the museum opened everything that could be it was exhibition kind of ready was accession into the museum of fine art and to the collection so formally accession given an accession number but also you know where the first floor of the innovation lab is that was the art storage for the college so we found more paintings this is one of the paintings and the windows were open so they were left to environmental issues so this is a work that is by Hail Woodruff the name of it is entitled Matador as you can see it was a gift from E.T. Williams who is a collector out of New York so when we found this work it was in the condition on the left and it had been obviously cut and it was a part of a mural and we're still trying to figure out what this work is about so that was one of the great finds we also did not have any works by Nancy Elizabeth Prophet who was a founder of the one of the founders of the art department who attended the Rhode Island College School of Design and kind of left Spelman very prematurely because she didn't fit in with the culture of Atlanta we thought we didn't have any works by her but going back into that storage area we found this watercolor which was given to us by a former Spelman student and we believe that this watercolor is what the physical plan is at Spelman so you know where FMS works this is where this used to be Nancy Elizabeth Prophet studio so we had this work conserved too and this is its first on the back so it was cleaned another work we found in storage it's called The Village by Hale Woodruff who spent a lot of time in Mexico with the Mexican muralists this work was also on view and rising up the Hale Woodruff murals at Talladega College which they're now back the Amistad murals are now back at Talladega in their new facility so as we thought we didn't have a Nancy Elizabeth Prophet we exhibited all the works that were existing of hers in the 75th anniversary exhibition and we wanted to make it right meaning that we wanted to acquire work by someone who was seminal to the development of the art department at Spelman so there was only one work available and so the work that was available was hidden in Ebony so do you have any questions about this work where's the nose huh so we are of the idea that the artist destroyed it herself she was frustrated there are a lot of materials on her mental well-being this is a woman who um was very well educated but wasn't very well respected in the field right and it was hard for her growing up in Rhode Island it was hard for her to be in an all-African-American environment although she was African-American and so she didn't get the respect her peers got she didn't get the respect that Woodruff got you know one of the things if you look into the archives you don't really see them really interacting while they were here and this woman had a degree whereby Woodruff didn't but still you know he was given more opportunity than she was so yeah she she destroyed a lot of her works 29 or 10 of her works existing I saw one at the Brooklyn Museum which I didn't know about that went very well very Beaumarche and in an auction about five or six years ago if I had known about we would have bought it so why would we purchase a work that looks like something's happened to it mm-hmm do you see it as damaged how do you view it later it's packed with like even the story about like her mental health and there being like documents that like document her mental health and thinking about the context of the time how she felt like she might not have been as bad as like a lot of female artists and I think that all of those things go into the work and the history of the work which is why I appreciate this what would conservation say about us acquiring this work and putting it on view are we sensationalizing are we just curious I think it would be very depending on the conservator that you've asked but I personally think that if I were asked if the museum should have parted this I wouldn't say yes honors her legacy and really understands the context around her work and if I were at a museum where it could be involved in the exhibition I would show the image of what it looked like before she altered it to say this is what the piece originally looked like and then the artist in her frustrations and in her struggles as an artist and as as a woman during that time chose to damage her work in this way and this is what we have now it's a testament to her skill and it's also a testament to her life and her working practices so I think that while some people would prefer the original I prefer to see the history of works I like working at history museums and getting the story that comes with pieces and getting the story of what that object or that item survived and can act as document to so I think that I would very much recommend collecting it because it does do all of those things you can see her skill and you can see all of the context around that skill in the same work Thank you Ness, really really gorgeous I would love to show it to you sometime at a later date Alright so current issues in conservation that we will have to monitor throughout its life we acquired this work in 2016 this is by Vanessa German who creates these power figures almost like in KC's the name of this work is called Delia on a Plane or Cabaret Slicer on the front on the Cabaret Slicer there's an image of Delia, Delia's face has come her image has come into the news lately because her relatives have said that Harvard has used her images for their economic gain and the family had no choice but this work is made out of plaster in Paris so every time this work is handled you see the little edges coming off this is a contemporary work made in 2011 how do we ensure that this work is here for future generation okay thank you Siri for answering that question I know Siri what would but particularly with contemporary works a lot of artists in corporate materials that they know are not stable in the way that they used it because they want that instability they want that to be part of the work so a piece like this where they're just losing pieces every time it's being handled it would be making sure that the way it's housed limits the amount of handling that needs to be done so it would be in a box where you wouldn't have to physically grab the object to get it out of that box it would be one that maybe folds flat when you remove the lid or is on a tray where you can remove that tray and not have to handle the object so that when you don't risk it as much in terms of losing the edge pieces and then if this piece were to go out on loan to another