Preservation Technology Podcasts (U.S. National Park Service)

Episodes

January 15, 2020

92. Creating Coast Salish Imprints-The Public Art of Susan Point (Episode 92)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people in projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Robert Watt, author of “People Among the People: The Public Art of Susan Point”. In this podcast they talk about his new book, and the importance of Dr. Point’s art in the revitalization of Coast Salish art forms.

Susan Point carving the large spindle whorl “Good Luck”. Jeff Cannell, courtesy of Archives of Coast Salish Arts

Robert Watt: My first hope was to produce a book that would be a celebration of the public work of a very great artist. I said several years ago, if we were in Japan, Susan Point would be termed a national treasure. And that’s how I think of her. And so doing this book, I think gives many more people that chance to appreciate the dramatic scale of her accomplishments. I think it also helps to ensure something that is so important to her and that is the business of a Coast Salish aesthetic and cultural imprint in this part of the world.

House posts in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Jeff Cannell, courtesy of Archives of Coast Salish Arts.

I quite often meet people who, if the discussion turns to First Nations art they immediately talk about totem poles. Well, totem poles were never part of Coast Salish culture. Carved house posts—typically more internal elements in a big house than external elements—but certainly totem poles were not a part. And the styling of Coast Salish pieces is very distinctive. And my hope is that people who have a chance to read this will come away with that understanding. They will understand that the people here, the First Nations here, had their own aesthetic, their own style. I think through her art, Susan has succeeded in achieving that.

Catherine Cooper: The spindle whorl seems to be a very important motif. Could you tell us a bit about why?

Robert Watt: I think that’s a question maybe best answered by Susan herself. Early in her researches she discovered and admired the historic spindle whorls in various museum collections and she was inspired by them. She created new designs using the form. And of course the circular form as you know for First Nations cultures, not only in this part of the world but in many other parts of the world. The circle of life and the way it allows you to talk about the importance of four: four seasons, four elements, all those things.

Catherine Cooper: One of the things that sort of struck me with the number of materials she’s worked with is it’s always: if it’s new and she can learn, that also seems to be a bit of a theme.

“Salish Gifts” in cast concrete with bronze lids and set on colored stone. Kenji Nagai.

Robert Watt: Oh yes. Yeah. She’s been a pioneer in using so many different materials, far more materials I think than any other First Nations artist. Certainly in our area and perhaps right across Canada. I can’t bring to mind any other First Nations artists that has so dramatically and aggressively explored different media. One minute it’s metal and the next minute it’s cast concrete and the way that she locates associates and mentors to teach her new techniques and then also people that she can work with to bring her ideas fully to life.

So for example, the great stained glass window—art glass window in Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver involved a very close working relationship between a glass artisan, Yves Trudeau, and Susan, who did the design and adjusted the design. But at one point she went to Seattle with Yves Trudeau. When the design had been completed and accepted by the cathedral people she went to Seattle with Trudeau to work with the glass blowers and I think it was Fremont Glass in Seattle.

“Tree of Life” stained glass windows at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, BC. Kenji Nagai

And she was there for days with Trudeau, being involved with the process, watching the glassblowers produce the sheets of glass in a range of colors. That’s been part of, an element of, her career right from the start: working with skilled artisans, in various fields to enable her to produce something in a medium that she wouldn’t be able to do if she was working solely by herself. In that process of collaboration, she’s always front and center. She’s always watching and she knows how she wants something to look at the end. And she’s very patient and is always ready to go back at something to achieve a particular result. And she’s a real perfectionist and very meticulous. She doesn’t stop until she’s satisfied that no other result is going to be possible.

I think another part is, and this really struck me, was when she received a commission, one of the first things that she did was to take a very close look at where the work was going to be and what kind of relationship it might have with the building or the landscape that it was going to be part of. So her initial research was into the Coast Salish aesthetic. Later researches, piece by piece, were centered around the stories and the history of the places where the work was going to go.

Cover of the book, “People Among the People.”

So for example, the dust cover of the book shows the four corners piece, which is on the wall of one of the larger buildings at North Seattle College. And the coloring, and some of the framing elements in that design, relate directly to a stream and a particular red earth color that was important for the First Nations people who lived in that part of what is now North Seattle. And that sort of care and attention is very, very characteristic of all her work.

Catherine Cooper: So you’ve known Susan for many years and watched a lot of this work come about. Have you also seen a resurgence of Coast Salish art since she started?

Robert Watt: I’ve become aware of it and I remember being on Vancouver Island and visiting friends North of Victoria in Saanichton and I went to do some shopping at a small shopping center or mall, and there were some beautiful carved pieces forming part of the entrance way in one of the larger stores there. And I could see right away that they were Salish because I saw the elements that I had come to understand as Salish through Susan’s work. And then I found a label identifying them as the work of one of the Marston brothers; and the Marstons, and a number of other young artists, are now all working in using Salish aesthetics and so their work is quite distinctive. And I think Susan has been at the vanguard of a resurgence, or a Renaissance basically, in Coast Salish work.

Catherine Cooper: One of the other things that has seemed incredibly deliberate and important about the way you constructed the book is the inclusion of her native dialect.

Robert Watt: Yes. And that was a suggestion that was made to me by the main editor that I worked with: Mike Leyne of Figure 1. And it was wonderful to work with him. He’s a consummate professional and he made a number of suggestions to me too, that I think were particularly important in giving the book it’s final appearance and impact. And one was his suggestion to organize the pieces rather than chronologically, which was my thought as an historian, to organize it geographically beginning in effect on the Musqueam lands then going out from there in a series of circles. And taking this geographic look, almost like a giant spindle whorl in a way, reaching out from Musqueam to, in the end, places quite distant. But his other big suggestion was, he said, Is there not an opportunity here to introduce people to Halkomelem, the traditional language of the Musqueam, the downriver dialect?

Part of Susan Point’s work “People Among the People” in Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC. This is the Grandparents house post in the piece “Grandparents and Grandchildren”. Kenji Nagai, courtesy of Archives of Coast Salish Arts

And I thought it was a great idea. And he said, well, how can we do that? So I first discussed it with Susan, who was enthusiastic and then with… I was very, very fortunate to be able to enlist the help of elder Larry Grant of the Musqueam people, who is head of their language program. So Mike and I together settled on the words that we hoped to integrate into the text and then worked with elder Larry Grant to receive the correct Halkomelem word. And we also had similar help from Dr. Barbara Brotherton, who is the curator of Native American art at the Seattle Art Museum. And she was very, very helpful in, in effect, doing the matching sort of thing. But for the first peoples of what is now Washington state.

Catherine Cooper: And the pronunciation guide in the back is incredibly helpful.

Robert Watt: Yeah. And that was there with the approval and support of Larry Grant who got the agreement of the Musqueam people that it could appear there. Because it’s something created originally for the language program at Musqueam and in effect directly borrowed from their printed resources.

Catherine Cooper: Do you view this book as an effort at preservation and education?

“Aerial Hunter” bus shelter design in Seattle. Courtesy of King County Metro Transit Archives.

Robert Watt: Yes. A very good question. And yes, I do. Maybe one way of underlining that is, delightfully, Susan’s work as an artist continues and as we speak, she is working on a number of large new commissions. And so the book is a portrait in time. It begins, the earliest work is 1981-82 and the most recent is 2017. And as the decades unfold, it may will be that one or two of the pieces succumb to the elements. Nobody wants that to happen, obviously, beginning with Susan, but you know, she’s nothing if not a realist.

So as you see with the bus shelter piece in Seattle, that’s the one in the book that no longer can be seen because it was painted on plywood and it inevitably, because it was open to all the winds that blow in downtown Seattle and the rains that fall, and the sun beats down, it ultimately had to be retired. I think the book is a very important record of really, really important work by a very great artist.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Robert Watt, author of â€ŽPeople Among the People: The Public Art of Susan Pointâ€,. In this podcast they talk about his new book, and the importance of Dr. Pointâ€,s art in the revitalization of Coast Salish art forms

December 4, 2019

91. Painting Palettes for Miss Griswold: Continuing an Art Colony Tradition (Episode 91)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with David Rau and Matthew Marshall at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. In this podcast they talk about the inception and design of Miss Florence’s Palette Trees and their new book highlighting the collection of over 200 artists’ palettes.

One of Miss Florence’s Artist Trees from 2016

David Rau: Miss Florence’s Artist Trees came about in 2004. In 2002 we just had completed our new building, the Krieble Gallery, and it was really a state of the art, beautiful modern space. And we were still trying to figure out how we were going to incorporate Christmas into that space. Christmas has always been important here because our namesake, Florence Griswold, was born on Christmas Day in 1850. We’ve always had a tradition of going kind of above and beyond during the holidays, but with the new building, in that modern space, we really weren’t sure what the best fit was. I kind of took a page out of the tree that I always see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They bring out this beautiful Baroque Christmas tree every year and it becomes a thing that folks visit season after season. So I said, well, what can we do that would be something we could do over and over again but it wouldn’t get old.

And that’s when the spark came that, because we spent so much time here giving out paints, palettes… You know, we have en plein air Sundays where we give visitors a palette with squirts of paint on it, and we give the school children’s small palettes. We handle a lot of these medium sized palettes. And so that’s when the idea came to us that we would give them out to the artists that we’re familiar with in the area. Old Lyme is rich with creative painters. And we would give them a blank palette and ask them to paint on it in their signature style and then give it back to the museum as kind of a donation. And we would put them on these different trees year after year. So the first year we started with 50 and that filled up a nice tree, but we had a lot of other decorations to put it in between. It just kept going and going, and you know, now we have 212 and no one has asked us to stop yet, so there’s more coming.

Catherine Cooper: How do you select who paints a palette for Miss Griswold?

Looking closely at a palettes on a tree.

David Rau: You know, it’s a combination. The artists that were part of it originally, the first couple of years were pretty obvious because they’re folks that show in the area, live in the area, are involved in the museum in a creative way one way or another. So that list was pretty easy. But throughout the year, sometimes staff members have a friend, or they go to a gallery and they send me a link. People who see the trees…any artists that they know all of a sudden they think it’d be perfect for that. You know, we give out my card and they send me a letter or a link and I just ask to see some of their work, so I know the caliber that they’re at.

It’s a sliding scale and some of them are famous artists that would be difficult to gather or really thrilled to have. Others are just really friends of the museum that it’s just really nice to have an object by them on the tree. It’s not a juried thing, it’s kind of a gut feeling. But it’s also a yes, yes, good, kind of thing.

