 All right. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's webinar. This is, of course, the fourth in your eight-part series to compliment your in-person metal-haired micr... I'm... and then I will unmute you when we're ready. These programs have been made possible through the generous grant funding support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Today, we're going to pivot from some of the general response topics previously covered to more material-specific considerations. We'll discuss paintings today, and then move into presentations on textiles, photos and electronic media, book and paper, and then finally wooden and upholstered furniture. For many of you, you might be aware, it's back to school time, so the programs will really be picking up in the coming weeks, and hopefully you all will be in the mood for lots of educational opportunities. If you miss any of these webinar sessions, I'll email you with a recording of the program. Write to me when you finish with a recording and I'll note your attendance. You'll be expected to complete all webinars before we meet again on November 1st. Before we begin the 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 of course use that to say hello and let me know you're here, ask questions, share any information that you'd like. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response from me. All questions will be noted, collected, and then I will verbally ask them of our presenter, David, during the conclusion of his presentation. Today we have a new resource. You might have noticed what's called the files box at the bottom of the screen. David has supplied some helpful resources for you all today. So you can click on a file to highlight it in blue, and then click the download file button to save a local file to your 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 surfaces with a private practice in Asheville, North Carolina. He holds an MA in art history from the University of Iowa and an MA with certificate of advanced study from the Coopertown Graduate Programs. He was elected a fellow of the 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 damage and fire disasters. David was chair of the AIC emergency preparedness response and recovery committee from 2005 to 2006. He coordinated AIC post-hurricane Katrina efforts with Circa and the Southeastern Museum Conference and then deployed on the Louisiana first assessment team with ASLH AIC joint efforts to assess hurricane damaged institutions in Louisiana. He was next project manager for the FAIC grant from IMLS to train 16 museum emergency responders from 2006 to 2007 in Charleston, South Carolina, Shepherdstown, West Virginia and right there in Seattle. Mr. Goist deployed to Haiti for the Smithsonian's Cultural Recovery Center in Port-au-Prince in 2010 and 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 hurricane Katrina for the 2017 Southeastern Museum Conference annual meeting in New Orleans. He presented identifying mold on paintings at the 2017 North Carolina Preservation Consortium conference entitled Battling the Bloom, mold protections for collections. He has completed more than 80 conservation assessments for 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. Okay, so you've unmuted me now, everybody can hear? Okay, well, thank you, Jess. Okay, thank you for that introduction. I'm pleased to be making this presentation to the Seattle Heritage Responders. I think if I weren't already living in Asheville with its mountains and fly fishing streams, good restaurants, micro breweries, Washington State would probably be my next choice. My wife was born in Richland, Washington, and we're very fond of your Riesling style wines. She also remembers fondly those frango mitts, mints that she used to buy as a little girl in the Seattle Frederick and Nelson department store. I'm quite partial to your, that ice cream you make when the Bing cherries are in season. So, Long live Seattle and Washington State. So let's get started with salvaging paintings. I believe you all have the handout from Davis and Moore on salvaging paintings. My role today will be to talk sort of beyond that form, what you might encounter outside of the studio situation. I understand that in terms of emergency preparedness, priorities in the Seattle area are earthquakes, tsunami, flooding, and as I was asking Jess yesterday, do you think they need to worry about smoke from all those wildfires in the Northeast? Well, sure enough you do. I'm sorry about that, but this is quite a time we have in our weather patterns. I checked online and I noticed there are some earthquake plans, something like SNAP, which is Seattle neighborhoods actively preparing, and I also looked at the risk map for tsunami. It's sort of focused around your Elliott Bay. I couldn't quite figure out which museums or university settings would be most affected by that, but it's a challenging situation. My advisor has a hair trigger, so I jump times, jump twice. The potential success of a salvage operation begins with good emergency preparedness plan. If you show up at a site, first thing you do is ask do you have a plan, and do you have an insurance company supporting your collections and or building? It's important that a good plan be drilled and updated regularly, and it's also important to have good collections care. National heritage responders is not a substitute for self-reliance or having a disaster preparedness and response plan. I think it's wonderful that regions like Texas and Seattle are developing their own programs. It's also important that when a site has an emergency plan, that it be made in multiple copies and spread around, because your plan does you no good if the only copy is in the center of the disaster. I want to cite one example I encountered in New Orleans, and that was with the old Mint Museum. I always credit the staff there for excellent planning. They had their collections in good order. They were all housed in clean archival boxes on clean shelves. And even though the site was without power for three weeks with interior humidity levels at 70%, there was still no mole growth. So keep that in mind in terms of planning. I want to jump to a topic that's sort of a pet peeve of mine. I call it what were they thinking? I think all of us in the museum and library fields need to raise our collective voices at times to convince donors, boards, and architects not to build museums and libraries in high-risk locations. I'll cite the Orro Keefe Museum of Art. Here is an image of a casino barge that was anchored offshore. It came on land during