Twenty Years of Conservation
Improvements through CAP
South Dakota Art Museum | CAP Year: 2009 |
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South Dakota Art Museum Exterior |
The South Dakota Art Museum’s (SDAM) was founded in 1970 with a mission to collect, preserve and exhibit visual art to increase access and appreciation for the people of South Dakota. Its collections include over 6,000 pieces by state, regional and national artists. In 2000, the South Dakota Art Museum participated in the Conservation Assessment Program. Their assessor was Neil Cockerline, conservator and Director of Preservation Services at the Midwest Art Conservation Center (MACC) in Minneapolis. One of his top recommendations was to institute collections care plans, policies and procedures. During the years following his assessment, these policies were written and implemented.
With a good collections care plan in place, the SDAM’s 2009 ReCAP collections assessment was focused on how the museum should address some of the accompanying materials that arrived along with donations of paintings and other art objects, such as archival collections. For instance, while the paintings by South Dakota native Harvey Dunn had been carefully stored, there were also large collections of photographs, correspondence, and other archival items related to the paintings that were disorganized and poorly housed. Collections assessor JoAnne Martinez-Kilgore recommended reorganization and cataloging of all archival collections. The SDAM decided to pursue this goal through numerous routes. One major step has been to collaborate with the South Dakota State University Briggs Archives to share an archivist. Through this collaboration, the SDAM will benefit from the expertise of the staff at the established Briggs Archives. Both an IMLS American Heritage Preservation Grant and an NEH Preservation Assistance Grant are being pursued as potential funding sources for this project. To implement another recommendation, which was an object-by-object survey of the SDAM’s etchings, drawings and watercolors, the staff is applying for a grant through the IMLS’s Conservation Project Support.
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Pottery Storage Before CAP | Pottery Storage After CAP |
Curator Lisa Scholten had this to say about the benefits of the Conservation Assessment Program: "Knowing what needs to be done to improve collections care at your facility is one thing, but confirming this knowledge through a report by an outside professional makes all the difference." Scholten also has words of encouragement for her fellow recent CAP participants who may find all the recommendations in the report overwhelming: "When you look over the list of recommendations, don’t think ‘we’ll never get through all these!’ When you take the recommendations just one or a few at a time, you’ll find it’s amazing what you can accomplish."
Thanks to Lisa Scholten for her help with this article.
Photos courtesy of The South Dakota Art Museum
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