Daly Conservation

July 25th 2009 I was in North Burlington to check out The Bobbin, a great sew bar and craft lounge, and I stumbled (appropriately) upon The Ramble. It is a neighborhood party in the Old North End (O.N.E.) of Burlington. It is community driven, with a schedule of organized events: music, comedy, fields days, bike rides, and world markets; as well as more informal or individually organized yard sales, block parties, and free food or free stuff.

The neighborhood is very fun, with small shops, restaurants, ethnic groceries, and brightly colored houses. I really enjoyed walking around the Old North End that day, it was sunny and everyone I met was very friendly and just a little silly. I bought a knitted hat from an organization that directly supports Bhutanese refugees, the yarn was donated and the refugees come together to knit hats, purses, and scarves. The proceeds from the sale go to the women. I loved the idea of the community and the coming together of these women to make my hat, it reminded me of my quilting group. The hat was made by Bishnu, and many of the knitted items had a picture of the woman who made them on the tag.

“Let public art out of the dark”

An evening concert had free crepes from Skinny Pancake and live music from local musicians, I saw 17th Fire, Jenny Montana, and a guy named Travis who played the Ukulele. They were all awesome.

There was a scavenger hunt/tweet rally, won by yours truly, complete with a lovely trophy.

There has been a recent discussion on the Objects Specialty Group e-mail list about Conservation, Treatments, and object value. Valuation can be financial or philosophical and assessed by an appraiser or the owner of the object. One idea posed was whether a treatment will increase or decrease the value of an object.

I had not thought of conservation treatment as decreasing the value of an object, and many of the responses were similar to my thinking, objects decrease in value when they are damaged or neglected and this decreases the value. Treatment as a consequence of this damage or neglect should not decrease the value. However, there is always the possibility a treatment will not go as planned and the object could then be further damaged, this was alluded to but not discussed. Some said that an ethical treatment always adds value to an object. I could certainly see cases where this would be true, but I am reluctant to say ‘always’ about anything in conservation.

A conservator cannot tell a client whether a treatment is “worth” doing, as it is not the conservator’s job to give any value to the piece they are treating, this is why a conservator can offer different treatments of different costs and let the client determine how much they would be willing to pay to treat the object.

It left me thinking about how I treat objects based on value. I have treated objects of little or no value like my nephews toys, and then objects worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Do I approach them in the same way? Tomorrow I will sit down with the rounding board I am treating and really think about what I am doing in my approach to the treatment of that object.

Being a student in Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) I learned and participated in the Iraq Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP). I first learned about the project from my professors who were directly involved. The program was involved in creating a school for conservation in Erbil, northern Iraq, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and one of the oldest continually inhabited cities.
I knew very little about the region, so I began reading about the history of the Kurdish people and their ongoing struggle for independence by the Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Afganistan, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. It is not a happy history, scrolling through centuries of conflict and struggles that continue until today. As well as open conflict the kurds are culturally oppressed, in some counties they cannot use their kurdish names, celebrate kurdish holidays, and they are discouraged from speaking kurdish.

The Iraqi Kurdistan region is beautiful, There is a series of photographs by Ed Kashi that show Kurds in daily activities.

See http://mediastorm.org/0011.htm

The plan is to build a conservation school and library in Erbil where conservators from throughout Iraq can come for training. There will also be training for museum directors and collection management staff. The museums in Iraq will be satellite museums to the main museum in Baghdad, using the national collection. The director of the project is Jessie Johnson and she is blogging about her experience as an American expat living in Erbil at http://roundthing.wordpress.com/ . I like this project because it is helping Iraqi citizens take better care of their cultural heritage. It is a good thing to do and it is an exciting opportunity to help the country.

One of my favorite initiatives is Save Outdoor Sculpture (SOS!)
I like the initiative for many reasons:
1. I love outdoor sculpture and monuments and I could look at them or talk about them for days.
2. It is a collaborative project, anyone in the USA can contribute, from girl scouts (there is a merit badge) to conservation professionals, to interested community members.
3. It shows how important documentation is to conservation. Treatments are exciting, but good, thorough documentation and knowing what to look for is what will inform treatments. You can’t make recommendations for treatments until you have comprehensively documented a work.

There are currently around 40,000 sculptures in the database. Nancy Proctor the Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum spoke about SOS in an interview with Sumaya Kazi the Senior Social Manager of Sun Microsystems on her blog talk radio show socially speaking. The interview included discussions about how the Smithsonian is using social media to make their collections more available. Nancy spoke about how the SOS! project can continue to create Wikipedia pages for each sculpture that could be linked to Flickr photos, allowing the public full access to the information. This would preserve the sculptures and educate the public about them. The interview has a great review by Molly Holtman on her blog.

Dale Chihuly Sculpture, Missouri Botanical Gardens
Source: creative commons on flickr.com

Another Smithsonian outreach project is Artful Abe which takes the visitor to statues of Abraham Lincoln from around the country and then relates them to pieces in the collection at the American Art Museum. A scavenger hunt using google maps and the American Art database. It is a great way to make the collection accessible to everyone with online access.

I am hoping to add reports to the SOS! database, writing reports is a skill I would like to improve. I have scanned a SOS form and I hope I can find some sculptures in Vermont to document and add to the database.