By Virginia Whelan, Textile Conservator in Private Practice
Optium Museum Acrylic® A frame is both ornamental and functional, drawing the viewer’s attention to the artwork and offering protection from handling and ambient elements. With a few adjustments, most any older wooden frame—whether it is historic, original to the artwork, or otherwise—can be adapted for re-use to become archival as well as ornamental and functional.
In this case study, the client wanted their nearly 200-year-old textile, a copperplate printed on plain weave cloth, to remain with its existing frame and glass even though they were not original to each other. The carved, gilded, wooden profile had a lovely patina from age and use, and the old glass had character.
To adapt the existing frame for archival re-use, the rabbet was made deeper and a piece of Optium Museum Acrylic® was added behind the glass. The Optium Museum Acrylic protects the textile from harmful UV-light and physical damage should the glass break, and its anti-reflective quality makes it invisible in the package. The step by step process is documented below.
Conservation of the Textile
Retro-fitting the Frame
Founded in 1989, APOYOnline is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote communication, exchange and professional development in the field of heritage preservation in the Americas and in Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries. Participants from many specialties, age groups and levels of experience represented major institutions from the region, such as universities and national schools, regional and national research centers and foundations, regional and national libraries and archives, museums, governmental cultural institutions and ministries of culture, professionals in private practice, consultants, funding organizations and sponsors.
The conference took place at the Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española (AECID), in the historic center of La Antigua. The topics selected for the four-day event were risk assessment, emergency preparedness, and post-disaster response and recovery. There were two program components: presentations in the form of talks or posters and training workshops, which included theoretical modules, practical exercises, and emergency drills offered by a team of instructors from Brazil, Colombia, and the United States.
Participants presented 13 papers, covering issues such as the challenges of emergency management in a historic building, case studies in emergency planning, lessons learned from floods, and salvaging monuments and historic buildings after an earthquake, among many others. The poster session included 20 posters presenting a range of topics including emergency plans in libraries, archives, and museums and case studies in emergency response and recovery from earthquakes and water related disasters.
Sequence of Assembly
Preservation experts based in Colombia, David Cohen of the Fundación Erigae and Mario Omar Fernández of the Universidad de los Andes, conducted training sessions in risk management. They first outlined the tenets of successful risk evaluation before a taking participants on a visit to the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) where participants were able to apply this new knowledge. Divided into five groups, participants noted potential risks in the building envelope, archives, library and other spaces. CIRMA founder and staff generously welcomed the large group into their workspaces, collections, and storage area, allowing participants to discuss their achievements and challenges in preserving archival collections in a historic building.
Beatriz Haspo, APOYOnline manager, and Alan Haley, Preservation Specialist at the Library of Congress, organized additional workshops that emphasized navigating different communication styles, problem solving and team building, highlighting their broad ranging experiences in risk evaluation and disaster management in the United States and abroad. They led presentations on emergency response and the salvage of water-damaged materials, culminating with a salvage drill that tested the participants’ grasp of wet salvage, communication, and organization. Everyone worked together via role playing with various duties, including managing opportunistic robbers and members of the media in order to safely and effectively organize the salvage of wet and soiled material typically found in libraries, archives, museums, historical houses and private collections. Participants handled books, works on paper, documents on paper and parchment, photographs, audio-visual material, ceramics, metal, and textiles, before reconvening at the end of the drill to discuss the lessons learned and how to implement the gained experience in their home institutions.
Documentation of Work
Identifying the use of archival materials is important. The handwritten label on the back of the textile’s mount and the Optium Museum Acrylic label adhered to the dust cover inform future owners of when and how the textile was framed, and what materials were used.
The finished product! The textile is now mounted properly, protected from UV-light, and displayed in its existing, and now archival, frame and glass.
About The Author(s)
Virginia Whelan
Textile Conservator in Private Practice/Sole Proprietor of Filaments Conservation Studio – Merion, PA
Virginia Jarvis Whelan is a textile conservator in private practice and is sole proprietor of Filaments Conservation Studio, based in Merion PA. Her conservation services include consultation, examination, identification, documentation, and conservation treatment for historic needlework and fine textiles. Her clients include museums, historical societies, historic house museums, and private individuals. She received her BA from University of Pennsylvania in 1978 and MS in Art Conservation from Winterthur/ University of Delaware Program in 1997.
Some of the textiles Virginia has conserved include George Washington’s Revolutionary War tent and his 13-star silk Commander-in-Chief flag, 18th, 19th, & 20th-century American schoolgirl embroideries, Civil War Regimental flags, and 19th-century political campaign flags & banners. Virginia is a member of the Art Conservators Alliance and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works.