Hurricane Katrina, depositing itself on the museum site. Now, you might think those in charge would rethink about rebuilding on that site, but sure enough, I don't have a current aerial view of the site, but here's a map, a Google map. I encountered a article from the New York Times 2011 citing problems with the museum, with cash, fewer visitors, higher operating costs, and less money support from the city. They're still in business, but I question the wisdom of rebuilding there. Here's a more personal note. Here's an image of the Iowa River and the University of Iowa campus, June 2008. In the early 70s, I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in art history. I had a research assistantship at the museum. And after every heavy rain, it was my job to, there were subterranean galleries between the museum, which is that square you see there, and the river. And with every heavy rain, these buildings, these rooms, would tend to want to bob to the surface. Many a time, I would curse, this is no damn place to build a museum. It took a number of years to prove me right. But the museum could not obtain insurance for this building. So the collection has been an orphan for over a decade. The university has since torn down this building. This building and the museum were designed by Harrison and Abramovitz, the two architects of the UN building. Fortunately, the university did save these buildings. The original 1930s art building, including the studios that Grant would use to teach mural painting. Finally, in 2017, the university issued an announcement that the Stanley family had committed $10 million to build a new art museum. And they say our building will exceed the mark for the 500 year floodplain by four feet. Well, let's hope so. Another experience I've had, my first cap assessment that I did was in 1991 at the Albany Museum of Art in Albany, Georgia. In January 2 of 2017, they experienced a hurricane. It took off the roof. There were a number of issues relating to what happens. This is an image from the day after, the morning after the tornado came through. One has to raise the question, when is it safe to enter either the property or the building? What happened in this case was the tornado ripped off, took off some of that white insulation that you see right here. OK, here you are. This is the insulation right here on top of a metal deck. This is a rubber membrane on the roof. This is a common roof construction. That membrane is held down by ballast, stone ballast. But the winds took that ballast, blew it off, causing damage in the neighborhood, peeling back the insulation and the membrane and allowing a substantial amount of water to come into the building. This is actually January 22, a second tornado passed over the museum and took off the membrane, the temporary tarp roof, allowing even more water to come in. But fortunately, the collections had been removed. A bit of a scenario, the storm happened January 2. January 3, trustees and volunteers were able to move all the damaged art into an auditorium section, the wing of the building, which did not use its roof. The museum's insurer, AXA, was able to bring in on January 4, a group from a large conservation center in Chicago to be in the triage of the collection. By January 7, Saturday morning, they were able to move undamaged pieces to a collection that were trucked to the offsite storage site for the High Museum of Art near Atlanta. 80% of the collection went back to Chicago for storage and treatment. So this is a scenario you need to think about. Does the site have an insurance company? Are they willing to hire help to move? And if you have to move collections, or triage the collections, where do you do it? And if you have to move collections, where to? This is a view of that auditorium. I was asked to do a recap in November 2017 to help them with some changes. They were talking about moving out of this building entirely and moving downtown. So this is the room that did not lose its roof, and which they were able to use for triage and a packout. This is during the triage. These sturdy boxes are quite useful. You can get them at a place like Uline. You can stack paintings in them with cardboard interleaves. It makes a good emergency storage system. And here's the truck being loaded for works of art going to the High Museum near Atlanta. This is very generous of the High Museum to help out an institution in Georgia. Here's the offsite storage for the High Museum. They have a huge space out there. And they were able to absorb a small amount of pieces that were not damaged from the Albany Museum of Art. Now let's go into training what you're doing right now. I'll show you the first group that we trained in Charleston, South Carolina. You'll recognize MJ and Barbara Moore. I think also in there is Randy Silverman. Our host was Sharon Bennett. She was in Charleston during Hurricane Hugo. Come on, Arrow. Well, anyway, Sharon's the redhead without a hat. Sharon will not be photographed wearing a hat. We lovingly refer to her as Mother Disaster because she has done so much for training of conservative dorns. Oh, OK. I was wondering how that happened. And there's Barbara. There's Barbara, yeah. And there's a good-looking guy with a white beard back there, too, so anyway. And I want to acknowledge the third training group. This was at the Seattle Museum of Art. Nick Dorman and his staff are wonderful hosts. We made some good, achieved some good efforts there. Some of those faces may be familiar to you. But again, thanks to Nick for all you folks did to help that meeting be successful. And I want to stress that I consider telephone consultations as part of salvage. Whether face-to-face or over the telephone don't underestimate the positive impact of reaching out to somebody, either having them reach you or you reach them after a disaster. It's a very good feeling to know that there's someone out there knowing the problems that exist. This is on the left is Hitoshi Kimura, good friend of mine from Florida. Hitoshi has been very generous with his time in responding. On the right is Steve Pine, a furniture conservator at the MFA Houston. He's been a leader for disaster recovery in Texas and was a big part of what we did for the last training session. And he's demonstrating that you don't need to wear pants when you're doing telephone consultation. So you're on the site. I want to go back and just mention you all had that program with Dr. Horseman on disaster psychology. I just wanted to stress the importance of that. More than once, I've literally served as a shoulder to cry on during a