Catherine Cooper: And what guidelines do you give to them?

David Rau: I send them a letter saying, “Thank you so much for being willing to donate.” You know, their paintings are very valuable. You know, even though it’s a smallish size in the open market some of them could get a lot of money for those. So I always thank them for their time and enthusiasm way in advance. We ask that they paint on the palette that we give them or if they need a surrogate, keep this shape and the size for the most part the same.

“The Griswold Museum” painted palette by Douglas Smith

So we have had a couple of ceramic artists that couldn’t make ceramics with the wooden palette, so they made ceramic versions of the palette where they match the size. And then we just say, because this kind of grows out of the history of artists coming to the Old Lyme art colony and painting on the doors and walls of Miss Florence’s house, that the palettes are kind of an extension of artists, living, contemporary artists, doing something for the museum and leaving it behind. So we ask them for maybe something that kind of represents them and their style, but also is appropriate to give Miss Florence as a gift. Some of them want to know if it has to be Christmas-y. And I say, “No, it is really open. It can be whatever you want as long as it’s kind of appropriate for Miss Florence and hang on a public tree.”

I mean, the very first year somebody asked me if they could do something pornographic and I said, “Well do you make pornographic art?” And they said, “No, I just wanted to know what the limits were,” and I’m like, “Well, don’t do that.” Something that’s appropriate for Miss Florence that’ll hang nicely on the tree.

The Florence Griswold house in the snow

Catherine Cooper: So you mentioned that the palettes are reminiscent of the panels in the dining room. Could you speak to that?

David Rau: Florence Griswold was a sea captain’s daughter. And so the Griswold house is an 1818 house that the captain bought for his young family and raised three daughters and one son. But when Miss Florence was 49 years old, she was alone in the world. The rest of her family had either passed on, or gone away. She was not married, and had no children. And so one of the only respectable things for her to do as a Victorian woman would be to run a boarding house out of her house.

But as luck would have it, in 1899 an artist from New York City, Henry Ward Ranger, stopped by, looking for a place to bring his fellow artists the following summer. And true to his word, in 1900 they showed up with a merry band of artists. They moved into her house and took over most of the public spaces, but they were wanting to make it look as much like an art colony house as they were experiencing in other places, Europe, and other places in the US. And so they asked her permission to paint on the doors of her house. And when the doors ran out, they painted on wooden panels that they installed in the dining room. And so from early on it was a museum, a house filled with objects and art to look at. And even though when Florence died and everything was sold off, all of her belongings, the doors and painted panels always stayed in situ.

Two doors with painted panels in a parlor of the Griswold house.

So they really are the jewels of the crown. And then the palette just kind of updates that with contemporary artists who still want to participate with the museum in this kind of artistic and creative way that’s, you know, long lasting and ongoing.

We probably need to tell our [artists] in the future that some of the materials need to be long lasting because we’ve gotten some that are 3D with stuff that is a little ephemeral. So, I’ll have to remind them that we want it to last as long as possible so that their supplies should be as durable as possible. You know, some folks have ribbons attached to theirs and those are long-lasting, but another artist decided to use dried flowers. And so those, you know, although we handle everything as if it’s a museum object, those things after time will slowly deteriorate. It would be nice to have things that are going to last a little bit longer than dried flowers, but we’ll see what we can do, and try to keep it as the artist intended for as long as possible.

Another thing that’s interesting is a lot of the artists, because they make the palettes for the deadline, they haven’t had the time to varnish them the way they need to do to really make it last a long time. Several artists have asked us to hang it on the tree for one season, and then give it to them so they can varnish it, let it dry, and then it’s ready for the following season; some of these things mutate. We actually got one one year that was still wet; the paint was so thick that we had to handle it with care, because it was still wet; but we got it on the tree and then positioned and high enough that nobody would touch it so that the oil paint eventually will dry. It’s always an adventure.

“Mountain”, painted palette by Eric Aho

Matthew Marshall: I think it was kind of a conceptual mountain scene. It was the peak of the mountain they had built up with layers of paint, the different shades of gray. And when they got to that white peak, the snowy peak, it was just pure wet oil paint.

David Rau: Several inches thick; it probably dried, not on the tree, but in the box in January, February, March, the following year. We think it’s dry now, though. It’s been several years.

Catherine Cooper: It can start creeping down the tree a little bit each year.

Matthew Marshall: Yeah, that one’s gotten a little lower each year.

David Rau: We tell people not to touch them anyway, but if they come out with a white finger…

Matthew Marshall: We know…

David Rau: They were busted.

A boy looks at one of the palette trees

Matthew Marshall: I think a lot of times when we go to hang, we look at the fragility of the palettes. I mean some of them are two-dimensional, strictly paint on a palette. And then we have the three-dimensional ones. The Guy Wolff pot palette is three dimensional, each pot is adhered to the palette separately. And then we have some made out of ceramic. We have some with these really lush ostrich feathers that just beg to be kind of pet. So we do try to keep that in mind, knowing that it’s an event that a lot of families come to and that we want to encourage young children to really spend time and to look and immerse themselves in these trees. But we also don’t want to taunt them with these little delectable three dimensional objects right at the base of the tree.

David Rau: Yeah, so it does play into it. It is a museum, though, and they could easily touch anything on the wall as well. So we have big signs reminding folks not to touch; and there’s enough staff wandering through that we do keep an eye on it. We’ll have four trees this season, we had three previously. But earlier years, where we had so many, we hung the palettes so high that we had to give out binoculars so that people could see them. Those we never worried about because those were very far away from where human hands could touch. But now we’re trying better to have them mostly all at eye level, where you look down or look up and you don’t have to strain your neck to see them. It’s a challenge, but it’s always a fun challenge.

Matthew Marshall: I think the sweet spot is around 70 palettes.

David Rau: So one year we went up to about 70 per tree and it was getting a little tight and we knew the next year to go to a whole other tree; it means then we’re going to go down to 40. Had to kind of do the math cause we didn’t want them to seem skimpy. They were very full last year, so I think with four this year and doing slightly larger additional ornaments, the trees should really be… Nothing will seem skimpy. It should seem like a beautiful presentation, but still room for next year and the year after.

Blue themed palette tree from 2016.

Catherine Cooper: How do you theme them each year? Who gets to decide?

David Rau: We never like the trees to look the same. Very often before we decorate the trees, we put tables around each of the trees and Matt and I kind of decide on which types of palettes and subjects are going on each one, and then we just sort, but we come up with a new sub theme each year. Matt kind of comes up with the colorways and the themes and I think he has got some interesting ideas for this year.

Matthew Marshall: Definitely. It’s interesting for us. We have been doing this for so many years now, both David and I obviously have been here since the inception of the palette trees. We see these each year, but we look at them every year with fresh eyes. It’s kind of like Christmas morning when we’re unpacking them and it’s like, ”Oh my gosh, look at this.” It’s so exciting. And sometimes you—I mean, I hate to use the word you forget about a palette, but it’s one that might not have been in such a prominent location last year. And so you see it and you’re like, “Wow, gosh, I forgot that this one was here. Let’s really try to build something around this one.” So it gets to be organic, I think. You know, as we’re bringing them out, the themes almost find us where we’re like, oh there’s a group of palettes that look like artists’ palettes where they put the deliberate color wave on it, or there are a group of palettes with the Griswold house featured on it, or they’re ones that are strictly Christmas themed. And we’ll kind of group those together, and that’s how we kind of decide.

David Rau: And then the other challenge is when we hang them—because some are horizontal, some of them are vertical, some of them are in between—not wanting to set up any kind of a rhythm on the tree that looks like, you know, a stripe. We have to mix and match them so that they play visually nice on the tree. The Christmas trees are artificial, but the branches are never exactly where you need them to be. So there’s a lot of bending up and bending down because it’s almost like laying out paintings on a wall, but we’re laying out palette shaped paintings on a giant cone. By the time we walk away, we feel like they look beautiful and they look balanced. I don’t think it’s as effortless as it actually looks. We try our best not to let them see us sweat.

Catherine Cooper: And do you close the galleries down while you’re doing this?

Matthew Marshall: We do the setup of the actual bare tree on Monday when we’re closed to the public. So they’re pre-fluffed, they’re pre-lit. The tables are set up so that on Tuesday morning David and I come in bright eyed and bushy tailed and we say, all right, today is the day. We lay out the palettes and we are open to the public. We use this as an opportunity to educate the public as we’re decorating. A lot of times we’ll have folks that come in and say, “What are these? Are these for sale? Is this a fundraiser?” So-

David Rau: “Is this a Christmas Bazaar?”

Matthew Marshall: Yeah. No. So it’s a great opportunity for us to talk to visitors. We’re a little more quiet in November. Folks are waiting to visit until the Magic of Christmas officially opens. We usually do set up the week of Thanksgiving or the week just prior to. A lot of folks have so many other things on their plates that last thing that they’re thinking about doing is taking a leisurely stroll through the galleries. So we tend to not be too busy, so we’re able to really focus a lot. But we are open to the public in theory.

Family visit to see Miss Florence’s Artist Trees

David Rau: But we put out a sign explaining what we’re doing and a lot of folks love seeing art or exhibitions being made. It’s almost like a behind the scenes. With the palettes on the tables, it doesn’t look like a construction site. It just looks like something exciting is happening and you can tell that people really kind of enjoy the special pre-look that they get. We ask those people to come back to see the magic when it’s done.

Catherine Cooper: Do you have people returning year after year?

Matthew Marshall: We really do see it become a tradition where multiple generations come in year after year and kind of share in what we call the Magic of Christmas. I can say, personally, there’s one family I can think of immediately, where I saw them come in when their children were toddlers and now they’re off to college. I’ve gotten to know this family through the tradition of them coming in and taking their Christmas card photo, and that feels so special to me. And it really kind of embodies the whole spirit of Christmas and the concept of the community coming together at an art museum in particular. It’s just, it’s wonderful to see that reaction.

David Rau: And that was kind of the impetus for the book because the same families come back every year and they try to remember which ones have they seen before, which ones are new. And because they’re so attached to these palettes and this tradition, they come out and say, “Has the museum ever thought about doing a book or doing some kind of publication, because we would buy one, because we just love this so much.” And you know, we realized early on, because it’s an ongoing growing collection, how do you do a book when it’s still growing? But we thought the 16th year was a good measure and also when we finally got over 200 palettes we thought, well we’ll at least do the first book. I’m not saying a series is coming, but at least the book is now officially done. But there are more palettes that are still being made, so it’s a moment in time.

