 All right, hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar. This is the seventh in your eight part series to complement your in-person training for the Texas Heritage Responders Team. These programs have been made possible through the generous grant funding support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We have just two programs in this webinar series before our final in-person meeting. Just a reminder, we've got one more that's going to be later in May on book and paper salvage. And if you have missed any sessions, please make plans to catch up with the past program recordings before we meet up again in June. I have everyone's attendance records, and we'll email following you this program to let you know if you have anything that you need to catch up on. I will also have more information to share about that June session with you all soon. A couple of you have been in touch with questions, and we'll definitely have some more details to share before the end of the week. Before we begin today's presentation, just a quick refresher of technical notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left-hand side. You can use the chat box to say hello, ask questions, share any information or links that you'd like. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response from me. And as with all the past programs, all questions will be noted, collected, and then I will verbally ask some of our presenter the conclusion of the presentation. Today we have the return of the files box at the bottom of your screen. Our presenter, David, has supplied some helpful resources for the group. So simply click on the file to highlight it in blue, and then click the download button to save the file to your local computer. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenter, David Goist. David is a conservator of paintings and painted services with a private practice in Asheville, North Carolina. He holds an MA in art history from the University of Iowa, and an MA was certificate of advanced study from the Coopertown Graduate Program. He was elected a fellow of AIC in 1982. From 1981 to 1993, David was chief conservator at the North Carolina Museum of Art. He next established a private practice for conservation, as well as for disaster response to water and fire disasters. David was chair of the AIC emergency preparedness response and recovery committee in 2005 and 2006. He coordinated AIC post-hurricane Katrina efforts with Circa and the Southeast Museum Conference, and then deployed on the Louisiana first assessment team, which was an ASLH AIC joint effort to assess hurricane damaged institutions in Louisiana. He was next project manager for the FAIC grant from IMLS, the trained 16 museum emergency responders from 2006 to 2007 in Charleston, South Carolina, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and Seattle, Washington. Mr. Goist deployed to Haiti for the Smithsonian's Cultural Recovery Center in Port-au-Prince in 2010, as well as to the FAIC Cultural Recovery Center in Brooklyn, New York, to assist artists affected by Hurricane Sandy with service in December 2012, as well as January and February of 2013. More recently, he organized advances in disaster response for collections since Hurricane Katrina for the 2017 Southeast Museum Conference Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. He presented Identifying Mold Bloom on Paintings at the 2017 North Carolina Preservation Consortium Conference entitled Battling the Bloom, Mold Protections for Collections. He's completed more than 80 conservation assessments of collections for small museums and historic sites throughout the Southeast. And with that, I'd like to turn things over to David for his presentation on painting salvage. Well, thank you, Jess. If everyone's still awake after all that, I appreciate you showing up on a Wednesday afternoon to listen to my tall tales and yarns. I hope you'll find it of use and of interest. The potential success of a salvage situation when you show up is often dependent upon whether the site has a good emergency preparedness plan. As important as a good plan, drilled and updated regularly, is a plan, a program for good collections care. I hope you've all had a look at the paintings salvage hand out that MJ Davis and Barbara Moore passed out. Essentially, I'll be repeating a lot of that, but I'll also show you some of the challenges. Knowing what to do is good. Knowing what not to do is better. And works of art sometimes will throw you some roadblocks. I've often stated at a number of lectures that the National Heritage Responders are not a substitute for self-reliance or having a disaster preparedness and response plan. I encourage all sites to deposit copies of inventory records offsite. Plans and records stored in the middle of a disaster do you no good. So I hope if you show up at a place, they have a plan available and it's in operation and well-drilled. Many times I cited and complimented the staff at the old Mint Museum in New Orleans. They had undertaken an excellent collections care program over the years. Everything had been stored in clean archival boxes on clean shells and what surprised all of us was that there was no mold growth on any of that material even though humidity levels had been near 70% for three weeks. I also encourage all of us to lend a voice to convince donors, boards and architects not to build museums in high-risk locations. We've got enough challenges with climate change coming up to not have museums in very vulnerable situations. Case in point is the site for the Oro Keef Museum on the Gulf Coast. During Hurricane Katrina, a casino barge offshore in the Surge landed on top of the site. To my amazement, they decided to rebuild on that same site. Unfortunately, I don't have a aerial view of that site but this is from Google Maps. And what I found interesting, I tried