response. You really need to be aware of the emotional state of the people you're trying to help. Also, be aware of your colleagues during a recovery session. You need to look into their eyes sometimes and be sure you know who's in there doing the driving, because this is stressful work. It can be tiring. You may not have proper food. Sickness is always a risk, so be aware of that. So who goes first? You show up on the site. What's the prioritized sequence for triage or wet or otherwise damaged paintings? In my opinion, paintings or any work of art on loan to a borrowing institution should receive priority, as they did at Albany. They had several major loan shows there, and the director very generously put those works of art on the truck first. If the site has an emergency preparedness plan, sometimes there will be a priority list of greatest value or importance to the collection. Those go next. Then traditional paintings on canvas with animal glue sizings or next paintings on solid support, such as wood panel or canvas board. And finally, acrylic paintings on canvas with acrylic emulsion sizings. It may be difficult for a non-painting conservator to recognize some of these details, but it would be good to have someone who does know. And remember my little saying down below. Sometimes it's just hard to know which way you were crossing the stream when you're in a difficult situation. As Davidson Moore pointed out in their handout, paintings are composed of composite materials. They won't necessarily respond to the same way in times of high humidity or water contact. The tendency for a painting to respond is to delaminate. A good way to identify that is with raking light. It's good to have a tool with you to lay a light close to the surface and see if you can identify flaking paint. In my go kit is one of those little LED sticks. They seem to be quite common now. They're fine about any hardware store, little magnifier light, and then a handheld light. You can buy all of these for $20 or less, and they should be in everybody's bag. Remember wood doesn't always, even within the piece of wood, doesn't respond the same way. Spring wood and summer wood will react differently. And remember, you can't tell wood what to do. On the right is a panel painting that was secured in a frame with nails, which prevented it from expanding. It wanted to expand and warp. So it said, well, I'll show you. And so it cracked in three different pieces. So it's good to get a wet panel out of the frame and let it do what it wants to do. This was the first wet painting I ever worked on as a graduate student at Cooperstown. Little did I know. It would not be the last wet painting I worked on. This is a painting that was in the Corning Museum of Glass. It was swept up when floods entered the museum caused by Hurricane Agnes in 1972. The little panel warped. It was punctured when it hit the corner of something, perhaps a table. And of course, it was covered with mud, mud of unknown composition. To be sure, I very carefully removed that mud, assuming it probably contained sewage and other accretions. Here's a little test panel I've made up in the past just to demonstrate what happens to some paintings. Here's a little canvas board painting, or there's actually a canvas board that I mocked up, on the front. You can see the tie line in the back. On the front, here's how water migrated from the bottom. You can see how those pencil lines have distorted because wet canvas will tend to contract, tighten and contract when wet and will often dry that way. And then you can also see how the markers have bled upwards. Of course, most of the time, oil paint is not water soluble. Here's another example of a wet painting. This was water that dripped on the back of a canvas, a lined canvas. You can see how it was swelling distortions plus tented cleavage. The tented cleavage in raking light. Well, Jess, can you point to that for me? I don't know why that arrow isn't working for me. It worked last time. Yeah, I was having a little difficulty, too. It's being very fussy. OK. Nope. Maybe I can move it. OK. Well, anyway, it's right there. You can see it in raking light. It's that little raised white line there. And it's very difficult to get paint to lay down on canvas, which is smaller than the space that originally occupied. Here's another example of what happens to a wet painting. You can see that the right side was actually the top. Water has run down. You can see the tide lines. It shouldn't be a surprise to see what's going to happen on the front. The water tends to affect the glue sizings on a linen canvas. And eventually, we'll promote delamination of the ground from the canvas. Another raking light shot of that. It's a portrait. Here's at the bottom. And to have a bit of a positive note, yes, a painting conservator can treat that. So it's not a major work of art. It was priceless to the owners. And they were more than willing to pay for treatment. The top of this painting, what you're seeing in the image was actually gravity side down. And so water collected on the bottom behind the stretcher and where it stays wet, because it couldn't dry out fast enough. And so this is the kind of paint loss that happens when canvas is left wet for a long enough period of time. Now water can also cause oil painting to blanch. This is not mold, to be sure. And then blanching can be treated. It's during your salvage situation. You simply carry these things flat and keep it up on blocks and try to let it dry out. In the studio, say Nick's studio, where it's nice climb control. It probably has a cappuccino maker and plates of Franco mint chocolate slaying about all the supplies in the world. It's easy to face a painting that has a lot of cleaving paint. But what's a responder to do out in the field? Well, here's a shot from New York after Superstorm Sandy down in Lower Manhattan. There was an establishment known as West Beth Artist Housing. It's one of the first and largest federally subsidized artist colonies in the country. It opened 42 years ago. And unfortunately, many artists used the basement for storing their work. So here's a group of people. I think that's Carolyn Tomzak, formerly with Brooklyn Museum of Art and Private Practice in Brooklyn, holding up the piece behind with the head covering that's good old Hitoshi. But she did, at least in New York, everyone's studios were close, and they could bring supplies in to do facings if necessary. So one has to ask a question to frame or leave framed to lay flat, face up on blocks, or lean against a wall. And for those of us, anybody who's dealt