Introduction
Keynote Remarks:Diane Frankel
Fine Arts & Science
Art & Conservation
American History &
Preservation
Library Sciences &
Preservation
Archaeology,
American History &
Conservation
Practice
Museum Practices &
Conservation
"The education
and conservation departments had
never worked
together before,
and though we're
situated next door
to one another, educators and
conservators rarely even spoke in the
halls. Our initial
meetings weren't
easy."
JENNIFER
SIEGENTHALER
EDUCATOR
LOS
ANGELES
COUNTY
MUSEUM OF
ART
| Art and Conservation | |
|---|---|
| Organizational participants | Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California |
| Audience | Elementary and secondary teachers |
| Subject areas | All subject areas |
| Staff and faculty | Museum educators and conservators |
| Length of program | One in a series of eight monthly professional development programs; material presented now available as a teacher packet |
| Funding | Registration fees and additional funding |
| Program dates | Conservation session begun December 1995 |
| For more information | Jennifer Siegenthaler Education Department Los Angeles County Museum of Art Tel: (213) 857-6138 E-mail: jennys@art.lacma.org |
Conservation Workshop for Teachers
The exhibition "Common Forms, High Art: Three Centuries of American Furniture," on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the spring of 1995, piqued the interest of several local teachers about conservation practices. For this particular exhibition, conservators and curators permitted the public to see what was behind and under some of the objects, how certain pieces of furniture were made, how they might have originally appeared, and how they were restored. This bit of conservation information excited many viewers and led the museum's education department to consider incorporating such materials into its established programs for teachers.
An informal canvass of other museums around the country soon showed that teacher programs on conservation were rare indeed, although programs and organizations serving conservation professionals, such as the National Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Property (NIC), Save Outdoor Sculpture (SOS!), the American Institute of Conservation (AIC), and the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), proved to be helpful and supportive of the department's efforts. Hurdles also had to be overcome within LACMA itself. "When we began the process of planning the teacher program," explains Jennifer Siegenthaler, associate museum educator, "the education and conservation departments had never worked together before, and though we're situated next door to one another, educators and conservators rarely even spoke in the halls. Our initial meetings weren't easy. We had to spend a lot of time, at first, explaining the goals of our respective professions to one another."
Some conservators were skeptical about the program and concerned that focusing on conservation over the objects themselves would detract from the viewers' appreciation of the artworks. In contrast, the educators felt that this information would provide viewers' with a point of entry into understanding and thus enjoying the objects even more. Both conservators and educators agreed not to provide teachers with information about specific conservation treatments in the hope of reducing at-home calamities with cherished works of art. Instead, they decided to work toward the following goals:
- to build awareness of the conservation field and the role of museums in preserving and protecting collections,
- to point out different threats to art objects and how to prevent them,
- to communicate the value of cultural property and why we conserve objects, and
- to enhance teachers' abilities to integrate art and science concepts in meaningful ways.
The final program, entitled "Preserving the Past: Conservation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art," was presented as part of the education department's ongoing program of Evenings for Educators. This series of eight monthly professional development programs is held at the museum from October to May for the benefit of teachers in the Los Angeles area. Each event attracts approximately 500 teachers of all subjects and grade levels. Although each evening is devoted to a different theme, usually a special exhibition or an aspect of the permanent collection, they all include a slide lecture, gallery tours, hands-on workshops, screenings of films and videos, and a reception with refreshments and live music. Teachers receive a resource packet with slides, essays, discussion questions, lesson plans, and other materials. The current cost is $10 per session, or $64 for a season pass for all eight programs. (These fees cover only a small portion of the total cost to run the program.) For an additional fee, teachers can receive continuing education credits from Cal State Los Angeles.
The session on conservation, held in December 1995, began with a slide lecture that introduced the field of conservation. It also described the research lab and the Conservation Center at LACMA, which is divided into four labs that specialize in paintings, costumes and textiles, works on paper, and objects. The lecture presented various kinds of conservation problems, with slide illustrations of objects before and after treatment, and explained several scientific testing methods.
Due to the high number of participants, tours of the conservation labs were prohibited, but 20 science teachers were invited into the research lab. This unique opportunity enticed science teachers to attend a professional development program at an art museum, something they might not normally have done. Conservators led the rest of the teachers through the collections for which they are responsible. The paper conservators talked about the effects of light on paper, the proper matting and framing of works, and conservation issues specific to photographs. In turn, the paintings conservator showed different painting techniques and materials, and how they have changed over time, from the early Renaissance to Impressionism. In a costume exhibition conservators discussed the proper care of costumes and textiles, while the objects conservator explained the significance of correctly interpreting and presenting pieces in the collection and the importance of preservation versus restoration.
Four workshops were also held to make teachers more aware of and sensitive to art materials. Attention was directed to inexpensive activities that could easily be done in the classroom, such as using powdered school tempera paint to produce a safe form of egg tempera. (This was done after consulting with chemists at Binney & Smith, manufacturers of Crayola crayons.) In another workshop, participants joined a papermaker to create kozo, a mulberry paper that is widely used in conservation.
One goal for the program was to help teachers learn and communicate the value of cultural property. The idea of why we conserve was addressed in a workshop on aesthetics, a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and value of art. Even though many states now endorse the teaching of aesthetics as part of schools' curricula, most teachers have had little training in that field. Conservators at LACMA were greatly concerned that introducing the topic of aesthetics would in essence put their profession on trial. To deflect the discussion from the museum in particular, the workshop leader posed hypothetical questions and then helped teachers to think through the problems and articulate their solutions and the rationale behind them. For example, one question was, "If the missing arms of the Venus de Milo were suddenly discovered in an excavation, should they be re-attached?" (The teachers decided, to the conservators' satisfaction, to create a facsimile sculpture with the arms attached.) Another question was, "If there is enough pigment left on an early Greek sculpture to tell how it would have been painted originally, should conservators paint the sculpture? And if they do, how would that affect our understanding of later works of art that have unpainted Greek sculptures as part of their subject matter?"
To continue this discussion into the classroom, a lesson plan in the teacher packet instructed students to identify things they would preserve in a time capsule that would help people in the future to understand us, our culture, and our concept of art. Of all the concepts introduced in this conservation program, teachers had the easiest time developing classroom activities based on the idea of aesthetics.
All the workshop instructors developed lesson plans and suggested classroom activities that were included in the teacher resource packets. The education department provided a general introduction to conservation that reviewed some of the common threats to art objects and measures for their preventive care. Conservators described specific methods used in their profession and supplied before-and-after slides of five objects in the museum's collection. These materials, along with brochures and booklets donated by AIC and GCI, and classroom activities related to outdoor sculpture furnished by SOS!, were compiled into teacher packets to supplement classroom instruction on conservation.
Overall, participant response to this Evening for Educators was extremely positive, and several teachers requested more conservation/science programs in the future. Others wanted more examples of how conservators study and restore artworks, and more illustrations and explanations of tools used in conservation. LACMA's education department now makes an effort to incorporate conservation information into all teacher materials and programs. The department would like to take this initial step even further by developing a unit on conservation for kindergarten through twelfth-grade teachers. This would require collaboration among art and science curriculum specialists, art and science teachers, university instructors, and museum educators and conservators. This teacher-tested unit would provide concrete applications for science, art, and art history, and would be a powerful way to excite students about learning.
To receive the teacher's packet "Preserving the Past: Conservation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art," contact LACMA's Education Department at (213) 857-6512.