Two pages of “Miss Florence’s Artist Trees”.

Matthew Marshall: Each palette has its own page and just has the basic tombstone information underneath it. It has been met with great joy.

David Rau: They’re selling; they’re selling and they’re selling. I mean one of our challenges is that several of the artists, not requested by us, but they would paint on both sides. The palettes have two sides, a front and a back, and during the Christmas season we didn’t do anything special with those. We just hung one side facing out, and one side hiding in, which is kind of interesting because one of the panels up in our boarding house is double sided and the artists themselves turned the one to face the wall. And so there’s always at least one hidden. So, our hidden palettes make sense and we try our best to remember which one was facing out each year. With the book, those double sided ones got both of their sides pictured and shown. So, A) It’s good for their record keeping that the artist has both of their donations represented, but also during the show years when one side is facing and people are dying to know what the other side is, the book is a great opportunity for them.

The new book, “Miss Florence’s Artist Trees: Celebrating a Tradition of Painted Palettes”

Catherine Cooper: Did you re-photograph all of the palettes?

Matthew Marshall: We did. That was an intense couple of days, I must say. We hired a professional photographer who we work with quite frequently. Having to photograph 200 plus objects in matter of two days, each one requiring different lights set up, some of them having reflective surfaces, some being three dimensional, some being two dimensional, some being two sided. The photographer himself deserves an award because he put up with a lot those two days. It was well worth it, oh my goodness, when he started to send some of the images my way, just seeing the crispness, the clarity, it was amazing to know that we now have archival records of these palettes that are so true to life. That is just a great, you know, side effect of the book project. It just allows the palette project to live on forever and also we can use those photos in other manners other than just this, this book.

But there was a lot, a lot went into the actual design aspect of the book. And one thing that I love about it is the spiral bound binding because when we were designing it, we realized that if each palette was going to have its own page, we were going to have over 200 pages in this book, not including an index, not including a forward, not including the covers. So we knew it was going to be a thick book. Working for a museum, and we’re all about preservation, the last thing I wanted someone to do was buy a brand new book and have to break the binding so that on page 86 they could see their favorite palette. Having a spiral bound book, you’re able to lay it completely flat. It was a very conscious design decision to go with the spiral bound.

Catherine Cooper: So I do have to ask this because it’s completely unfair. Do you have a favorite palette or set of palettes that you look forward to opening every year?

David Rau: I’ll let Matt tell you, but first I have to say that both Matt and I are artists on the tree. That took a little soul searching, like, “is that appropriate?” So we can’t say those, if those are our favorites. We won’t mention our own palettes. But you’d love to say they’re like your children and you love all of them the same. What is amazing, though, is I do have some favorites and I have some of least favorites, but I’ve also had folks show me or point at something that I might not like as much and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, that’s my favorite.” So I realize that it really is up to people’s personal opinion and some of the ones that you’d think “Really, I don’t know…” people say, “Oh my gosh, I look forward to seeing that one every year.” So, go figure.

Matthew Marshall: Definitely. If I had to choose, I would say some of my favorites are-

David Rau: Are you going to pick mine?

Matthew Marshall: I don’t know…The Christmas themed ones are always something special for me because being the designer that helps design the trees, I look at them as part of a Christmas display. So for me, personally, it’s linked directly to Christmas. And I love the angels in particular. I just think putting an angel on a tree is so quintessential New England Christmas, and that to me is always a special part. Bringing the angels out of the boxes and putting them on the tree. So, that’s something I look forward to every year.

“Untitled” [Paper Snowflakes Trompe l’Oeil], painted palette by Michael Theise

David Rau: If I had to pick one…early on there was a trompe-l’oeil palette that really fools your eye. It looks like an old palette made out of old wood with the paint on it and then some snowflakes cut out of paper and then hanging on them by thread. Well, the artist lives pretty far away and I didn’t want to burden them by having to come all the way to the museum, so I actually met the artist in a Home Depot parking lot one night halfway between the museum and their studio. And I was very gracious and thanked them, but I really thought I was looking at a crafty palette that he just cut out some snowflakes and stuck it on there. Cause in the light of the Home Depot it really looked like just a palette with some decoupage snowflakes. And it wasn’t until I got back to the museum in good light that I saw that every aspect of that, the paper snowflakes, and the thread, and even the ancient wood was all painted by him. It’s really kind of a masterful piece. That one’s always been kind of near and dear because he didn’t hesitate to say yes when I asked if he would consider doing a palette for us. I think that just shows not only their eagerness to share their own work, but in their universe, the museum seems to be a very special place and they can acknowledge that by this kind of wonderful donation of a little bit of themselves.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much.

David Rau: Well, you’re also doing us a favor because we’re talking about the book, talking about the new palettes is getting us revved up for our 17th year of decorating Miss Florence’s palette trees.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Guests: David Rau and Matthew Marshall at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Subject: Inception and design of Miss Florence's Palette Trees and their new book highlighting the collection of over 200 artistsâ€, palettes. NCPTT: Catherine Cooper

November 15, 2019

90. Building a Career in Historic Masonry (Episode 90)

Transcript

Preservation mason Teddy Pierre working on Africa House at Melrose Plantation.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Parks Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Theodore Pierre. In this podcast, they talk about Pierre’s career as an historic brick mason in Louisiana.

Theodore Pierre: I was born into it. My dad, in 1971 was cited by the local chapter of the AIA in New Orleans as craftsmen of the year. He had that kind of reputation. He was respected. I’m his namesake, because my name is Theodore Pierre, Jr. And I was his only son, and I just happened to really like what he did. He built his own house. We had a working fireplace. We had a fountain in the yard. He was a major influence in my life. My mother on the other hand, was a woman with some education. She had education. So, I was caught in a kind of a nexus between the physical work, my dad’s occupation, and my mother who wanted me to do something academic. At least get a college degree.

But she didn’t have any problem with me emulating my dad. It was just something that I did. From the day I was 12 years old, he told me, “All right, tomorrow morning you’re coming out to work with me.” And from that point on, I worked with him every Saturday, every weekend, during the summers. I had a built in job and that continued all the way through the time when I graduated from college. The day I finished college, I handed them my degree and I said, “Okay. For the next three or four years I’m going to be your apprentice. I’m going to work for you every day. No more school getting in the way of me learning what I could learn from you.”

And he this fabulous repertoire of projects that he could select on his own. To decide, well, I’m going to go do a fountain over, here or I’m going to do a fireplace over here. And it wasn’t until much later in my life that I realized what he was doing was he was selecting those projects to give me experience in those areas. Yeah, we could’ve just done brick veneer every day. And some people did that, and they became really good at it. Fast and accurate and so on. But that’s not what he did. It was also a turnkey operation. We get a job, we did all our own site prep, all our grading. That’s where I learned all of that, the whole schmear. And I learned it from the ground up, basically the ground up, the way craftsmen taught their sons in the 1960s and 70s. That’s what my dad was doing with me.

I worked with him for about five years. And then decided I wanted to go and do some other things. And then I went back to it. I just decided, I tried working in an office for awhile. Because, I had a degree in architecture and of course, there was always the idea of me perhaps starting an architectural firm and that sort of thing. Just wasn’t for me because I hated working indoors. It just didn’t work for me. Not only the working indoors, but the finished product. I like the physical finished product and I like to be able to claim the finished product. That’s just the way I’m built.

Jason Church: So, how did you get into historic masonry?

Theodore Pierre: My dad had that sort of bent to him. And then it was just appealing to me as well. It was a way for me to distinguish myself from other bricklayers. Because some of those guys found it very useful and financially rewarding to just do one kind of work. And some guys, all they did was brick floors. Some guys, all they did was walls. But, because we had that variety in my dad’s practice, I began to find out, and it was just so interesting. Because there was an incident in my life where after Hurricane Betsy, maybe five or six years after Hurricane Betsy, my dad got a call to go out to Evergreen Plantation. And Evergreen has the largest collection of slave quarters, intact, in this part of the country. Or maybe in the country at large. And so the work that needed to be done, because the hurricane was so destructive in that part of the country. Fireplaces, brick piers, and that sort of thing. And all of them using soft red brick. They were historically significant structures. It was very interesting because Evergreen Plantation is located maybe two miles from where my dad was born and grew up in Edgard, Louisiana. So, he was going back home when he went out there. And I saw how that all worked out, and I saw that the volume of work, the decisions that have to be made and so forth. And I just found it very appealing. Plus, I’ve always been attracted to history. Even as an architecture student, I liked the historic work more than contemporary work. I like the idea of taking something that once was intact and worked very well. It went into decline and I like to be the one who brought it back to life, is the way I think about it and thought about it.

And so, then what happened was my father passed away, and I got the call to come back to Evergreen. And in many cases I was redoing work that my father had done because my father had used the inappropriate materials. And I could see the damage that was being done to the bricks. So I had a chance to redo some of the work that my dad had done. I found that very appealing. And Jane Boddie is the woman who runs that plantation for the Stream family, I think. Jane Boddie was very appreciative of what I did. And I also had an apprentice with me at the time, two guys who were part of the preservation resource center project that I was involved with. And I brought them out there. After that program shut down, I left them as their instructor, and wound up going back into the field.

And one of the first projects was this Evergreen Plantation project. There are all kinds of ties that go along with it. But my dad, what he did wasn’t purposely done. It was just a matter of the amount of information at the time, just wasn’t that pervasive as it is now. There’s no excuse for people using inappropriate materials today. There’s just no excuse because we know too much about what’s being done and there are too many organizations that are screaming at you and saying, “Don’t use Portland cement base mortar on low fire brick.” You just don’t do that. And if you do it, you really are making a statement counter to what everybody else in the world is telling you.

Jason Church: So in your career, tell us about a project that stands out that you have enjoyed the most or you feel like you’ve given the most to.

Teddy Pierre instructing volunteers at a HOPE Project in Chalmette National Cemetery.