with a conservator, one of our common phrases or responses is, it depends. Well, at West Beth, they decided to place the paintings that they had faced, face up, and they used the steps to allow a little airflow underneath. Those paintings that were not flaking or cleaving, they leaned against a wall. You can see by the placement of the wires on that painting that they're further right, that usually these things got wet from the bottom. And so they placed them top side down so that water would kind of drain from the bottom, hopefully drying out fast enough that we didn't get a lot of cleaving paint at the bottom. But these are decisions that you'll have to make when you're at a response. In terms of unframing, as a painting conservator in private practice, I count hours. And nothing is more annoying, well, there are many annoying things in life. But one of the annoyances is if some framer has driven nails to hold a stretcher in a frame and has driven those nails deep into the wood, it could take several hours to dig those nails out and remove the painting from the frame. So I asked, is this the best use of responder's time? By and large, I would tend to leave a painting in the frame. It would be a blessing if every painting was secured in the frame with bent metal plates and screws for quick removal. Also with a good backing board, backing boards can be useful, as you'll see soon. An example of a response in Texas back in 2004, this historic house, the Eugene Pilo House, sustained flood damage. Their response was to raise it 10 feet above the flood prone area in a park. However, it flooded again higher than the last time in 2017. Steve Pine provided me this image. So a response team had to go in. They actually moved the paintings to another building. And this is the kind of thing you might experience. Some things have been taken out of frames. Some paintings are in frames, face up. Some paintings are still wrapped. So you need to ask yourself when you show up at a site for a salvage job, what was in that water? You need to know that before you handle. A lesser problem, this was water released accidentally at 200 pounds per square inch. While a pressure test was being formed on a wet pipe fire suppression system, it blew water into this gallery, causing water damage to a number of areas. This is just an example of an acrylic painting. Acrylic paintings are more resistant to water damage, but water running down the surface can remove surface grind that might be there. Also, as conservators know, acrylic paint is composed of a number of components, anti-sudging agents, anti-foamers. And some of these materials tend to rise to the surface and they tend to wash off. There's a big debate among painting conservators about whether we should remove these deposits, but in this case, it was necessary. Here's a sample of flood mud. Hurricane Floyd caused flooding of the Tar River in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina in 1999. This floodwater, we really don't get that much damage from hurricane winds. It's the water from flooding coming down the rivers that's done the most damage to us. And it may well be the case for you folks, because I know folks have hills in Seattle. But this flood mud on this bronze sculpture here contained all kinds of contaminants. And a surprising was not water soluble. I did find that I had some when I went there to help out that I had some hand wipes with me. I had a little bit of alcohol in them. And I could use those hand wipes to take off some of this stuff. I actually was treating a Bible at a church, trying to putting a tally between pages. Now, here's an image of the door of a studio of an artist who lived below Canal Street in New York City. He lived there for 40 years. And for the first time in 40 years, his studio flooded. If you look at the bottom of the door, you see how the woods lighter, and there's kind of a line. Well, that's the tide line, the height of the flooding. What was equally important is that he just happened to see a pest control company that had stored chemicals in the basement below his studio. They removed all those chemicals and poisons from the basement. Many of them probably would have civilized. And as the water swelled up through the wood floorboards of his studio, they would have gotten on his paintings and on him during handling. And note the red sticker on the door that was put there by the fire department, declaring the building not safe to enter. After a while, we questioned the validity of that. The building was a rent-controlled building owned by a fellow who was, shall we say, connected. He wanted to tear the building down with the artist's studio and contents in it. It took a number of lawsuits. But I have to say, I went into that building many times, generally trying to avoid the owner and his entourage. Now I want to point out that reminder that Superstorm Sandy hit that New York area October 29. November 4, the Museum of Modern Art was able to organize a consortium to help artists who were affected by the hurricane. I think this is a wonderful effort. I've always complimented the staff for their quick response in doing so. And Texas followed suit after Harvey. They put together a program. So if the Seattle group does not already have something in the works or in place, I encourage you to do so. You must remember, most of the time, artists don't have insurance on their studios or even their apartments, as we found in New York. So they're desperate for help. This is the interior of the artist behind the red sticker. I've never seen so many paintings by one artist in a place. Now his wife did attend the Museum of Modern Art Consortium. She brought back a lot of useful advice, and it helped save a lot of his paintings. The artist was able to appropriate an empty apartment several floors above and move some of his collection up there. One thing that he regrets and I regret was that he just sort of laid rolled paintings on the floor. And you can see, I'll try my friend the arrow one more time. Not going to work. You can see the washboard effect that that produced. He painted in essentially stained canvas. Although it was not just stained canvas like Stella or some of the others, but they were quite resistant to water damage. But another thing he did that we both regret was that he rolled paintings still with after he took them off the stretcher, he left with tacks in the edge. And so when those tacks corroded, still being wet, they stained his canvas front and back. So another thing to point out to artists not to do that. So salvage in place or set up a recovery