to find out the situation of the site. This New York Times article from 2011 that the key point was they had trouble getting insurance to cover that museum plus low visitation. I just really don't understand how anyone decided to build on that site again, but they did. Another case in point, something near and dear to me, the University of Iowa Museum of Art. When I was a graduate student there, I was also worked as a museum research assistant. One of my jobs was to, Jess, I'm gonna take a chance here and use that dumb green arrow. Last time I did that. Hey, you got it. I got it, but I can't make it move. If you just move your cursor, it's all right. Okay, excellent. All right, that is the original University of Iowa Museum of Art building. It was designed as was the other building next to it by Harrison and Braumovitz, the architects who designed the UN building to the right of that building between the main building and the river. They put two subterranean galleries called the Maytag Galleries. And with every heavy rain, water seeped in. So it was my job to use a wet vac to mop up water that seeps in. Those rooms tended to bob to the surface. Most of the time I was grumbling about, this was a dumb place to have built a museum, but they did. And in 2008, it flooded, the river flooded extensively higher than it ever had before. And as you can see, fortunately they were able to get the collection out. Since that time they've torn this building down. That included the print shops and lecture halls. Fortunately they saved these buildings. Those were the original 1930s buildings and Grant Wood taught mural painting in these galleries. But they were not able to get insurance to put the collection back into that building. So the collection had been an orphan over the last decade. Finally, the Board of Regents approved a plan to build a new museum on a new site. And I quote from my alumni literature that our building will exceed the mark for the 500 year floodplain by four feet. I hope it's enough. We've got a new funder here, so it'll be called the Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa. But give some credit to some Midwest horse sense about not trying to reuse the same site that flooded so badly before. I want to cite another example where a good emergency plan and a good insurance company were helpful. Again, if you show up to help salvage, it's important to know that they have these two ingredients. So I'm gonna cite the Albany Museum of Art in Albany, Georgia on the evening of Monday, January 2. They had a major hurricane, not a hurricane, a tornado come through the site. By light of day on the morning of January 3, this is what the first people to access the site found. I reiterate something in the protocol sheet, know whether it's safe to enter a building before you do so. Certainly, there are a lot of downed power lines. You don't know whether any of them are active. But what was interesting to me was that my very first cap assessment was in 1991, and it was at this museum. And as things come around in November of last year, I was asked to do a recap. So I had some special insight into this situation. Know what can happen when a site gets hit by high winds. Many roofs have this type of surface, metal decking. I'll do that again. There's metal decking with foam block insulation, a rubber membrane, and to hold that all that down, they put rock ballast on top. Now, in high winds, this rock ballast tends to blow off. Sharon Bennett in Charleston noted early on that none of their windows at the Charleston Museum of History broke from the winds, but what broke them was ballasts from nearby roofs blowing off in the hurricane winds. So with the roof off and rains falling, this is what the interior looked like. Fortunately, they assembled a group of staff, trustees, and volunteers, and by the end of the next day, January 3, they had moved all the collections to an auditorium, which was not damaged, which was not wet. And with a good insurance company like AXA, January 4, they had a response team from a large conservation center in Chicago on site to triage the collection. And by January 7, a Saturday morning, they had all the damaged, undamaged pieces ready to go. Some to go to Chicago that were damaged, and the undamaged pieces were taken to an off-site storage generously loaned to them by the High Museum near Atlanta. But to show that this site is tornado-prone, another tornado came through January 22, took the tarps off the roof, and fortunately, all the collections are out, but the museum got wet again. This is the auditorium where all collections were moved to. This is my cat bag sitting there. This is the team from Chicago. Pieces that were not wet were put in these heavy-wall cardboard boxes. This is a useful tool to have. It'd be good to know where to access these should you need them during a salvage. The undamaged collections were loaded on the truck ready for transport by January 7, and they were talking about a collection of about 2,000 pieces, objects, paintings, paper. I think that's a remarkable effort. And they were taken to the off-site storage of the High Museum, and this is their, the High Museum has, they have a huge space near Atlanta, and they generously, the Albany Museum, use some of it for temporary storage. I'm gonna mention a few things about training. This is the very first group that trained when we were called AIC CERT. We met in Charleston. You'll recognize MJ, and where's, I don't see Barbara, but anyway. It was an excellent training session, a lot of hands-on wet stuff, but one important thing was learning to implement telephone consultations. Phone and face-to-face consultation, I think, are also salvage. So I assume you've had some training in that. I have to say some of my best response work has been face-to-face or on the phone. Being literally a shoulder to cry on, to be