Today we had a half-day consult with a conservator from Connecticut. OK, no need to be coy, his name is Marc Williams, principal at American Conservation Consortium (www.conservator.com), and he was fabulous! Though I had pulled out a half-dozen items for him to look at and see if we could improve the environment in which they were being displayed or housed, when he arrived the first topic on this 25-degree morning became to heat or not to heat (with the several existing steam radiators) and from there we moved on to a host of more general conditions that affect the collection as a whole.
He told us as a general rule, for instance, that we shouldn't hang paintings on outside walls, where they create their own microclimates, trapping cold or heat behind them. In our current space, outside walls are all we have available for displaying paintings. Given that, he said we could lessen the risk by inserting spacers behind the paintings that would hold them away from the wall, allowing air flow. He recommended leaving 2" at a minimum, though 4" would be better behind the larger paintings.
I already knew we needed to move our several needlework samplers out of their acidic frames into archival mats and frames (because I found a report with that advice from a prior consultant some 20+ years ago), and today's consultant confirmed that. But in small local (and volunteer) history museums like ours, there are usually 100 things that needed doing 20 or 30 years ago, and it's a question of priorities, not only of money but of time. What tasks are worth doing first? Should rehousing the sweet samplers done by young girls in the 1800s fall into our top priority list? That's what I really wanted to know, and Marc the conservator left no ambiguity -- "Absolutely!" He suggested sending them out to a textiles conservator, but agreed we could carry out the work ourselves if we had a staffer familiar with the proper archival treatments of textiles.
Those are just a few of the recommendations and tips we received today. I'm going to make a list of them and post them in the museum so we can start checking them off in the new year. And now that I've committed myself here, I'll have to do it, right? That is, if anyone is reading this...
He told us as a general rule, for instance, that we shouldn't hang paintings on outside walls, where they create their own microclimates, trapping cold or heat behind them. In our current space, outside walls are all we have available for displaying paintings. Given that, he said we could lessen the risk by inserting spacers behind the paintings that would hold them away from the wall, allowing air flow. He recommended leaving 2" at a minimum, though 4" would be better behind the larger paintings.
I already knew we needed to move our several needlework samplers out of their acidic frames into archival mats and frames (because I found a report with that advice from a prior consultant some 20+ years ago), and today's consultant confirmed that. But in small local (and volunteer) history museums like ours, there are usually 100 things that needed doing 20 or 30 years ago, and it's a question of priorities, not only of money but of time. What tasks are worth doing first? Should rehousing the sweet samplers done by young girls in the 1800s fall into our top priority list? That's what I really wanted to know, and Marc the conservator left no ambiguity -- "Absolutely!" He suggested sending them out to a textiles conservator, but agreed we could carry out the work ourselves if we had a staffer familiar with the proper archival treatments of textiles.
Those are just a few of the recommendations and tips we received today. I'm going to make a list of them and post them in the museum so we can start checking them off in the new year. And now that I've committed myself here, I'll have to do it, right? That is, if anyone is reading this...