center. Well, FEIC was able to get the donation of an empty industrial space down in Brooklyn. We had generous funding from a number of groups. We set up a hotline for New York and New Jersey artists. I actually went up on December 3. I went up at my own expense because I was making me nuts. I was doing a lot of telephone consultations, but I had to answer the plea from this artist that I was showing you. So Eric Perchot, not wanting to miss a chance, he said, well, while you're up there, would you please check out this space we even offered down in Brooklyn? So I did. It was a huge space, like 17,000 square feet. There were window panes missing. It was cold. All the toilets were clogged with dried fecal material. But it was a great space, and it was free. So we made it operational. A number of people set up these little polyethylene rooms in the space as workstations. We had a number of supplies donated, various vendors. We had these wonderful filtration cabinets donated by Polygon so that we could work in the space, pull air through one side and out the other, filtering for mold spores and other things as we do the air out. In your handouts, I have a basic plan for this storage rack. It is 4 feet deep, but 8 feet high, 8 feet wide, made from standard 1 by 3 by 8 foot stock. It's engineer designed. It's very strong, but you can expand the dimensions of these using the same principles. And this is a rack that Jason Church from the National Park Service assembled by himself, I point out. So we must forgive him if there aren't always right angles in this rack. And poor Jason badly cut himself doing this assembly. But you can see you can take that plan and expand it for large paintings. And we were dealing with large paintings at the Recovery Center. We weren't set up to treat things. We were there to advise artists on how to take care of their own things. And so we had HEPAVACs there. Here's an artist vacuuming materials from the backs of his canvas. It was quite common to find paintings that had been sitting on a floor, tied lines from water stains, mold stains on the back. This is the kind of thing you're likely to encounter if you do a salvage of paintings. Another thing I observed is that many artists would stretch their canvases on a strainer. Strainers made out of, say, 2 by 2s. And when the canvas became wet, it would tighten. And while the wood would tend to bow in the center of these large strainers, at the corners of the canvas couldn't. The strainer couldn't take up the slack, so the canvas often tore. So one of his face went, well, should I release the canvas from the stretcher? If you do, I assure you that the painted surface, the original image, will always be smaller. It's a number of problems we've encountered with advising artists. It's important to know the source and the materials causing stains and accretions. This is a painting that I worked on. The artist had broken his leg trying to move things out of West Beth. So I was kind of doing some preliminary work for him. I asked many people, would you smell this brown stuff and tell me what you think it is? I never could find a taker. So I did find things that he could use to remove most of that, but they were still staining. And I found myself, more than once, advising artists. I said, well, you painted it. You can paint it again. So I would recommend that the artist repaint those white sections on his canvas. Seemed like a practical and realistic and pragmatic solution. Going back to the artist from below Canal Street, he taught at the Art Students League. And so he hired some of his students to help him out. One of his paintings that had been sort of rolled without any support and dried with an accordion pattern. They were using the HEPAVACs to remove debris. Now fortunately, that flooding, he was right near the Hudson River. And so the river, he was only, he was, say, maybe 100 yards from the Hudson River. So the water was still pretty clean when it went into the basement and up through his floor. So it didn't have a lot of the problems that you might encounter elsewhere. Here they are vacuuming the same thing face down. And we advised him he was able to buy some large cardboard tubes. These are not archival acid free, but you got to do what you got to do. And so wrapped in polyethylene and interleaved of polyethylene, his students are rolling his paintings on these tubes. Hopefully with time, those distortions will gradually dissipate. And here are, he generally put maybe four paintings on each tube. And fortunately, he is a good artist. He had inventory numbers for everything he'd ever painted. And so inventory numbers are on each tube, so he can find them. And the person to the left is Anne Studebaker. She was manager for our recovery center. I always compliment her. She did an excellent job of coordinating efforts between two difficult personality groups, being artists and conservators. And remember, an artist has a right to kill his or her own painting if it no longer retains the artist's original intent. It's difficult to watch an artist kill a painting, but it's their decision. So you get on site, you ask yourself, is that mold on the painting? It's important to learn to identify. I have a few suggestions. Most of you probably know the whole 65, 75 degrees Fahrenheit, 45, 55% relative humidity. Above 65, you're running the risk of mold growth. So you can read that later. So now this is not mold. This was an encaustic painting. I photographed it under a microscope. This is some component of the paint, probably something in the wax, some sugars, or other things that have migrated to the surface. Those don't present a problem to you during salvage. It's something to be dealt with by a painting conservator later. Here's a detail of another painting that had been stored in a barn for a long time, some components of the oil medium. Steric acid probably rose to the surface. There's a circular image in the lower right there is showing these white deposits that is not mold. My recommendation to determine the distinguish between mold and effervescence or other things is under magnification, take a little brush and give this white stuff a nudge. If it comes right off, it's mold, probably. If not, it's probably some salts or something. Here's a shot of detail of Andrew Wyeth in the North Carolina Museum of Art. Seemed like every spring, these deposits would form something coming out of the artist's egg tempera paint, and I'd need to take that off. Again, that would not be a problem for someone working salvage. This is mold growth, and it's mold growth on a pastel. So