a good listener, can be a major asset to any site that's suffered. And when you're doing telephone consultation, you don't need to wear pants, so keep that in mind. I wish Steve isn't on here, is he, dang. Anyway, so, if you come to a site, which ones do you deal with first, in terms of paintings? This is my opinion of a prioritized list of response, and so I say that paintings, or any work of art on loan, to a borrowing institution must come first. You have a fiduciary responsibility to care for pieces that have been trusted to you on loan. The next group of paintings that are identified in the emergency preparedness plan, that's why it's important that they have one, and they have a list of priority pieces, that have great value and importance. The next group to look at are traditional paintings with animal glue sizings, because the glue sizing will be the most responsive component of that whole setup. Paintings and solid support, such as wood panel, or canvas board are next. And last are acrylic paintings on canvas, especially if they have acrylic emulsion sizings. I found them to be very resilient to exposure to water. And as I say, when you're in the middle of the river surrounded by alligators, sometimes it's hard to remember which way you were going, so it's good to have a list available to help you sort out. Now I'll point out some of the things. This is a very traditional painting, generally an Italian panel painting. Painting on wood with a canvas layer, with a thick gesso ground, and a thick paint layer. But it's the sizings in where I have the arrow of the site, it's on the canvas, excuse me, will be the most reactive. It's good to examine a painting, a traditional painting with a raking light. And here I am doing so, and I'm using one of these little flashlights I found to be very useful. They're sort of an LED band of light sources there. It's very good for creating a nice raking light, and this is a small tool, very lightweight, so there's less risk in case you drop it. I found this tool to be very useful and very inexpensive. It's a magnifier that you can put on a stand, but there's a light with it, and I found it very, I can even, with my point and shoot camera, I can make photo micrographs through this thing. Wood panels, you really can't tell wood what to do. It will expand and contract with changes in humidity. It's important that very wet wood panels not be restrained. If they're held in a frame with nails, you'll find that a panel can crack as it tries to warp along these lines where it was restrained by wood. Wood, if it expands in a stretcher, I mean in a frame, when it dries, it'll become smaller. This is what we call compression shrinkage, so it's good to get a panel painting out of its frame and let it do what it wants to do if it's very wet. If you think you can dry it out quickly with blotters and various drying implements, then do so. This is a painting on a fiberboard support. It was in the flood at Corning Museum of Glass, Hurricane Agnes, 1972. You can see how it's warped. It also, it was floating in the flood water, hit a sharp edge and punctured. Little did I know, this was a clue to my future. I took this on as my second year project and actually had to transfer the fiberboard support and remove the paint film to a new support. This is a mock-up of a wet canvas board. You can see how the canvas is delaminating here. This, of course, is a tide line from water that came up, soaked up the board. However, on the front, the tide line isn't quite as high, but this illustrates what happens when canvas gets wet. You tend to get a decrease in dimension and you get a decrease in dimension that encourages delamination of the paint and ground. Of course, there's a water-soluble medium that gets bled up. This is the kind of thing that can happen to a painting. This is water dripping from a condensate pan where this painting was exhibited. It caused shrinkage of the canvas and what we call tinted cleavage. This painting needs to be kept face-up, so keep that in mind. If you come across a canvas that has this sort of tide line on the back where it's been wet, this is probably what's going on in the front. This is a loss of bond between the ground and the paint. Again, this type of painting needs to be kept face-up when you come across it. Now, the area of that same loss. Now, just to show something positive, this is the painting after treatment. Something can be saved, so if you find staff distressed over the damage, you can assure them that with proper care, the painting can be used once again, can be returned to exhibition. Another example of the kind of paint loss that comes, this edge was wet and caused the paint to tint up and cleave off. Again, something that should be kept flat. Sometimes you won't encounter a painting that's turned kind of ghosty white. We call this blanching. This is not mold, and that blanching can be removed, but it's not something that you as a responder to do salvage need to worry about. Set it aside and only worry about something that might have mold on it. In the studio, we have the option, the luxury of applying a facing with a variety of adhesives such as cornstarch paste. That's not the case when you're in the middle of salvage. Here are a couple of images I'll have of a group of people that went to West Beth in Lower Manhattan right after Hurricane Sandy. You can see that some of these paintings had flaking paint that required a facing. Fortunately, studios belonging to the conservators were responding. They had supplies with them, so they could do some response. I often get a question, if a painting is wet, should I unframe it or leave it framed? Should I lay it flat, face up on blocks, or lean against a wall? Well, those of you who are conservators listening in here, it depends, is one of our favorite phrases. Here's what conservators responding to West Beth