Theodore Pierre: It’s a small project, but because of what I was able to bring to the project, and that was the Metoyer Tomb restoration. Started off as a fairly typical job. I got a call from a local organization, the Cane River Heritage Area, to come and look at restoring this tomb. It had lots of problems. It was an 1853 structure that had been mistreated over the years. Soft, red brick, brick roof … a gable shaped roof, two wythes. It had plaster that was slapped all over it, Portland cement based plaster. Theodore Pierre: One of the jobs they wanted me to do was to remove the plaster, get back to the original brick, and finish it off with a lime wash, a lime paint finish. In order to do that, we had to take that Portland cement plaster off. With that self-supporting gable brick roof, once you removed a single brick out of that system, the roof was compromised. Well, it wound up collapsing. But again, we kind of anticipated that would happen. What made it fun for me was the fact that when it came time to rebuild that structure, I had two choices.

One was to build a plywood form, leave one end of the gable open, insert the form, build the roof, and then remove the form. Well, I had three choices. I could have just left the plywood in there and let it deteriorate. But, what I just determined, I said, over time what’s going to happen with weather beating on this thing, It’s gonna fail again. Because one of the things I found was evidence of there having been a failure in the past. That the roof had probably collapsed.

Well, I came up with the idea of a metal A-frame that would fit inside. You’d never see it, but it would be total support for that roof. There happened to have been a very convenient little shelf on the inside. The frame would sit on that shelf and support the roof. I was told by more than one person, “Oh, the state will never give you approval for doing something like that.” What I wound up with was an aluminum—I decided to go with the aluminum because, the aluminum wouldn’t rust and it would be lighter in weight than doing it out of steel.

Well, I came up with a design and so forth, a price and so on. And then I wrote a letter to the State Historic Preservation Office, and we got the approval. And, by the grace of God, one of the people who was involved with the project … was Mr. Jason Church. He was asked by the State Historic Preservation Office, because they don’t have resident brick masons in their office, to act as a consultant on the project and give his input. So, I got a call from Jason Church one day. I was on the job site and he vetted me. He asked me a lot of questions about what I was proposing and I got approval to do it. And so I was able to build that thing, set it up. And now I feel as though that project will be at least intact for at least 100—150 years. Who knows how long it will be there?

And maybe we have started another way of thinking about these projects, so that you wouldn’t go back with that same system. But you would still wind up with the same aesthetic. That was the most interesting project that I’ve done—so far. The next one is the African House. That is the one. But I’m not finished that one yet. That’s another story for another day.

Jason Church: For people listening to this, what would you say to either masons that are already learning the trade or people who are thinking about getting into the trade? What would you say to them?

Teddy Pierre lifting a headstone out of the ground before resetting.

Theodore Pierre: I’d say you find a craftsman whose work you find of value. You may have to go to an organization that can assist you in evaluating what you’re looking at. And I’m talking about an organization like the Preservation Resource Center or the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Who could give you some advice on how to evaluate a craftsman. And then don’t be in a hurry to go out and do the work on your own. Be a student for as long as you possibly can. Because you will be a student for the very rest of your life. Item one.

The other thing is, whenever there are conferences, in other parts of the country, make yourself available. You need money, you need a few dollars to get yourself to at least one of those conferences. Once you get the bug, you will learn so much. There’e so many people who are doing wonderful things. And there’s a network of folks who want you to succeed. Because, they want to make sure that the finished product is one that’s going to last for the next 150 years or so. That’s the most important thing, is to find that network. And find one of those craft categories, they’re probably 10 to 20 of them, that best fits what you are suited for, what you like to do. And don’t be afraid to experiment.

If you’re a bricklayer, put yourself in a position where you need to learn a little bit more about carpentry or plastering. Don’t be closed minded about what a preservation craftsman is all about. Because, there was a lot of cross pollenization in the past, and it’s reflected in the work that’s done. And you want that latitude that allows you to be a resource to the people in your area. Also … it’s really important to invest, and that’s what I’m talking about, is to invest your time. Oh.

To invest your time in becoming an expert. And all an expert is, is a person who knows more than the next person. That’s all that qualifies one person as an expert over another person. You want to be an expert. And when you talk to a potential client, many of those people who will be your clients have already been online. They already know what vocabulary, what mindset you should have. And you must be able to communicate that to them. Otherwise, you won’t get the job. They’re gonna keep looking until they find someone who meets that criteria that they set up.

So, that’s a lot to think about. But, that’s the way it works in any career area. It is in fact a career area. And you have to think about it in those terms. Yes, you get dirty. But you also take a shower. I mean, your hands get dirty, but you also get an opportunity to do something unique. You realize that what you do cannot be outsourced. It starts and stops with you.

Jason Church: It’s a good statement. Well, Teddy, thanks for talking with us today. We will talk to you again when you finish Africa House.

Theodore Pierre: Africa House, yes sir. I got a big story to tell you about Africa House.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Jason Church with Theodore (Teddy) Pierre Teddy Pierre is a historic brick mason

October 24, 2019

89. Conserving Captain America: Using Klucel M on Comic Books at the Library of Congress (Episode 89)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Parks Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Cathie Magee, and Michiko Adachi. In this podcast, they talk about Magee and Adachi’s efforts in conserving six original Captain America comic books.

Cathie Magee: Well we did the project as interns at the Library of Congress. We were both there as third year graduate fellows. It’s a part of our graduate education to do a third year externship for our conversation degrees. We had both gone to the Library of Congress. I was in the rare book lab and Michiko was in the paper lab. This was kind of a joint project between labs, which happens sometimes. It was the curator who approached conservation?

Michiko Adachi: Well the supervisor, Claire Dekle, who’s a senior book conservator; I think she thought it was a good joint project to do for us. That’s how she brought it to us. It originally came from the serials division who takes care of the comic books at the Library of Congress.

Cathie Magee: Library of Congress has thousands. How many hundreds of thousands?

Michiko Adachi: 131,000?

Cathie Magee: A lot of comic books. I don’t know how many have been treated, but not many.

Michiko Adachi: Not many. I believe not many come to the conservation division.

Captain America Vol. 2, No. 1-6, 1941. Before treatment, opening to No 1. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: This was kind of a pilot project for the lab in a way. One of their hopes for us was to have us develop a sort of protocol for addressing the materials. Most of the comic books are printed on newsprint, which is extremely acidic. I think most people know it doesn’t age well at all. They can be quite fiddly to repair. Some of the challenges are getting tide lines in the paper.

If you use an adhesive that has a lot of water in it, if it dries, you end up with these visible rings of degradation products that form around where the water was. That’s an aesthetic that we want to avoid. We don’t want to cause those. Then the other challenge is just, handling the paper can be extremely delicate. Newsprint as it ages tends to start cracking and then flaking and little pieces will just break off. They are a real challenge to conserve, which is probably one of the reasons why not many of them came to the Library.

Michiko Adachi: Also, the important thing is that the treatment has to be streamlined because there are multiple pages in each comic book. That was also an important factor to consider.

Captain America Vol. 2, No. 1-6, 1941. Before treatment, ¾ view. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: They end up being very time consuming because they’re 64 pages in a comic book. The project that we were given were six comic books. They were the first six printed Captain America comic books from 1941. It’s not the original art, it’s just the printed comic books. They had been stapled together through the spine. Each comic book has its own section of newsprint stapled through the fold.

Then those six books had been stapled through the spine with these big, heavy duty staples. I think there were 10 of them. Then that sort of makeshift text block was glued into a case binding. It’s a really common library style binding that’s cloth covered. It was really only bound with adhesive. Getting that off was fairly easy, because it was practically falling off because of the glue had decomposed.

Getting the comic books apart was one of the first steps. One of our supervisors, Claire Dekle, did that part by gently lifting the legs of the staples. She kind of sawed them off because we didn’t want to just lift the comic books up because we really feared we would continue to damage them. Then once they were apart, we could really see that the staples had obviously caused a lot of perforations in the spine.

Captain America Vol. 2, No. 1-6, 1941. Before treatment, opening to No 2. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Michiko Adachi: You couldn’t open the comic book from its natural binding because of the staples.

Cathie Magee: That’s why we had just found them in the first place. We should backtrack a little and say that the intention of this project was to treat these as research materials. They’re obviously not circulating, but they are requested by researchers really frequently to be viewed. The researchers get to sit in the reading rooms and leaf through the comic books.

They could not do that with these books in this state, because the paper was very fragile and the binding, these six things stapled together, it couldn’t open wide enough to be read fully. We really feared that if somebody tried to force it open, they’d end up causing a lot of damage. The curator really wanted these in a state where they could be handled safely by researchers.

Michiko Adachi: Also, because it’s the Library of Congress. It does have to be accessible to the public. That’s also important.

Cathie Magee: It is their mission.

Jason Church: Do you know the history of those bindings?

Cathie Magee: No. I don’t think we ever knew who did that. I don’t think it was believed that that happened at Library of Congress. Elsie has been known to rebind things in library bindings and lots of libraries do that, where the books are meant to be more functional than art pieces.

Michiko Adachi: I believe most comic books are stored the way they come in.

Cathie Magee: Yeah. That happens in conservation. You end up discovering some work someone else did, and you have no idea who, but you’re silently cursing them, whoever they are.

Jason Church: Once you got the bindings apart, what was the treatment for the individual comic books?

Michiko Adachi: The papers exhibited a lot of tears, losses. We weren’t gonna fill the losses, because that would have been too time consuming and visually just bridging it would have been enough. It was mostly mending the tears so that they could be handled again.

Cathie Magee: We’d call it stabilization.

Michiko Adachi: Yes.

Cathie Magee: Rather than aesthetic compensation.

Michiko Adachi: Yes.

Michiko Adachi applying test mends to King of the Royal Mounted. Image by Cathie Magee, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: For that we used a solvent reactivated tissue that Michiko and I developed. That was our main role in this development of the protocol for treating these things. I mentioned the tide lines and Claire Dekle had done some testing on the inks and discovered that some of them were soluble in or sensitive to water or ethanol. We didn’t want to just put down wheat starch pastements.

We didn’t want to use a paper that was too thick because that obscures the media. We need these to be legible. We also needed something that would flex. We had to find the right adhesive. We have a standard set of adhesives that are pretty common in almost every paper lab. We can give you a list of those. That includes the wheat starch paste and methylcellulose and some other things, synthetic adhesives.

We tried a number of those. Library of Congress conservation makes its own repair tissues ahead of time, just in bulk, because we go through them so much. We had tried some of those with different adhesives. They just didn’t work the way we wanted them to. They were a little too opaque, and a lot of them were too stiff. They popped off when the paper was flexed. I should also mention that we …

Michiko Adachi: The adhesion strength wasn’t that great.

Cathie Magee: Yes, that’s the reason. To do all of this testing, we were given a discarded comic book from the serials division at LC. It was artificially aged by the preservation and research …

Michiko Adachi: Testing.