you're dealing with a very friable paint image, pastel, pigments, mold growing on, nice fluffy stuff. There's a detail of a painting. Black paint often will form mold because it's richer. Generally, the artist wouldn't take much pigment to make a black paint, so it's often richer in oil medium, and mold will grow on the linoxin. I recommend you need to isolate moldy paintings from others that you're salvaging. And just to show the difference, here's a 19th century portrait, a coat with mold growing on the black, and to the right is after treatment. Here's another example. This is a large mural by John Biggers, an important African-American artist. Many years ago, I worked on a painting by John Biggers that was owned by Dr. Maya Angelou. This artist is very important to her, so it's very important to me. So I got involved in trying to raise money to save this mural. It was done in 1953 in Houston. The building itself called the Blue Triangle Community Center had a number of building issues, deferred maintenance, a long time leaking roof, and of course, it did not stand up well to Hurricane Harvey. So you can see it doesn't take a conservative to tell that this painting has mold problems. Here's Steve Pine with James Gilbert from Polygon, kind of doing a mock-up thing. But you can tell this painting had a lot of mold problems. Here's some of the staff from the center trying to shield the painting from more rainwater. It rained for a long time in Houston after the hurricane. Now, you may not always see mold. If a painting has a glue lining that is a piece of canvas that's been adhered to the back of the original canvas, using, say, if it's French or English, it's probably hide glue. If it's an Italian painting, it's probably more of a pasta-type lining. But mold will grow between those two canvases on that glue, because mold loves that glue. You may not always see the mold if you come upon a painting that has mold spots or foxing on the liner of the frame. Chances are you're going to find mold on the back of the canvas. Here's a shot from Puerto Rico, my good colleague Susan Duel. Susan and I did a lot of work in New York after Hurricane Sandy. Susan's an excellent paper conservator. She's got one of the fastest and most surest mat knife hands I've ever seen. She's Philadelphia tough, and she follows that characteristic of being a good responder. She has all the MacGyver factors, which we'll get to in a bit here. But if you come into a place and you see that kind of mold, you know you should have on all that personal protective wear that she has on. So don't leave home without it. Fire, if you have to respond to a fire, well, obviously, there's not much to salvage here. It should be saved. This was a Thomas Sully portrait. It was in Wigg Hall at Princeton University. You can see the ghost of the sitter's face in there. But not all fires burn everything, especially say if it's a fire in a basement. One of the problems with an HVAC system, if it senses heat, the air conditioner will come on or the heat will come on and it will try to solve the problem and hence and blow soot everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Those of you in institutions, I would determine if many systems have sensors. If the fire alarm goes off, the HVAC system shuts down so that you're not blowing soot all over the place. And if you're dealing with soot on a stained canvas, canvas without much varnish, try to avoid rubbing anything on the surface because that soot will become embedded. It's very difficult to remove. It's good if there is a backing board on the painting. Here's a sample of the same painting, backing board on, backing board off. You can see how effective that backing board was in protecting the back from soot accumulation, resulting from a fire. We're going to touch upon earthquakes. Wasn't such a big issue for the Texas group. This is half a map showing the east. You can see how the new Madrid fault line in St. Louis is a big risk. This arrow we're working, I could draw a big C from that kind of that lobe in the center of Virginia. That's, if you remember, the earthquake that took place centered in Centerville, Virginia. That damaged the Washington Monument. That's called the East Tennessee seismic zone. And it kind of forms a C. It moves down through that other yellow area in East Tennessee. Unfortunately, kind of close to Asheville. It ends down in Charleston. Charleston experienced a serious earthquake in the 1880s, caused much damage to the city buildings. Damage was experienced clear up into Winston Salem, North Carolina, or Old Salem at the time. And in that Centerville earthquake a few years ago, we actually felt the tremors down in Raleigh. So earthquake shock waves can pass a long way. Here's the West Coast. Should be no surprise to you folks out in Seattle. Note that Texas is largely earthquake-free. I told them we may need you guys to go to Seattle or Washington State or the West Coast to help out. So I've talked to Jess many times that as a whole, NHR needs to think about how we would respond to a major earthquake. How do we get people there? How do we get supplies there? Chances are staff already trained on site are going to have their own life issues with family and housing, where we sleep people, where do we feed them, et cetera. It's something we need to think about. I'm sure Nick Dorman has shown you slides. His deployment to Haiti was just before mine. So I'm sure he's impressed you with what can happen with a major earthquake, 7.0 or above. This is a place called the Musée Gallery des Arts Nadar in Port-au-Prince. It's a three-story art gallery. The son, George Nadar, an adult son, reported that there were 12,000 paintings in this gallery. His parents were living on the top floor. They survived. They simply rode the earthquake down when the building pancaked. They say they saved perhaps 2,000 of those paintings. Let's go back. Let's keep in mind, keep an eye on the blue cap on that brick wall in the center. It's going to be painted a different color in this shot. That's what that building was like after the earthquake with 12,000 paintings in it. Also, the Sontre de Art experienced significant damage. Many paintings were damaged. Some were salvaged. And they were put in a tractor trailer for storage. And this may be the only option any of us may have. I've been doing some thinking about how one might make these more climate-appropriate. I think having vents and fans moving could be quite useful. But down in Haiti, it was hot. And so temperatures reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit when my friend