did. They didn't have a lot of blocks. They used these steps to get some airflow underneath and put these paintings with flaking paint face up. Those that weren't flaking were leaned against a wall. This upper half is probably, the painting is upside down. You can actually tell that by the wire. They wanted the water to run away, not to collect at the bottom of the stretcher. Again, the question, should I frame or unframe? Many a time, as a conservator in private practice, I've encountered stretchers nailed into frames and the nails are embedded deep into the stretcher. There's no gap to access pliers or anything. It can take several hours to get a painting out of the frame. Keep in mind, is this the best use of your time? If you encounter a situation like that, leave it framed, help the majority, not the one. It would be a blessing if every painting had good backing board and good brass menu plates, but that's not always the case. Gradually, more and more paintings are getting reframed this way, but not everything yet. I show you this historic house near Houston. I assume most of you recognize this place. Steve Pine sent me these images. I asked him about what responses were needed in the Houston area, and he showed me this historic house. A newspaper article I uncovered indicated that it actually had been flooded in Tropical Storm Allison, and they decided to raise the house ten feet on these pillars. But the way things are going, it flooded again in 2017. I understand these are pieces, paintings from the house, or moved to another dwelling. This is the kind of thing you could expect. This painting has been unframed. I guess that's this one over here. Some things are still all right. There are some, I think, pads underneath, but this is sort of what you might encounter, what you're expected to do on the salvage of paintings. You need to know if you're handling wet paintings, what was in that water. This is a gallery in the Asheville area. The landlord wanted to put wet pipe fire suppression in. The installers were there. They announced that they were about to do a pressure test. They were going to put 200 psi of air into the pipes. Someone made a mistake. The pipes are already connected to water, so water gushed out of the end of this pipe at 200 pounds per square inch. A lot of paintings were wet. This is an acrylic painting. You can see it's not just some drip lines running down. This could be treated. Acrylic paintings end up having a lot of surfactants that were in the original manufacture of the paint come to the surface. So you do it, in a sense, wash some of that surfactant off. This is a piece that was in Hurricane Floyd from 1999 down in Tarborough, North Carolina. So everything the Tar River had to carry, whether it was contaminated sewage, hog lot runoff, a major issue in North Carolina, petroleum tank ruptures, this stuff was not water soluble. It also had an unusual odor to it. It's important to handle anything like this with gloves and with respirators at a minimum. One of my first telephone consultations was with an artist who had a studio below Canal Street. He had been there for 40 years. For the first time, his studio flooded. That's the tide line of how high the water came. He wasn't far from the Hudson River. That's how high the water came. This is the dreaded red sticker on the door. It means the city has declared the building unsafe to enter. Equally important, the artist noted that a pest control company had used the basement below his studio for storage of chemicals and poisons. They wisely moved everything out of that basement before the flood. So God knows if he had noticed that and the chemicals had been there, he and his wife and his adult children who were working in this place and me who showed up sometime later would have been exposed to all those poisons. Another issue he had was that the owner, the building was under rent control. The owner of the building wanted to use this situation to have the building torn down. With the 40 years of the artist's work in it, here is where telephone consultation and face-to-face consultation I think was most effective. I spent a lot of time talking with the artist. We were about the same age. We shared a lot of challenges in life. So the bottom line was, after many lawsuits, he ultimately paid a good sum of money to move out of the building. He has a very nice studio north of New York. Just to remember, this is the timeline. October 29 is when water started coming in to lower Manhattan. God bless the Museum of Modern Art. They put together a consortium very quickly to advise artists. Many a time I've complimented the staff of the Museum of Modern Art for putting this together. They save so much art in the New York, New Jersey area by the quick actions they took to pass out good advice. I also compliment the Texas Group for putting together a similar program after Hurricane Harvey. I think any state group should be prepared to do this sort of thing. This is the interior of that artist's studio south of Canal Street. He worked with sort of acrylic stains on acrylic-sized canvas. His pieces were fairly durable, having been exposed to water. But this was a God-awful mess when I got in there. Plus, you don't tell old Dave what to do. You put a red sticker on the door saying, I can't go in. So I'm the first one in the door, ignoring all things from our protocol. Anyway, some basic advice he taught himself. He should not have rolled wet paintings and leave them unsupported like here. Because when they dried, they all ended up with these washboarding distortions. He probably should have left many of them on stretchers. Another thing he learned was he should have taken this. He pulled many paintings off the stretchers. He didn't bother to take the staples or tacks out of the edges. So every time the roll hit a tack, as it dried, it stained. Iron stains in the