Test mends applied to King of the Royal Mounted. Image by Cathie Magee, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: … testing division. Yes, thank you. It was from 1956, so it was a little bit later. They put it in the aging oven for a while to get the paper to a state that was closer to Captain America. Then we used that to do all of our testing. We have this lovely image of these different strips all laid out with the different adhesives. We had settled on one particular kind of paper just to knock one variable out. It’s a paper that we’re familiar with. It’s a machine made Japanese paper. It’s very thin. We were comfortable using that.

Then we were experimenting with these adhesives, and then reactivating those adhesives with different solvents. After a few test runs, we decided that what we were using wasn’t working. Sylvia had this idea to try Klucel M. Sylvia Albro, who’s the senior paper conservator at LC. She had gotten a little baggy for us and we made some up. It’s something I had used previously at the Walters Art Museum, where I am now. I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.”

Michiko Adachi: I think Klucel G is a common adhesive used in book and paper conservation, but there is a paper out by Feller that Klucel M yellows a little bit more. I think maybe that is why people have shied away from M, but because of the higher molecular weight, higher tact, we thought we would give it a shot. We did like Klusel G. It was just the adhesion wasn’t strong enough.

Cathie Magee: It was nice and opaque compared to the other.

Michiko Adachi: Nice and transparent.

Cathie Magee: I’m sorry. Thank you. It was nice and transparent compared to the other adhesives, which were a little more opaque. We made up a new set of testing papers. It’s a simple process to make this stuff. You just paste it out and lay on your paper and it’s done.

Michiko Adachi: Yeah, we found that Klucel M worked.

Cathie Magee testing the solubility of the printing inks on Captain America. Image by Michiko Adashi, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: Yes, it worked brilliantly with ethanol, which was wonderful for us because that really minimized the tide line formation. Really, it was just wherever there were two inks printed on top of each other, like green is yellow over blue or something.

Michiko Adachi: Was sensitive to ethanol and the latter. The other inks weren’t sensitive to ethanol. That was the solvent we decided on using.

Cathie Magee: We did end up toning the mends with acrylic. We had a spray booth in Library of Congress, and we have an airbrush. We could airbrush our acrylic paint mixtures onto the paper to tone them first. I think that kind of gave that thin paper a little bit of extra structural integrity because it’s so thin. Klucel M is really viscous. We were only using a 2% solution. It’s really quite thick.

Michiko Adachi: And because the paper was white, toning really helped to integrate the mend into the medium.

Cathie Magee: Exactly. We could put it over that colored printed material and you can barely see it. It’s really fantastic. I was delighted how well it worked.

Jason Church: Once the pages were mended, what was next for the comic books?

Michiko Adachi: Because it needed to be handled, the decision was made that each sheet would be encapsulated in a polyester film. It won’t be in its original form. It will look a little bit different, but that is the decision that was made. We had to encapsulate each sheet. We actually had to make the mylar encapsulation too.

Cathie Magee: We did. This is high quality. These were custom cut, by us, by hand.

Michiko Adachi: Welded with an electro-, what, oh no, ultrasonic welder.

Cathie Magee: The ultrasonic welder, made by Bill Mentor himself. We did have to cut the comic books down the center fold, which is a step beyond dis-binding.

Michiko Adachi: It’s that the ideal, but if we kept it in a bi-folio form, you wouldn’t have been able to read it in the right order in this binding.

Cathie Magee: Yes. Okay. Let me clarify that. If we had left the comic books stapled together through the center fold, that fold would have eventually failed. I guarantee it because the paper was just so fragile. It had started to tear along that folder anyway. It was really only a matter of time. You can go back and mend those any number of times, but then you risk in doing a lot of damage to the newsprint.

We had observed that this newsprint was so fragile, that if it flexed at all, it really risked exacerbating the existing tears. We really needed to keep them flat. In order to do that, each page was separated from its conjoin and then it was encapsulated between two sheets of Melanex that was much, much wider than the … It’s smaller than eight and a half by eleven, but it ends up the finished book has a margin of 11 centimeters. That’s where the pages flex.

You can turn each page without actually bending the page. You’re bending the Melanex as you flip the page. Then the rigidity of the Melanex really supports the comic book page. These can be accessed really, really easily by researchers. They do have to wear cotton gloves, but that’s to prevent getting fingerprints on the Melanex, which is nice. It’s got a nice margin around each page too, so they have space to grip the Melanex without actually even getting a finger on the, on the newsprint.

Jason Church: How will this be rebound?

Captain America No 1., 1941. After treatment in new binding. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: Each individual issue was given its own binding. We call it a scrapbook style binding. We took this stack of newsprint pages in Melanex and actually, we stack them and clamp them and then drilled holes with a drill to create sewing holes. We used a linen thread to sew them together. A lot of people do it with posts, with metal posts, like regular scrapbooks. These were actually a little too thin for that. We had to improvise and use linen thread. We made covers out of laminated binders board and covered them in a lovely blue cloth that the curator picked out, because she thought it was appropriate.

Michiko Adachi: For Captain America.

Cathie Magee: Yes. We made our own labels and we bound each one in a big scrapbook. One of the trade-offs is that it’s gone from being this little tiny book object to six, big, hefty scrapbooks. The storage space has gone from this to this, which is something to consider when this kind of treatment is proposed for future objects.

Jason Church: Is this extreme treatment because of the extreme condition that these first six Caps were, or is this something you foresee for other comics in the collection?

Michiko Adachi: I think it was because it was an exceptional … Yeah, the extreme condition, because it was just so deteriorated. The paper was just so brittle.

Cathie Magee: I think this is something that we would avoid if we could, and maybe it would depend on a case by case basis if something was really popular but in bad condition, then this is the route they would ask us to go.

Jason Church: I know you said that these were frequently requested. Do you think the recent popularity of Captain America may have led to this treatment as well?

Michiko Adachi: Yeah, I would assume so.

Cathie Magee: That seems entirely likely. Yeah. These books are available to anyone who requests them.

Michiko Adachi: Yes, yes, again, because the Library of Congress is a public library.

Cathie Magee: Yes. Government institutions.

Michiko Adachi: Yes, it has to be accessible to everyone really.

Jason Church: Very important question. While you’re doing all this work, did you read them?

Cathie Magee: Some of them.

Michiko Adachi: Yes.

Cathie Magee: We have a lot of great pictures of Hitler getting punched in the face.

Jason Church: Yes.

Cathie Magee: I am not a comic book fan, so it was a surprise for me to realize that there’s the Captain America story and then there’s all these other characters that I have never-

Michiko Adachi: Yeah, Caveman and Tuk.

Cathie Magee: It’s a very 1941 cultural aesthetic that was eyebrow raising from a 21st century perspective.

Michiko Adachi: It was interesting. I didn’t know Captain America’s shield wasn’t round.

Cathie Magee: Oh yeah. It started out as not round.

Jason Church: Until later.

Cathie Magee: No, it’s like by issue three or something. It’s a round …

Michiko Adachi: It was interesting to see how he was depicted. Some of the volumes his jaw is more angular, like strong, whereas some of them are softer.

Cathie Magee: There’s that one issue where he disguises himself as a woman.

Michiko Adachi: Oh, that must have been yours.

Cathie Magee: That was one of mine, yeah.

Michiko Adachi: Yeah, it was funny. He had eyebrows over his masks.

Cathie Magee: Really? I hadn’t noticed that.

Michiko Adachi: That’s how they depicted it.

Cathie Magee (left) and Michiko Adachi (right) applying test mends to King of the Royal Mounted. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: Yeah. We should also mention that, there were six issues. Michiko and I each treated two. Then one each was treated by Claire and Sylvia. We were constantly consulting with them on our work, and the direction we were going. What was too much? Where should we draw the line in terms of mending? Then ultimately what the goals were from this mending material.

I should also mention that the reason we presented this poster at this conference, which theme is innovation and treatment is that not a lot of people will use Klucel M because of the study that Michiko mentioned. But the PRTD lab at LC is doing more research on that adhesive, and we included some of that in our poster, but they’re going to continue that, to investigate the degradation qualities of Klucel M. It’ll be really interesting to see what they find and maybe more people will start using this stuff as a result.

Jason Church: You said this was an internship. Where are you headed or where are you at now?

Cathie Magee: I’m at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, working on medieval books.

Michiko Adachi: I am a fellow at the MFA Boston, in the Asian conservation studio.

Jason Church: Well hopefully we can talk to each of you at a those locations on projects you’re doing in the future.

Cathie Magee: Yeah.

Michiko Adachi: Yeah.

Jason Church: Thank you very much for talking with us.

Michiko Adachi: Thank you.

Cathie Magee: Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Jason Church with Cathie Magee and Michiko Adachi Increasing visitor accessibility while preserving the character of the historic landscape.

October 8, 2019

88. Paths through History: Accessible Trails at Voyagers National Park (Episode 88)

Transcript

Four men, three in NPS uniforms, standing over a trail under construction. Left to right, Mason Meyer, Jamie, Callais, Jason Christenson, and David Driapsa on the accessible trail under construction at the comfort station at Ellsworth Rock Garden, Voyagers National Park.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Debbie Smith as she speaks with landscape architect, David Driapsa, FASLA, and Jason Christensen, a maintenance worker at Voyageurs National Park. In this podcast, they will talk about increasing visitor accessibility while preserving the character of the historic landscape.

View of raised flower beds and stone sculptures on the granite outcropped hillside Ellsworth Rock Gardens (David Driapsa, 2010)

Debbie Smith: David and Jason, thank you for joining me today. David, could you tell me a little bit about Ellsworth Rock Gardens?

David Driapsa: Ellsworth Rock Gardens is an historic district in Voyageurs National Park. It was the summer home of Jack and Elsa Ellsworth, and they spent a number of years here, decades, building these beautiful gardens of rock. They laid up glacier rock on the granite outcroppings and then planted flowers in raised beds. It became known as the showcase of Lake Kabetogama.

Debbie Smith: How long did it take him to build the gardens?

David Driapsa: I’m going by recall, but I’m thinking something like 20 years or some more possibly.

Debbie Smith: Do you know when he started to build them?

David Driapsa: I know that he stopped in about 1966. He worked on these gardens between 1944 and 1966.

Debbie Smith: Why is there a need for this new trail? I know there are a number of trails here already.

Rock sculptures on a section of granite outcropping Several of Ellsworth’s rock sculptures on the granite outcropping.