Hitoshi arrived and did measurements back in June of 2010. By November 2010, American conservators had stopped responding to Haiti. And there was a group doing training for young Haitians to help save their own patrimony. Here they are carrying a damaged painting on cardboard. Got to do what you got to do. Here they are working with HEPAVACs that we brought in. And this is Stephanie Hornbeck. She was hired by the Smithsonian to be sort of the chief conservator there. This is after Nick and I were there. They built some storage racks in one of the rooms. And I note here that it's extremely important to mark location, inventory numbers, and processing during the registration process of a salvage operation. Useful tools during salvage to reduce the potential for long-term damage. Box fans are very useful. If you have electricity, you can keep air moving. Just don't direct that air at the wet collections, paintings, or whatever. Same advice goes for dehumidifiers. Sometimes you may need to bring in a generator. I have one of these in my garage. It's called a Champion Dual Fuel Generator, which means I can power it with both gasoline and propane. I think propane is a useful tool. Oftentimes, if a site's region was out of electricity, stations can't pump gas. But oftentimes, they'll have tanks of propane and cages. If they're open, you can buy them. If not, 1960 style, you can liberate them, bust a lock, leave a note saying, please send bill for damages and propane tanks to Jessica Unger, FEIC, Washington. Jessica's promise she's going to buy me one of these. This is essentially a generator, which is a battery charged by solar panels. I think this would be a useful tool to bring into a site if you need to power fans within a building. Of course, there'd be no exhaust from an engine. Tools useful to have are smoke or dry cleaning sponges. I don't recommend a non-painting conservator using these on the face of a painting. Use them to maybe wipe down frames so that you're not spreading soot about if you're dealing with a smoke damage situation. This is a formula I'm showing. It's in your handouts. I show it because it was widely distributed after Harvey in Texas. So I want you to have the formula as Chris Stervutis devised it or how it came down. It's changed over the years. I don't, again, recommend non-painting conservators using this on the face of a painting. I know for sure that some paintings were damaged by conservators using it on the face of moldy paintings. What might be useful to share with artists is ceiling wood stretchers. Many times, artists can't afford to replace stretchers. So if they can repurpose their damaged or moldy stretchers, they can use this alcohol situation or this alcohol option followed with ceiling with shellac. Discussions online revealed a number of suggestions which most people I trust said should not be used. People were recommending the use of Lysol, Thymol, Orthophenylphenol. I have several pages here. I'm not going to bother reading them all, but bottom line is don't use them. There's Thymol. People were recommending Thymol to use on paintings, even though it's a long-established bit of knowledge that Thymol will soften an oil film. Orthophenylphenol, I couldn't help but notice that it was used post-harvest treatment for fruits and vegetables to protect against micro-damage following during storage and distribution. I kind of went how much stuff that I've eaten. So now we're getting to our fearless leader, Angus MacGyver, who was a resourceful secret agent able to solve a range of problems essentially with a Swiss army knife and a roll of duct tape. So this is where we get this thought that you can be a good bench conservator in the studio, but you need to take your knowledge and be able to come up with inventive ways to solve problems without doing harm in the field during a salvage operation. You should always have gloves in your go-kit. I like these nitrile-coated work gloves. You get them at a place like Northern Tool. I like them because if I'm handling paintings that have been exposed to floodwater, what I don't want is to get a hand puncture and perhaps some infection with that. So this nitrile coating makes for a tougher surface. Plus, these gloves are breathed in the back and you don't sweat as much. There's another shot of these gloves that I love. Another supply that I think is useful in a salvage operation, again, not archivable, but you got to do what you got to do. And you get this stuff at Home Depot and Lowe's. I know you have those two stores out in Washington State. This stuff, you can get four by eight by three-quarter inch thick. Easy to cut with your Army Swiss knife. Here's a sample of how I used it. This is going back to that gallery that had the broken fire suppression system, the blue water all over the gallery. So we put some of that foam on the floor so it keeps paintings up off the floor and away from the wet wall. Now in my studio, and I'm sure Nick does, two by fours cover with carpet. I like to put little pads at the bottom to keep the block from sliding but also keeping it up off a wet floor. But you really can't carry enough of these things to a salvage site. So again, you can cut up that foam into strips, just tape it together. Another useful tool, those brown angles are corner guards. You can get them from U-line but in a pinch. Chances are if you go to the back room of Lowe's or Home Depot where they have all the cardboard boxes where they receive their washing machines and other appliances, those guards are used for protecting the edges. I found them a very useful tool. Again, you can cut them with your Swiss Army knife. Here's what I've done with them in the past. I've cut them into small sections, screwed into the back of a canvas and put something across the surface. If you need to protect the surface of a modern painting without a frame, keep wrapping materials off the surface, these things serve well. Here's the back, this little mock-up I made just one screw in the back. But again, a useful readily available tool for you. My friend Atoshi likes to call these doggie wee-wee pads. It sounds funnier in his accent but here's another tool. If you need blotters, you can always, blotters aren't always available. You can go to PetSmart and buy boxes of this stuff that are relatively inexpensive. They're great absorbers of moisture if you need to blot the back of something. The shop rags, shop towels, you can get them also at Lowe's and Home Depot. They're inexpensive. I've never found that blue dye in them to bleed, but you can slide them under between a canvas and a