canvas. Now, we all need to consider, when you show up on site, are you going to salvage in place? Or are you going to have to set up a recovery center? FAIC was generously donated an industrial floor in Brooklyn. Beyond that site is East River. And let me tell you, in December, January, February, the winds coming down that street were memorable. This is the beautiful space we had. It was industrial. The heat wasn't on there. The toilets didn't work. But it was a great space to have donated to us. And FAIC quickly got donations. We were able to equip the site. People from the area came in and we built these chambers with polyethylene because we knew we were handling moldy paintings and paper. Polygon generously donated these filtering boxes. So we put those in the rooms and vented air out of the workroom. And again, thank you, Polygon, for doing that. You may need to have storage space or storage places for paintings. This is a rack system that Marion Mecklenburg, a painting conservator, a longtime friend who was a trained engineer, designed. These are tremendously strong storage units. You can build them from 1x3s. You can get it at Lumberyard with wood screws. And these are strong. I've actually stacked these units, one on top of the other. The design and the plan for this is in your handout. You can change the dimensions of this. This is a storage rack that Jason Church from the National Park Service built at the Recovery Center. He did this, believe it or not, all by himself. He actually wounded himself. He was bleeding pretty badly. But he did an excellent job of putting this together. He wants to know that he did this by himself. That's why there aren't always right angles. But it worked. As conservators, we were working with artists to help. We had these HEPAVACs to help pick up mold from dried paintings. We encountered tide lines. God knows what was in that New York water. And of course, stains from mold growth. Another decision you'll have to make when you're doing salvage. If you come across a large painting and you see that the sides are bowing inward because the canvas is contracting. You decide, do I need to release this? Because while the canvas in this part, because the wood stretcher is bowing inward, it's sort of absorbing that shrinkage. However, at the edges, at the corners, it will tear. So this is a decision someone doing salvage will need to make. You're going to counter all kinds of materials on paintings that have been in a flood. Learn to know the source and what the materials might be. I never did figure out what this was. Although I asked many people to sniff this brown stuff and tell me, what do you think it is? I couldn't get any takers. Here I am, trying to find a way to get this off. The artist who made this painting broke one leg and wasn't able to come to the center. So here, I am making some progress. But of course, this is what's beyond salvage work. Here is one of those paintings that was just rolled flat with no support. This is the washboard effect. He taught, he still teaches at one of the schools in New York. So he hired the students to come in and help him. They're using our HEPA VACs at the Recovery Center, back and front and back. And then he purchased some carpet cardboard tubes. These are not archival, but that's what he could afford. And so here are his students rolling his paintings on the tubes with an interleave of polyethylene. He put about four paintings per tube on. And he also had inventory numbers at the ends of the tubes. So I recommended that the tubes be supported just at the end so there's no pressure on the painting itself. This is Anne Studebaker, who was manager for the site. She was remarkable. She did an excellent job of managing two very difficult personality groups, artists and conservators. We accomplished a lot, I think. I think we could have kept going a few more months based on demand, but I think we ran out of money. And the owner of the site needed his floor back. And remember, it's up to the artist to decide whether his or her painting has been compromised to the point where it cannot be treated or they don't want to treat it. So they have the right to kill their paintings. And here the artist has just slashed it in many ways so it cannot be used again. You need to recognize whether there's mold on the painting. You should be able to identify mold. This is just my standard blurb on when mold happens. Generally, if you have humidity in the 70% range and it's very long without much airflow, mold will start to grow. This is not mold. This white material is efflorescence coming off an encaustic painting. These little white spots are not mold. This is more efflorescence. If you're looking at a white spot under magnification and it doesn't nudge off easily with the tip of a little brush or a tiny cotton swab, then it's probably efflorescence. It's not mold. This is a detail of Andrew Wyeth painting. Because of some of the materials he put into his paints, they frequently have efflorescence. Joyce Ilsoner has worked on a lot of paintings that has this problem with materials coming to the surface. Again, this is not mold. You need to worry about doing a salvage operation. This is mold. Big ol' fluffy mold. Under magnification it looks like a plant. This is mold on a pastel painting. You're talking about a very fragile surface. Best to keep any airflow away from a pastel painting. You need to isolate paintings that are growing mold. This is mold on an oil painting. Again, you need to isolate. Sometimes you can create a chamber like we did at the recovery center in Brooklyn and just keep moldy paintings in there. Or you can wrap them in polyethylene. This is mold growing on black because a black paint is often rich in linseed oil. The linoxin, the dried oil film, is a good supporter of mold growth. But again, you can assure any owner of a painting that this