David Driapsa: Well, the real need, Debbie, is for a universal accessibility, so people with maneuverability disabilities can access this historic landscape equally as anyone who is mobile.

Debbie Smith: I noticed when I came here there was very steep steps at the current landing.

David Driapsa: Yes, there is and I counted those. There are fifteen risers, which would make it very difficult or impossible for some people to access.

Debbie Smith: I’m interested in this trail because it goes through an historic district. How is the trail going to blend in with that historic landscape?

David Driapsa: Well, that is the beauty of the preservation treatment. It is a solid trail that will be wheelchair accessible, and the top surface is grass just like the surrounding area. So, it does not impair the visual quality of the historic resource.

Debbie Smith: Jason, can you tell me, I’ve seen some of the construction documents and plans that David created. Can you tell me about the layering in the lawn?

Construction drawing showing the layering of the basecoat, geotextile, geogrid, paver cells, sandy loam, and turf. Path Construction, Ellsworth Rock Garden. (David Driapsa, 2011)

Jason Christensen: Sure. We first we flagged the lawn where the trail is going to go. Next, we dug down 10 inches till we found a good solid soil to work off of, and then we brought in a sandy clay material that we packed in layers. After that, we lay a separation fabric of a geotextile material over the new soil, which is basically the base layer for the trail, the foundation of the trail. And then, over that it’s the geogrid, they look like big cup holders. That’s the final grade, and the grass grows through the geogrid when it’s all said and done, to match the surrounding grass.

Debbie Smith: I can see some grass in the grid coming through, and I understand it was seeded this year. Is that correct?

The plan view site plan depicts the three trails. Section of the Accessible Path Plan, Ellsworth Rock Gardens (David Driapsa, 2011), with color added to show path through the lawn (purple), comfort station path (yellow) and switchback path from dock (red).

Jason C.: Yes. It was seeded about a month and a half ago.

Debbie Smith: It’s amazing how much grass has already grown through.

Jason Christensen: Yes, it’s coming up real nice.

Debbie Smith: I understand you started in May. When do you hope to complete the project?

Jason Christensen: Well, also involved in the project are new his-and-hers comfort stations, a big dock with much more dock space, and a switchback trail for accessibility up the slope. We hope to be done with the accessibility part of the project by this fall (2018), and to complete the project we’re looking at probably mid-summer (2019) to have the dock in and the comfort station built, and everything wrapped up.

Debbie Smith: Jason, I noticed the difference in the trail. Around the location for the comfort station, it’s a crushed gravel. Can you tell me how this construction is different from the trail?

Jason Christensen: The trail edge is outlined with 5 x 6” green-treated timbers that we fill with a crusher fine, so it’s a real good solid surface.

Debbie Smith: Does it compact down with time?

View of the walkway lined with timbers Compacted crushed stone walkway at the site of the new comfort station

Jason Christensen: Yes, and we run compactors over it so it’s completely solid and crowned in the middle so it sheds water off of the trail.

Debbie Smith: Is it something that you will have to maintain by continually rolling over, or will it just stay in place?

Jason Christensen: You might be looking at maintenance-free for 10 to 15 years. You might have to occasionally add bit more gravel, but they maintain themselves pretty well.

Debbie Smith: I understand that at I. W. Stevens historic site within Voyageurs National Park, there’s a similar type of a trail that’s been recently put in. It’s also handicap accessible. David, could you tell me a little about that project? I understand you also designed that site.

David Driapsa: Yes, I.W. Stevens Resort is another visitor day-use historic site, and the main trails are handicap accessible. There are backcountry trails that are not accessible, but the main ones leading from the boat dock all the way over to the picnic area are accessible. Even the boat dock is accessible, so the visitor gets an overview of how Mr. Stevens lived from his home to his sauna and the lawns and the cabins.

Compacted gravel path lined with timbers passing through mature pine trees Accessible trail at I.W. Stevens day-use area.

Debbie Smith: These are two examples of where handicap-accessible trails have been constructed at Voyageurs. Do you know if there are more planned?

Jason Christensen: Yes, recently at the Ash River Visitor Center where they constructed a nice handicap-accessible trail, and picnic areas at Rainy Lake City and Camp Marston on Rainy Lake. There are plenty more sites to come.

Debbie Smith: Thank you both for talking with me today.

David Driapsa: It’s a pleasure being here.

Debbie Smith: Thank you. Bye now.

David Driapsa: Bye.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

with David Driapsa and Jason Christensen Increasing visitor accessibility while preserving the character of the historic landscape.

August 12, 2019

87. Shining Silver Pt. 2: Conserving Objects for the RISD Museum Gorham Silver Exhibit (Episode 87)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper and Ingrid Neuman for the second half of their conversation about the upcoming Gorham Silver Exhibit at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. In this podcast, they discuss the history of Gorham Silver in Rhode Island, and why the RISD Museum decided to mount this project.

Catherine Cooper: It sounds like such a huge undertaking. So three years in preparation, and then it will be up for a few months here. What led the RISD Museum to actually decide to do something to this scale?

Design drawings for the Athenic peacock vase, including three different configurations.

Ingrid Neuman: Well, it was interesting. I would say about six years ago or seven years ago, we hired a new curator of decorative arts and design. We hadn’t had a curator of decorative arts and design for quite a few years. Elizabeth Williams came to us as a doctoral student, an advanced doctoral student, and she was writing her PhD on Gorham silver. So, it was a perfect match because she was coming to Providence where Gorham silver was first created by Jabez Gorham in 1831 or so, and then eventually the company was taken over by his son, John Gorham, later. Elizabeth Williams, the curator of the exhibition, is a specialist of Gorham, and so it was a natural fit when she came to the museum. She knew of course that we had 2,200 pieces of silver, plus I believe about 2,000 design drawings that are very special because you see the 2D version of the elaborate silver artwork, and then you can also see the result of the design drawing. She was very excited by all of this, and it’s really been her life’s work.

Silver Athenic vase with decorative peacock feathers.

At least a dozen design drawings will be on view. The Gorham archives are located at Brown University right up the hill, so we’ve also been able to pull a lot of historic photographs from the actual company, which will be in the exhibition as well as in a beautiful book of Gorham silver published by Rizzoli. We have a paper conservator here at the museum, Linda Catano, who is working on cleaning and repairing the tears and presenting the drawings in such a way that they won’t look like finished works of art. They’re really design drawings. They would’ve been tacked to the wall. They would’ve been very casual, not matted framed works of art. They’re working on a nice way to exhibit those so they look like design drawings.

This exhibit will be focusing in part on some very innovative techniques that John Gorham, the son of Jabez Gorham, insisted on. I think there was a little riff between the father and the son because the father was very traditional. Everything was done by hand. That was in 1831 up to about 1860 or so. Then John Gorham took over and he introduced the steam-powered die-cutting machine, for instance, for the silverware. I get the sense from different readings I’ve come across that the father was much more of a traditionalist, and the son of course wanted to make advances, use mechanized processes to crank out the silver a little bit faster.

They were quite profitable. I think Jabez Gorham thought his son was going to take the company down, but the son was actually on the right track in that it was very profitable. The company grew from something like 40 employees to 400, this kind of thing, and actually had to relocate. The original Gorham Manufacturing site that the father owned and operated was here in Providence, very close to the museum. That’s what’s kind of cool about the whole project is that we’ve had some walking tours. There’s a lot of history. It happened really right around the corner from the RISD Museum. When the son decided to mechanize and the father passed the company to the son, they moved over to an area called Elmwood, which is further from the museum, but it’s still in Providence, but it’s just farther. They had to make many more buildings to accommodate the much larger number of employees.

Display showing silver stamping techniques

The exhibit will highlight, I think, some of these new mechanized processes that the son introduced. There’s going to be a really interesting process area where you’re going to be able to see a lot of the dies, meaning these are molds that were used to press the silver into to create, for instance, the elaborate silverware. When I say silverware, there are many unusual implements that I would say most people do not have today, for instance, fish forks, and knife rests that have little unicorn heads on them, and berry spoons that have raspberries wrapping around them. One of the most fantastic sets of serving implements that you will see are called the Narragansett Salad Service. It’s a large spoon and a large fork that would be used to serve salad. The reason why it’s called Narragansett Silver Service is because if you look really closely, there’s little sea urchins, and snails, and all sorts of sea creatures that wrap around the handles in a really intricate pattern. They’re just stunning. It’s not something that you would just look at for one second. You really need to examine them closely, and imagine people cleaning all the surfaces that are minute.

We didn’t just put these pieces, say, in an ultrasonic cleaner, which, for instance, a lot of jewelers would do that if you took your jewelry to a jewelry store. We cleaned them by hand with minute pieces of cotton wrapped around bamboo skewers and very thoughtfully cleaned and in some cases didn’t clean areas that we left black to allow the higher levels, or the ornamentation that is raised on the silver pieces was cleaned to a higher degree than, say, the recesses so that you get the effect of these design elements popping off of the surface.

Catherine Cooper: Silver is an interesting material to work with for a wide variety of people. But for you, why do you find it so fascinating to work with?

Ingrid Neuman: Silver is interesting because of course it’s metal. Everyone knows it’s metal. I think people associate metal with being indestructible. It’s metal, but what people don’t realize is that metals have various softnesses and hardnesses. For instance, silver is considered a rather soft metal. There’s something called the Mohs scale of hardness, for instance, where all materials are rated by their hardness. There’s also something called the electromotive scale of metals where metals react with other metals in various ways based on their reactivity. There’s a lot to metals. I think that silver of course, we love silver in this country. Silver is loved in all countries. It’s a very precious metal. It’s soft. It can be manipulated in wonderful ways.

Gorham was very active. This particular exhibit will feature 120 years of silver-making. Not only did they use silver, they often gilded the silver, which we refer to as vermeil in French. The silver itself is, as you know, very sensitive to atmospheric pollutants, we call it, or chemicals that are in the air like sulfur. That’s one of the biggest deterrents to keeping your silver shiny all the time. Sulfur can come from eggs, egg salad, eggs, or it can come from exhaust fumes from cars. It can come from burning coal in the 19th century. Sulfur has always been with us in different forms. That’s why the silver often tarnishes. It’s not only from sulfur, but often from sulfur.