institution doing a condition survey every time to make sure that the pieces that are there are stable and if they're not asking that it not be sent out on loan or making sure that it's packed in a way that makes sure not to lose any more pieces and when it comes back doing another condition report to see if it lost anything during the transit to that other museum or on exhibition there so a lot of it is doing careful looking in documentation to make sure that we're not damaging the works by exhibiting them and sort of sometimes having to tell curators and other museums that a piece is not safe to travel and suggesting that it just stays where it is and maybe offering a different piece in its place that is more stable so knowing that there is this this circle of care to the artist, to the object and to the to the audience what will we tell Vanessa German about you know how do we inform them about materials because Bureau didn't use materials at the time we can't really conserve that piece because we don't know which magazines he clipped out what you know there are times so how will we inform an artist to create well I mean not that we will want to but if an artist is interested in their works of being here for generations to come what could we what could we share with them there's a lot of conservation scientists in the field and conservation scientists are just people that do analytical work for conservation so they typically don't do any conservation work on objects themselves but they do material studies and really understanding artist materials how they behave how they interact and understanding materials that we use to conserve those pieces so a lot of the conservation scientists have been doing material studies on understanding what artists are using and how those things will be created some artists are fair in particular about what they use and if you tell them the pigment you're using is not going to be stable they will say I don't care I want that pigment to be a source of instability but often artists understand what they want their artwork to do over time and what they want it to look like and if they want it to look exactly the same way that it did when it was painted they will try to use the best materials that they have access to so and a lot of artists do contact museums to say do you have any recommendations for this or is there a paper that you think would be best to do what I want to do and so just really having her just having a conversation with artists about what their intent for their work is what they think of long term for the work because some artists do want the pieces to have a life and when you have a life at some point you do die and some artists want that for their works they want the work to have an endpoint regardless of what collectors want so for example there is an artist who has made concrete molds of people that are on each and where they are placed on that beach that is in the UK the tide when it comes in completely submerges these works and they are starting to get colonized by barnacles and they are being affected by salt water and the city wants the works to stay stagnant because it is a tourist drop and it just wants the works to change in their environment and so the compromise between the artist and the city is that the artist has given the city the molds so that when the pieces do reach the end of their life they can be replaced by the same work from the same mold but be allowed to live that life cycle again so it is very much dependent on what the artist's intent is and what idea at least at this point their career may have changed so the last work I would like to show you is somewhat of a showcase and tell last year the museum received a gift of seven quotes from the women of G's Bend the cultures of G's Bend from the So's Grown Deep Foundation they vary in conditions and conservation needs and holiness women from the the women who created these quotes for warmth but the art world has seen them as artworks and they've used materials or the materials and scraps that they had so the question is how do we honor this work and how do we keep it here for generations to come so we're going to open it up and just look at it and then I didn't bring paper with me but I need to kind of do a conditions assessment so thank you for bringing her here collective because you know so are there any questions while we're opening the quote yes ma'am so I was really interested in what you were talking about what we've been originally thinking about and it made me think about how some museums they value object-based learning versus experience-based learning and so I wanted to know how this museum feels about exhibiting like facts and reviews or even like retouched collages and how do we feel about that well like your stance on whether or not the object is all important or a good experience you know I mean the original the primary source is always to have that you know the experience with it there's something different about you know really being as opposed to looking at a you know like for example I mean they're coming here but the Obama portraits you know people did not care for the Obama portraits by looking seeing them from the television you know from a computer you know from your device your smart device you see that in person you're in tears you know so it's like why is the skin great and you understand because the skin the way in which she does the gray scale Amy Cheryl gives it so much more depth than just you know even using flesh tones you know so I would actually say the first and I think that contributes to the experience so for me they're kind of one in the same so if you want to come up and look at this quote with us you're more than welcome I've already as yet there's kind of a stain on it on it on somebody's bed I think you know one point so yeah the things that happen to the conservation a lot some of you notice that took all my reins off jewelry is nice but it can catch fabrics and cause pulls to the threads or holes so we tend to take off all of our jewelry or not wear any a lot of particularly the women in conservation at this point is majority female will wear even just a silicone wedding band so that way there's nothing hard near the objects and then I also took off my name tags so that way there's nothing dangling and they can catch and then when you typically work with a partner on moving objects even if it's not heavy just because it's much easier to do that and communicating with each other about which way you're turning so that way you're not stressing the object but trying to go in opposite