can be treated. For those of you in Houston, you may recognize this wonderful mural by John Biggers. It suffered a lot. Steve Pine and Gilbert. James Gilbert from Polygon are examining it. That is mold. The building has a history of roof leakage. They can never really get funds to do a proper repair of the building. What's tragic is, in this case, the value of the mural greatly exceeds the value of the building. It creates a problem for the folks managing this site. Here they are trying to protect it. I don't know whether this is after flood or after the roof leak or whether they're just trying to keep, isolate mold from spreading. But it's an extremely important painting. You may not always see mold. Sometimes mold will be growing between, this is a lining canvas, this is the back of the original canvas, and this is mold growing between the areas. On the high-glue adhesive used to bond the lining canvas to the back of the original painting. If you encounter a frame and then there's a liner with foxing, dead mold growth on it, you're probably going to find mold elsewhere in the painting. I used that as an early clue that you probably have mold growing elsewhere in the structure. If you get into the tall weeds and you're dealing with mold like this, you must have at least this sort of protective gear, Tyvek suit, mask and goggles and gloves. If mold is this bad, it's probably gone beyond a salvage situation. Touch upon fire. This is a portrait by Thomas Sully that was in Wig Hall at Princeton University where I did my internship with Bernie Raven. There's just a ghost of the face here, so this is not really salvageable. You might keep it as a memento. But sometimes fire is nothing more than soot being spread throughout, this was a library which had a large collection of paintings, but you can see the amount of soot that the HVAC system circulated throughout everything. For those of you in institutions, I would check to make sure that you have an alarm that your HVAC system will shut down at the first notice of a fire alarm. It will save a lot of problems down the road. And be sure that if there is soot on the surface of a painting, especially an unvarnished modern painting, that material will not be rubbed into that because it becomes almost impossible to extract. If you have backing boards on paintings, you'll be quite fortunate. You can see the contrast between backing board after fire, backing board removed. You can see how much that backing board protected the back of the canvas. I'm going to touch upon earthquake. Now, Texas is not earthquake prone, but we may need trained Texans to respond elsewhere. Of course, this is the New Madrid area. This, from this point to here to here in Charleston, is called the East Tennessee Seismic Zone. This is where that earthquake took place in Centerville a few years ago that caused damage to the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral. Charleston, at the end of the 19th century, took a real hard hit from that. I have to say in that Centerville earthquake that we felt the tremors in Raleigh. What am I doing here? Here's Texas. Not many spots where you're prone to earthquake. But, of course, out west is where we get a big one someday, and I just don't know how we're going to deal with it. Jess mentioned that I went to Haiti to show you what can happen. Fortunately, I believe our building codes are much better than Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This is the Gallery Nadar. It had 12,000 paintings in it. The parents of George Nadar lived in an apartment above, and during the earthquake, fortunately just rode their building down as it collapsed. Keep an eye on this concrete edge on this wall. This is after the earthquake. It's changed colors, but this is the Gallery Nadar. They were able to salvage a number of paintings out of it. Not all. Many were lost. This is the Santerre des Arts. Wooden structure that collapsed. There's many paintings in it. Those paintings were moved to a tractor trailer. By June 2, these pieces had been in this trailer for quite a while, 105 degrees Fahrenheit, when my colleagues were there doing a measurement. I think tractor trailers can be used, but I think we can set up ventilation systems to keep air moving through these things. I'm not totally condemning the use of tractor trailers. We just need to use them better if you get in a really tight situation like this. After volunteers from America stopped coming down, the Haitians had been trained, and here they are moving some of the paintings from the trailer to the wonderful building that actually had belonged to UNESCO. Very well built. Unfortunately, all the staff that worked in this building were at home in their hotels. Those hotels pancaked and killed most of the staff, so UNESCO decided not to use this building, but to do the various groups of the Smithsonian. Here are the Haitians, the trained Haitians, working on things, vacuuming on the back. This guy doesn't have his mask properly up on his face. An important point to make is good record keeping. This is Stephanie Hornbeck. She was hired by the Smithsonian to be the chief conservator there, and so here they are keeping records. They're starting to store paintings better. In climate control, this building was climate controlled. It cost something like $9,000 a month for fuel oil to manage the air conditioner. Useful tools that I found during salvage. Many of you probably already have these things, but I'll just show mine. Of course, I recommend keeping air moving, not directing air at any wet work, but just keeping it moving in the storage space or the work area to reduce the potential for mold growth. A dehumidifier can be very useful. Again, don't direct the air coming out of the dehumidifier at any work of art. If you don't have power, you may need a generator. I personally own a Champion Dual Fuel