When you add gold to the top layer, the gold of course is very sensitive. It’s very soft. It’s sensitive to abrasion. It’s not so sensitive to atmospheric pollutants. People know that, say, from gold wedding rings or other gold rings. They might wear gold jewelry. It doesn’t tarnish, so that’s why it’s very nice to have the gold on top of the silver. But it is sensitive to abrasion, and over-cleaning, and rubbing, and scratching, and that kind of thing.

Catherine Cooper: You mentioned that the Gorham Manufacturing is local to Providence. What did that do to the landscape here?

Fruit stand embellished with gold grape vines and a fox.

Ingrid Neuman: Right, that’s a really important element to consider when you appreciate all of the work that’s gone into these stunning Gorham pieces is that when the company moved over to the Elmwood area, the process of working with the gold in particular, it’s my understanding that the process working with the gold is actually a fairly toxic one. Vermeil, or gilding, when it’s applied to silver requires the use of some fairly stringent and toxic chemicals. There’s many forms of applying gold to silver, but there’s amalgam gilding, for instance, that was done earlier on and is still practiced in other countries, is not practiced in America anymore because it used mercury, for instance, to apply the gold. There was a process where you applied the mercury to the silver, put the gold leaf on top, heated the whole work to vaporize the mercury so it would go into the air. It was very toxic for the workers, and that is something to think about when you see the gold applied to the silver. That’s amalgam gilding. Amalgam gilding can be very lumpy. You see that on the Cubic Coffee Service, for instance. It’s a bit uneven.

Other forms of applying gilding by electroplating, for instance, which is what you see on the majority of the gilded pieces in the Gorham exhibition, was much smoother. It was a much thinner layer. It looks more clean basically. It also required the use of chemicals like cyanide and different toxic chemicals like that which were toxic to the employee, but also there was leftover. There was residue. There was material that unfortunately was put out into the environment surrounding the complex, the Gorham complex, the manufacturing complex in Elmwood. To this day, it is an issue. There’s been many environmental cleanups. There’s a body of water there called Mashapaug Pond. Then of course there’s the earth itself that has been cleaned and continues to be cleaned. The EPA is involved somewhat and other entities that are concerned about cleaning up. It’s a work in progress. It’s getting better incrementally, but it’s going to take a while, and it is an ongoing project. It is sort of a dichotomy of the beauty versus the toxicity of the implementation or application of gold.

Catherine Cooper: With some of these objects, and you also mentioned the son taking over the business from the father, how did Gorham promote itself? How did it keep the interest and keep people buying these pieces?

Ingrid Neuman: Well, it seems like they were very clever in making some wonderful standalone pieces maybe that were very unique. There was only one of them, they were unique, or there were only a few of them, six or seven produced. For instance, a very good example of that is something called the Cubic Coffee Service, which you will see in the exhibition, which involves a tray, coffee, creamer, sugar. What was really wonderful about this piece is it’s faceted. It was important at the time that it was created because it basically mimicked the whole idea of skyscrapers, and building tall buildings, and this architectural innovation that was going on in urban areas.

The Cubic Coffee Service is unique. As I mentioned earlier, there were always design drawings for every piece and so forth, but we don’t own the design drawing for the Cubic Coffee Service. We own Cubic Coffee Service itself, which is fantastic. However, during the course of this project, sometime in 2016, one of our staff members, I believe it was the curator, was watching Antiques Roadshow, as most of us do at the museum. We love that show. She was watching the American version, not the British version. A woman was on the show who had a manila envelope, out of which she pulled a folded design drawing of the Cubic Coffee Service. It was just a match made in heaven because we didn’t know where the design drawing was. The curator reached out to the woman and so forth. The owner of the design drawing didn’t know where the actual Cubic Coffee Service was, which is here at the RISD Museum. We were able to borrow the design drawing for the exhibition, which is pretty fabulous.

The Gorham lady’s writing table (right) contains 47.5 pounds of silver in addition to mother-of-pearl and ivory inlays. The Gorham lady’s dressing table from Dallas (left) has 78 pounds of silver.

We have a very special ladies writing desk and chair that is a composite material. There’s 47.5 pounds of silver in the Gorham ladies writing desk, which is really hard to wrap your mind around. [Edited]

Catherine Cooper: So, there’s pounds of silver. How much weight does the wood add to this desk?

Ingrid Neuman: Yes, we need to weigh it, and we will be weighing it prior to creating a crate because it is very important to weigh these pieces. Some of these pieces are quite heavy, as you can imagine. The desk is also made up of a lot of different fruit woods, and also a fair amount of ivory, I’d say. We’re not the only one that has one of these gorgeous Gorham writing desks. The museum in Dallas, the Dallas Museum of Art, also has a similar one I’m told. I have not seen it yet. It will also be traveling, so there will be two desks traveling with this show.

Catherine Cooper: Would that have been an object that they made a lot of?

Ingrid Neuman standing in front of the exhibition title wall with the promotional teapot and spoon on either side.

Ingrid Neuman: No, I’m not entirely sure how many Gorham writing desks there are in the world. But for instance, you will also see in this exhibit a very large spoon in the Melrose pattern. It’s solid sterling silver. Sterling silver is 92.5% silver, 7.5% copper. Solid sterling silver, it’s not plated. It’s not just the surface. This is a very, very large spoon. It’s over a meter in length. There were six or seven of those, for instance, produced. They were promotional to get someone’s attention. Perhaps you’d put it in a window that people would walk by in a city, that kind of thing. I know the Cubic Coffee Service spent some time in a window to attract people to come in to purchase other Gorham pieces. This particular spoon is very neat because it was used promotionally. They sat a small baby in the bowl of the spoon to express to the viewer exactly how large it is. They also took this particular silver spoon to the zoo and used it to feed an elephant. These historic photographs will be visible. You can see them in the catalog.

The Admiral Dewey Cup is made from 70,000 dimes. The design drawing for the cup is hanging behind it on the wall.

In another example that I’d like to highlight, the Chicago History Museum has a wonderful Admiral Dewey Cup, it’s called, but it’s not a cup like you would drink out of. It’s approximately six feet tall, and it’s made out of 70,000 silver dimes. Not all the dimes are recognizable as dimes. Many of them have been melted and reformed into basically a trophy cup. That’s what it looks like. There’s an enamel pendant of Admiral Dewey. That’s why it’s called the Admiral Dewey Cup. Anyway, they own this six-foot, 70,000-dime Admiral Dewey Cup, but we have the design drawing, which is also about five feet tall. So, we’re bringing them together for the exhibition, which is really the point of the exhibition is to bring everything together and make it all make sense for the public so they can really understand from beginning to end how these beautiful pieces were created.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

In this second part, Catherine Cooper continues an interview with with Ingrid Neuman at Rhode Island School of Design Museum about silver conservation work on an exhibition called Gorham Silver Designing Brilliance 1850 to 1970.

July 30, 2019

86. Shining Silver Pt. 1: Conserving Objects for the RISD Museum Gorham Silver Exhibit (Episode 86)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Ingrid Neuman, the objects conservator at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, commonly referred to as the RISD Museum. In this podcast, they talk about Ingrid’s work on the upcoming Gorham Silver Exhibit at the RISD Museum, and her strategy to handle this large scale project at a small museum.

Catherine Cooper: Hello, this is Catherine Cooper. I’m here at the RISD Museum with Ingrid Neuman. So Ingrid, could you tell me a bit about the work you do here at RISD?

Ingrid Neuman: I’m the sculpture conservator here at the RISD Museum. We have a collection of about 110,000 artworks. It’s an encyclopedic collection, so it goes all the way back to the times of the ancient Egyptians and up to contemporary. We collect a lot of contemporary artists.

I’ve been here for 11 years. I’m really only the second sculpture conservator we’ve had at the RISD Museum. I’m the first full time sculpture conservator, so there’s a lot of backlog to take care of. I rely heavily on the student population who, both from Brown University and from Rhode Island School of Design, who are very interested in learning more about what it’s like to work in a museum.

As a sculpture conservator, I’m responsible for not only obviously sculpture, but three-dimensional, you know frames, for instance, wooden frames, gilded frames. I’m somewhat responsible for furniture that is also considered three-dimensional of course, but it really is a separate specialty unto itself. I would say about half of my time or so is spent on upkeep. And then the other half is spent on exhibitions. We have a pretty rigorous exhibition schedule.

Since April, 2016 I’ve been working on an exhibition called Gorham Silver Designing Brilliance 1850 to 1970. When we embarked on this particular exhibition, I thought it was going to be pretty reflective of most other exhibitions we work on where we start about a year, well, six months to a year in advance with a checklist from the curator. And then we survey the material that the curator would like to exhibit and then we start conserving it. We start preserving it, stabilizing it, condition reporting, cleaning it, repairing it, you know, preparing it for exhibition. But in this case, I soon realized that this exhibition was really unique in the history of the RISD museum and that the curator was going to select 1200 pieces of Gorham Silver out of our collection of 2200, so a little bit over half.

It’s the largest exhibition we’ve ever put on. We’re using so many. The sheer number of silver articles that we’re planning to present, the 1200, and that pretty much all of the silver was going to require some intensive cleaning, because it hadn’t been exhibited that much in the past. We do have a small silver gallery at the RISD Museum in the Pendleton House, the historic House that we have attached to our museum, but maybe there’s 30 or 40 pieces exhibited there.

Ingrid Neuman cleaning silver tea cups.

I could only possibly complete one piece a day and that I wasn’t probably going to make my deadline if it were to be just me at a table sitting by myself. Plus it seemed like a really wonderful educational opportunity because we’re surrounded by colleges. Many students call me, email me, want to get involved in the museum. They don’t know how. There are many kinds of activities in conservation that would be too advanced for someone new who is interested in conservation.

So silver cleaning seem to be perfect. So basically, there are many ways that I was able to arrange to have several students help. Of course there was word of mouth, there was emailing, but some of the students for instance, at Brown University, used their Facebook accounts within their departments and so forth to reach out to like-minded students. For instance, in the Archeology Department at Brown. I’d like to give a shout out to the archeology students at Brown who really came down the hill to the museum en masse to help us. They were particularly wonderful silver volunteers, because of their attention to detail, because they’re archeology students and they’re used to that level of detail. Not every student, for instance, would have the attention span, to be perfectly honest, for doing very detailed cleaning of silver and all the crevices and so forth. So they were a particularly wonderful population to work with.

Catherine Cooper: Overall, how many volunteers did you have on this project?