stretcher bar and help dry out a wet canvas. Again, so here are wee-wee pads and shop towels. It was always been on my bucket list to be interviewed by the New York Times. I wanted to impress the world with the depth and breadth of my intellect and I got my chance in 2013 after Superstorm Sandy. I was interviewed by a writer from the Times. We're talking about what it means to be a responder. I brought the issue of the MacGyver factor being able to be resourceful out in the field, use things to reduce potential harm to a work of art and so I cited the example of toilet tissue, single-ply turret tissue, which you can find in any NYU restroom. Wouldn't you know the one thing he focused in on and quoted me in this article was coist and toilet tissue, so I'm forever remembered for toilet tissue in the New York Times. But here's how this stuff works. Wet toilet tissue on the face of a painting, you have to carry a painting flat somewhere, if you have to go outside there's wind blowing. The tissue can secure flaking paint and hold it in place and as that tissue dries it invariably will kind of lift up and away from the paint so that a painting conservator can get in there and secure lifting paint. So now I'm going to close with two philosophical thoughts that I presented when I did a talk during the College Art Association. It was trying to convince artists to be better prepared for the next one. I used a phrase that was chiseled into the over mantle of the library at the University of Iowa Museum of Art in Latin, Ars Longa Vita Brevis. Art is long, life is short. At my age I can promise you that life is short and being a painting conservator for many years, paintings don't last that much longer either. My last and final bit of philosophy by a mountain philosopher trying to convince artists to get their stuff together. Jessica, fine lady that she is, cleaned up my phrase. But anyway, be prepared. I'm so glad that the Seattle Heritage Responders are in training. You've got a lot of good work to do and good luck to you. So that ends my talk. Any questions? Great, well thank you so much, David. What I really love about your presentation is the fact that you really hammer home the point that resourcefulness is a key skill for responding and that having the ability to flexible and to basically troubleshoot on the fly is so important for this group to really be aware of and to be thinking about as they're going through their training. I didn't see any questions come in during the presentation but if anyone has questions for David now please feel free to go ahead and drop those in the chat box on the left-hand side of this screen here. I'm going to go ahead and pull over the link for the survey for this program. So if you're all just be familiar with this drill just click on the Evaluate Webinar line there and the Browse To button and that will take you to that quick survey link for the link so that you all can provide your input for this program. So Corey wrote in with a question, since we are not conservators, so yeah, again a lot of the folks in the group aren't conservators, could you reiterate which of those techniques we should definitely not attempt ourselves? Great point, Corey. How far would you want this group to go, David? Well, I would recommend not doing anything to the service of a painting. It's just hard to know. But by and large, most of that stuff is for you to do as salvage operators. You need to move things to a safer place, reduce the potential for damage. But I certainly wouldn't use, say, that cleaning solution on the surface of a painting. I don't even like hearing painting conservators using it. I think a lot of mistakes are made after Harvey. You can use a sponge on a stretcher, on a frame. There's no flaking paint. I'm thinking of, say, large modern paintings. I can't remember what I said. I don't recommend unframing a modern painting that has a strip molding, just a strip of wood nailed to the edge. Because you're left with a lot of nails that you've got to deal with, I think it's best just to leave that kind of a stretcher on. Maybe you can pry it away a bit to let the canvas dry on the edge. By and large, I tried to make suggestions that any responder could use that is coming from a collections environment. I had the spreadsheet on who's there and most of you are archivists. You're accustomed to dealing with collections, so you kind of know fragility. It is important. It's not so important knowing what to do. It's important knowing what not to do and when to stop. I tried to select things that any responder coming from a collections background could do. It's important to have those tools to do careful examination. It's important to have good safety equipment and be able to look things with raking light, especially prepared for respirators. But as I think back, most of it is stuff you can do. Just don't get quoted in the New York Times. Good advice. I love that story. Yeah, I'm glad Corey raised that question, though. It is good to think about where the line is in doing this work and I would encourage you all as well to know that you have this broader support network. Even as you're working on a potential future salvage operation that within your group itself, but then of course within the broader national heritage responders team, you have access to expertise like David's or NYX or other NADS conservators who might be able to provide remote assistance assuming that communications are reestablished. So just remember that you have some ways that you can get that expertise and advice even as you're doing this work. I didn't see any other questions at this point, but again, I will encourage you all to go ahead and fill out the survey for this program and then I remind you that we do have quite a few sessions coming up over the next few weeks, so I hope you all are ready for material-specific salvage programs. I want to take the opportunity now to give a big thank you to David for taking the time to share your wisdom. It's always a pleasure, David, to hear not only specifically about paintings, but also some of the broader insights that you have from your many experiences in responding to disasters. And of course, thank you to everyone who took the time to join us today. Thanks. Well, thank you for all attending. I wouldn't mind a deployment out to Seattle, especially during Bing Cherry season when you make that great ice cream. That's good stuff. If the power's out, you may need a lot of that stuff before it melts. So anyway, you know where to find me. Always think it ahead. All right, thanks again, David. You're very welcome.