Generator, which means I can power it by gasoline as well as propane. Oftentimes after a disaster, there's no power. Gas stations can't pump gas. Many of them have cages of propane tank. You can bust into those cages, or just take the tanks and leave a note saying that Jess Unger will reimburse you. On my Christmas list is a solar-powered generator. It's essentially a battery. I think these things would be extremely useful if you need to take them inside a room. Of course, you'll have no combustion engine going on, so I think those would be very useful. Another common tool I take with me is a smoke sponge. I have a list of sources on my handout. I often cut them up and make little swabs out of them, cut them up from the big brick. We're doing small work. During Harvey, or after Harvey, there were a number of online discussions with Painting Specialty Group or with other sites, and Christopher's recipe came up. I don't think it was always accurate. I don't necessarily recommend it. If you don't know what you're doing, don't use it. I personally know that some paintings were damaged because this solution was improperly used, but it's there. Since it's around, I wanted to make sure you had the accurate recipe for it. Chris has recommended using shellac to seal stretchers, strainers, that have been wet and perhaps some old growth upon them. I believe this is also in your handout. It's useful if you're working with artists because many of them can't afford to buy new stretchers for their paintings that have been wet. Also on those discussions are a number of materials that people were recommending. Calmer, more informed minds say, do not use lysol, do not use thymol, do not use orthophenyl phenol on paintings. There's a list of the ingredients for the sake of time. I won't bother going through this. You guys can find this stuff online if you want. Someone said, well, thymol is just old-fashioned listerine. Why can't we use it? Orthophenyl phenol. I used to use this as a fungicide when making various facing pastes. We get to what those of us have been around a while called the MacGyver factor. We like to cite Angus MacGyver, who was a secret agent who could solve any problem with a Swiss army knife and a roll of duct tape. I think a good collection of spawners is someone who can incorporate or utilize the MacGyver factor. You may come in with a variety of gloves. I prefer these nitro-coated gloves. For those of you who have worn these blue gloves for any amount of time, if you raise your hands at any height, sweat starts to run down your arms, maybe even onto the art. I really like these. I have a fabric backing. Let your hands breathe a bit. Plus, this is a slightly tougher material. If you're handling frames quickly, you may not have time to look to see whether anyone's left broken staples or bits of nail in the back, so you reduce the risk of cutting your hands and you don't want to get a cut if you're handling pieces that have been in a flood. Another useful tool that I use is polystyrene foam sheets. You can get four by eight sheets at Lowe's Home Depot. I found it to be a very useful tool. It's relatively economical. One thing I found places like Home Depot and Lowe's make a remarkable effort to get open as soon as they can after disaster because they know how important their supplies are. Here's how I used... This was after that water sprinkler break. We put several layers on the floor and against the wall because the walls were wet, so we start to stack things with this styrene foam. You can cut the foam up to make blocks to put under paintings you have face up. You're not going to be able to go in with enough wood blocks, but if you do have wood blocks, I like to put these little feet on them so that if they are in a wet floor, the wood itself doesn't get wet. You can do fashion anything out of this. Another useful tool are these cardboard edge protectors. If you've purchased filing cabinets any time recently, you'll probably find that the edges of the filing cabinet were protected with ease. There's a source for buying them directly. I found it to be very useful for making cheap travel frames. Cutting them in sections so you can put strapping across the face so now you can wrap this painting, this mock-up painting without letting anything touch the surface. Here's the back. You can attach these pieces of the corner guard with screws into the back of the stretcher. That's my good friend Hitoshi Kimura in Florida. These are doggy wee-wee pads against a very absorbent material that can be readily found. You don't need to weigh in a shipment from any vendor. You can find them in pet stores. They're very absorbent. They're a very useful tool to have and not that expensive. Worst comes to worst, I've used shop towels, shop rags. These are paper towels. They're very thick, heavy weight. I've never found this blue color to... What did I do? What did I do, Jess? What are you looking for? Well, my screen went blank. Oh, your screen went blank. Well, I can still see it. I'm not sure if others are having that issue. Okay, the piece didn't say it's still working. So if you just want to tell me when to advance your side, I can do that. I know we're nearing the end. Okay. Yeah, try wiggling your mouse, David. I don't know where that's coming from. Strange. Well, we can still hear you. Okay. Well, anyway... Wow. Okay, we'll... So this was the... The paper towels. Yeah. So Ralph suggested lifting your mouse up and gently shaking it. I know you're working on your Surface Pro. Is that right? I don't know if you have a mouse with that or not. If you have the paper printed out of your sides in front of you and whenever you feel comfortable, just let me know and I can advance the slides. Okay. If you guys can hear me, I'll just quickly finish here. Okay. These are the shop towels. I often use... Actually, I've used toilet tissue for a temporary