direction so women in conservation have you discussed that or will you discuss that early later I haven't discussed it but at this point conservation I want to say is around 78% female it used to be more male dominated but as the arts have been seen as more of a feminine pursuit more men have not been coming into the field there seems to be an uptake again and men coming into the field and really wanting to participate again and understand that this is something that everyone can do for their collections which sometimes does cause issues in the field because since it is so female dominated and women aren't paid less than men for the same work wages have been suppressed in the field for some time and now there's a lot of work on trying to equalize pay between consumers at institutions because some institutions put us in more of a technician position than a professional position and so we're paid on a different pay scale than other people in similar positions in other departments and so we're trying to correct that so everyone is paid a fair amount of wage instead of what they're currently getting in some institutions because this was you know you know old fabric said was used was a utilitarian object that we brought into the art museum context we're looking at some losses and if you want to come up close to just see and examine it and there's a great article I would suggest if you're not going to share it with you it's called Back to the Future from Bridget Cook's Exhibiting Blackness talking about technology so use everyone don't be shy yeah thank you hands on opportunities would you like a piece of my paper or you said that you didn't have one oh yeah thank you would you be the transcriber I would appreciate that okay yeah thank you so particularly if it's fine you can be that so to exhibit this safely this would have to be an utilitarian object that's just a thing it could be used same material fabrics so we let a spot on the polyester appear here it might even be dyed to be a color similar to this so that we doesn't draw your eyes so that means that can act as a bridge between this fabric and this fabric so that way as it comes exhibit additional attention being to allowing this to hold your goal is to not add new holes so when you're sewing they always say stitch in the ditch which means where there's already stitches then you follow those stitches and you use a different if it was sewn with cotton we tend to sew silk so that way it's very obvious that our stitches are different they can be removed easily in place so the object can be more stable I personally don't do a lot of standard long textiles because I know the history of the work and I'm not distracting it's hard to see the pattern or that I worked on a G-spin coat that was only blue jeans so it's very homogenous in color but then it had like a dark brown stain on it that stained me because it was so different so it felt correct because it allowed me to work as a whole but to me a stain isn't something that's damaging the piece or something that's very regionally shocking we find information from those stains where someone might be able to do analysis and find out that that is a specific kind of liquid that they only have in G-spin like oh this is oh this is a oh this is a oh this is a oh this is a and be like okay well this came from this specific family because this family was doing this or things of that nature so we always try to move more than we need to so that way someone in the future could do more research than we have done so that we can learn more about the pieces and get their context more firmly found you got any episode of job history for comedy? I'm sorry yeah it's hard no it isn't are we looking at real good enough for the acquisition 2000 well last year so very good no one of the works have been up and like this where there's a thread left over from the sewing process you don't want to lose this thread and if it's loose you can get caught and lose it so it would be simply taking a needle and putting this on a needle and then threading it through the other stitches that are nearby so that way it's kept under those stitches and it's not loose and you're not risking it might get caught or accidentally pulling it off so that way you don't engage that material you wanted to take samples and understand what types of thread they were using that's a great place to take a sample from you don't want to lose that because that weakens the structural integrity of the piece ironically we have another new acquisition by the South African Artists really Zangala who makes these silk tapestries and she hand sells and just wears it everywhere and we don't know what to do I mean you know but consolidating that we're asking her like how do we consolidate some pieces so it's so it's a lot of loose threads on the back it's a lot too and it's raw silk with that I would probably do a full encapsulation if I could find a big enough a big enough piece of swum polyester so it's like a thin mesh where it's very fine it's not catching your eye in any way and you can just completely look through it but putting at least one maybe two pieces all the way around so that way it is completely encapsulating the size of the material so you're not you have a smooth surface to work with and you're not just seeing the thread because you would hate for someone walking by to not be paying attention and they're brave enough to catch it or be too interested and do it it's not really benign what is benign neglect I kind of like the benign neglect because it sometimes gets it to the point so benign neglect when you are caring for a piece but you not caring for it it's actually helping a piece so it happens a lot with for example leather people think that caring for it is constantly buying dressings and that it's not caring for it it actually damages it over time and encourages bacterial growth and by a lot of people so sometimes just leaving it alone is the best thing that can happen because otherwise sometimes you have to remove mold and other things that are starting to grow that is eating the dressing that they can constantly apply because they think that leather needs to be oiled or leather on display needs to be oiled more right within an hour or pledge people feel like when they have this sort of furniture and they want it to look really nice so a little pledge on it waxes it make it look pretty and pledge is not good for materials it's very you can't remove it once it's in a surface and it affects the way the surface can be treated leather so sometimes just pushing the dust off of us off the wall is good enough