facing. You can put it on a wet painting. Carry the painting away. And then after the tissue dries, it pulls away and the conservator can come in and secure cleavage or whatever. So a single-ply tissue is a very useful tool. And again, you can find it anywhere. So I'll close with two thoughts from world-renowned philosophers. This was on the... above the door of the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Art is long. Life is short. At my age, I agree. Life is short. I use these two slides to inspire artists up in work. I did a program for the College Art Association. And I use that to inspire them to get ready for the next... the next disaster to my strike. So this was my last inspirational thought to them. So that closes my slides. I've got to get rid of this. Jess, I'm going to sign off and then sign back on again, okay? Okay, not a problem. I'll keep an eye out for you. In the meantime, I'll go ahead and encourage you all to ask any questions that you might have or throw any additional comments in the chat box there. I saw Richard had a note earlier on that I was going to share with everyone and with David once he's back in. Sorry about the technical difficulties, everyone, but I'm sure David will be able to get back into the room soon. He had had an audio issue previously, which I think came back when he lost his screen there. So hopefully he can get that resolved. Also, I just want to encourage you all to ask David questions, not only about painting specifically, but obviously he's one of the responders who has had some of the most experience on the ground and can speak to a range of experiences working with water damage objects, as well as fire damage and earthquake damage that he witnessed in Haiti. So please do go ahead and ask any questions you have. I'm going to go ahead and... Well, I'm keeping an eye out for David joining the room again. I'm going to go ahead and move the survey link over quickly just so you have that handy. Oops. Oh, sorry about that. I managed to lose it. One moment, that will be right back. There we go. And I'm just going to check in on email very quickly and make sure that David is able to get back in. Okay. Jennifer, I see your question there. I will test it on my computer as well. If anyone else had an issue with the download feature, the files, please do let me know. And if not, I can make those available to everyone afterwards via email. Okay, Jeff says he was able to. Yeah, Jennifer, it might be an issue of just directing it to a specific part of your computer. So I'm keeping an eye on that. Okay, we'll just give this maybe another two or three minutes to see if we can get David back in the room and just send him the URL for direct access again. So hopefully he's able to get back in. Laura, I see your question about putting mold cover paintings in a bag. So we'll be sure to ask that. I think I see him here. So one moment. All right, welcome back, David. I'm sure I have no idea what happened. I just got this flood of music coming into my earphones and I couldn't hear myself talk. Never had that in mind. No worries. So we just have a couple of things come in. First of all, I wanted to share earlier in your remarks when you were talking about assessing works. Richard noted that iPhone flashlights are always handy for exams as well as affordable clip-on microscopes. So I don't know if you've used either of those tools or not, David, but I wanted to share that comment. Yeah, I have several of those things. I don't have an iPhone. I'm of a different category, but yeah, anything. It's a good MacGyver tool. If MacGyver had an iPhone, I'm sure he would use it. There you go. Yep, it's all about that kind of attitude. We had a question from Laura as well. She was something you could clarify your comment about putting a mold cover painting in a poly bag in terms of trying to isolate it from other works. And she was just wondering if that would encourage any growth on the work itself. It certainly could. What we're trying to do is if you have a painting with a lot of mold in it and you don't have other things that are moldy, what you're trying to do is to get that painting away from the main body of the collection without spreading mold spores about. I wouldn't leave that bag on for very long. I try to find someone to help minimize that mold. But what is important is to reduce the amount of mold spores that might get moved into the air, settle on things. Obviously, if you're dealing with something that's moldy, you're providing the right, you've got the right environment where you've got high humidity, a lack of air flow. So yeah, I wouldn't leave the piece in the bag for very long. Great. Any other questions coming in? Thank you from Laura. Thanks Pat. Yeah, and I see if we just had a couple of other technical related questions about the downloads. So I will follow up with you Jennifer to share those files with you directly. If anyone else is having trouble downloading the files, just shoot me an email and I can just attach those to a message for you. But I don't see any other questions coming in at the moment. So I just want to go ahead and thank David so much for that very thorough presentation. And it's wonderful to hear about the range of experiences that you've had. So thank you for sharing your wisdom with us all. And thank you, of course, to all of the participants on today's webinar. And I believe the date of your final program is May 23. I will confirm that with you all. But as I said, I'll send a message if you need to catch up on any of the programs just to let you know. And then more information will be coming soon about your second part of your training in June. Okay, well thanks Jess. Thanks for your patience and helping me get through. This was my first live webinar. So it was a real challenge in life. Well, you were great, David. Really enjoyed it. Thanks. Okay.