Ingrid Neuman: Well, it was interesting. It started out with probably 10 or so students and then when each individual had a roommate or a friend at their college, this kind of thing, we ended up with exactly 90 volunteers. A few of them were staff members in that 90, but the majority of them came from, you know Roger Williams University, Rhode Island Community College, Brown University, definitely. And early on there were some RISD students as well and RISD professors.

Volunteers sitting around a work table cleaning silver objects for exhibition.

It was very exciting to have so many people that were also excited about working on the exhibit. As you know from your experience, silver cleaning can be somewhat repetitious and it’s not for everyone. It involves a lot of manual dexterity and manual repetition. It’s also very bright and shiny and it can affect your eyes, for instance.

But we didn’t have all 90 people, of course in, you know, one room all together, all the time. The way I structured it was in general, the volunteers would come in the morning and I would say typically we would have five to eight volunteers at a table. We would all sit at a long table together. So we would be comparing notes and everyone would have a spoon to work on, or small tureen, or a Yoyo, or a fish fork, or something like that. There were different, very unusual, some very unusual pieces. And we would talk about the issues and we would kind of work together. In fact sometimes with some of the larger pieces, like the epergne and the larger compotes that had multiple pieces, we would pass them around and we would work on them collectively, because often it was really almost too much for one individual. And so we would collectively work on them. And we used materials that were quite foolproof in the sense that you couldn’t go too far with the conservation materials that we were using.

Catherine Cooper cleaning a set of cut glass decanters for exhibition.

Catherine Cooper: So that was one of the ethical considerations on bringing in so many people who aren’t necessarily trained in the profession yet, to protect the objects?

Ingrid Neuman: Yes. You know, I’m aware that as a conservator, in general, we do not employ a lot of volunteers to do actual hands on conservation work because there are so many ethical concerns in terms of knowing how far to go in the cleaning. When to stop, when to ask questions. But I felt that if I arrange the group so that we were all on one table together, we were all sharing our concerns and we had a lot of very strong light sources and we could talk about the issues together, it was more of an educational experience.

Some people were actually silver makers. They were students of jewelry and they knew a lot about how the pieces were actually made and they would educate everyone, and it was a wonderful experience. There were a few silver collectors, who also had pieces at home. I remember one day when we were working on a Gorham silver yoyo, and one of the older gentlemen who were helping us actually had a similar Gorham yoyo at home. So he had taken a real interest in the collection because he was a collector himself.

This project was very large, unusually large. I wanted to start as soon as possible. So we started the preparation for the conservation of the silver in April, 2016. And in fact, we’re still performing conservation on the silver works of art at this point. And it is, you know, now, December, 2018. We had to continue a momentum for a long period of time. And that was tricky. You didn’t want your volunteers to just disappear. A handful of volunteers decided it wasn’t for them. And that was totally fine. But there was really a hardcore group who expressed interest, came regularly. In fact, I was so excited by a core group of very diverse young people who took an interest in this project that we made a short film, which featured four or five of the students from different departments. Because I wanted to highlight the fact that it wasn’t one typical type of person that took a fancy to this project. And they spoke about what they got out of it. And you can see this very short film on the RISD Museum website.

Catherine Cooper: So one of the things that I remember from when we were cleaning was there were coatings on these objects as well.

Ingrid Neuman: So when these functional silver Gorham pieces were in use at people’s homes, they didn’t coat them. They would use them, they would put their string beans in the dishes. They would eat with the fork, they would play with the yoyo. Honestly, the hand oils probably from playing with the yoyo would keep the silver very shiny. Just like when you wear silver jewelry and if you handle it you’re actually kind of self polishing it with your hands.

Volunteer cleaning Gorham silver tray for exhibition

But what happened was a lot of the Gorham silver that we own was, prior to our accessioning it, it was owned by a large corporation that bought out Gorham, called Textron. And for obvious reasons they wanted to coat the silver so it wouldn’t tarnish and they could display it in various showrooms for promotional reasons. And so the typical coating that was applied and still applied today in many, many museums, is called cellulose nitrate. And it is a coating that is wonderful in the sense that it levels really beautifully when you apply it by brush or by spray gun. It levels so that it’s not uneven and it fills in all the nooks and crannies of the silver and it can look beautiful for a long time and it also keeps the silver from being tarnished, so you don’t have to polish it. So it’s a wonderful, that’s a wonderful feature.

But what happens is, fast forward 30 years, 40 years, it’s a natural product, cellulose nitrate, so it turns yellow. It discolors, because it’s natural. And all of a sudden the silver, especially, it’s more obvious on the silver than the gold, because it turns yellow. So the silver has a very odd coloration. It shifts it to being a warmer silver than a cooler silver. Originally, the coating is clear, then it becomes yellow. So there’s a color shift.

So that’s why we want to get it off because it’s not really representing the silver in its original format. The gold on the other hand isn’t typically coated because it is gold. But in this case, we did find coatings on the gold and they were very yellow, so we took them off, which involved using acetone. Fortunately, it’s very easy to take it off, but it’s very tedious and it’s very obvious when it’s on there because you use a cotton swab, like a q-tip, use some acetone, the q-tip turns yellow. You know there’s a coating. I would say about maybe a third to a half of the pieces that we cleaned were coated. So more of the silver pieces were coated, not so many of the gilded or vermeil pieces were coated.

Catherine Cooper: With so many objects that we have been cleaned with such care, how are you going to transport it when this exhibit travels? Because that’s another big part of this exhibit is it’s not just going to stay at the RISD museum. It will go elsewhere. Yes?

Ingrid Neuman: Yes. So very often exhibitions stay at their home institution. In this case, our venue, the RISD Museum, will have the Gorham Exhibition from May 3rd until December 1st, 2019. But then it’s actually going to travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, from March 3rd through June 7th, 2020. And then to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina from July 25th to November 1st, 2020. And then it will come back to our museum about December 2020. It will be on the road for about a year. And in preparation for that, we’ve had to think seriously about how to keep the silver from tarnishing, because as we spoke about earlier, we removed a discolored coating that was on the surface, but we didn’t re-coat the silver because we frankly didn’t have the equipment to do that kind of thing.

Cleaned silver objects on cart ready to return to storage. Some objects have been wrapped in anti-tarnish copper-impregnated sheeting while others are waiting to be wrapped.

Also, I wasn’t sure I wanted to put a coating back on and have someone have to remove it again in 30 years or those kinds of issues to consider. So in this case we went with the more passive technique, it’s called. An active technique would have been to coat the silver directly, but a passive conservation technique is to protect the silver. So in this case we’re using a specially formulated polymer sheet film that has copper particles in it and the copper particles embedded in a polyethylene matrix actually serves as a sacrificial component. The pollutants will react with the copper particles in that film that’s surrounding the silver and will not actually infiltrate into the bag in which the silver is placed. So we’re hoping that we’ll have really limited tarnish. We might have small amount. After all, the silver will be exhibited in cases that will have charcoal also embedded in it.

Charcoal is a wonderful adsorbent for chemicals. Charcoal is very porous and so there’s thousands of little pores that can adsorb chemicals. And so by putting charcoal paper, it’s literally paper that’s embedded with charcoal, into these exhibit cases, we can also maintain a more or less tarnish free environment for the silver.

These particular exhibit cases that are being created for us, some of them will be historic in nature. They will appear to be historic, even though they’re newly made. And they’re going to travel in at least one or two tractor trailer trucks. And then the silver, which will be crated for reasons of security, because also silver is soft as I mentioned—it can easily be scratched or dented. So very wonderful crates will be made and we will have at least four tractor trailer trucks, perhaps more. We’re working on using computer diagrams to calculate how to fit. It’s like a big puzzle, how to fit all the crates and all the exhibit cases into these various trucks. And we will tour the exhibit that way.

We begin the installation in three months on March 27th. Basically what’s involved here is that now that we’ve prepared all of the silver for exhibition and we’ve protected it from tarnishing and so forth, the installation crew, which is comprised of about five individuals, will be installing the exhibition for a bit over a month before it becomes available to the public.

Catherine Cooper: Will the parts as they go in be sort of on view or just everything happens in a back room and then the doors will open?

Three cut glass decanters with stoppers sitting in a silver holder.

Ingrid Neuman: Yes, pretty much like that. There’s two rooms. The exhibition is going to be in the newest portion of our museum. Our museum was built originally in 1877 and since that time we’ve had four other appendages built onto the museum.

The most recent edition was built in 2008 and it’s more of a modern edition and it has very large rooms. Two of the large rooms in the modern edition will be the area where this Gorham Exhibit will be. It will take a good month to create the walls. We’ve pre-ordered exhibition cases. In fact, some of the exhibition cases will be an imitation or a reflection of the 1901 World’s Fair, in which Gorham was very much represented. And so there’ll be some historic references looking back to the past and the material will all be on view at once and the public will not be able to see it until it’s completely installed.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to the first podcast on preparing the Gorham Silver Exhibit at the RISD Museum. Please join us again next time for the second half of Catherine Cooper’s conversation with Ingrid Neuman as they discuss the history of Gorham Silver in Rhode Island, and why the RISD Museum decided to mount this particular exhibition.

Catherine Cooper speaks with with Ingrid Neuman at Rhode Island School of Design Museum about silver conservation work on an exhibition called Gorham Silver Designing Brilliance 1850 to 1970.

April 4, 2018

85. Cultural Protocol While Working in Hawaiian Cemeteries (Episode 85)

Transcript

Cemetery at Kalawao on Kalaupapa.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Kaile Luga and Ka`ohulani McGuire. In this podcast, they talk about cultural protocols and working in the cemeteries of Kalaupapa National Historical Park.

Jason Church: This is Jason Church, and I’m here on the island of Molokai, and I’m here with-

Kaile Luga: Kaile Luga.

Jason Church: What do you do here at Kalaupapa?

Kaile Luga: Currently I’m an NCPE intern with CRM here in Kalaupapa.

Jason Church: What does your job entail?

Kaile Luga: Well, we’ve been here for a few weeks, but so far I’ve been doing a lot of building assessments to update the park’s LCS assessments that need to be updated every six years. So I’m looking at historic buildings and rating what condition they’re in, and also historic monuments, and grave markers.

Jason Church: … And I’ve been here at Kalaupapa for 10 days doing a cemetery workshop. It’s been an amazing event, but one of the things that’s been very different is before every work day, and after every work day, and sometimes during the work day, we’ve been doing what you guys call protocol. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is?

Kaile Luga: Well, here in Hawai’i protocol is very important, Jason. Protocol basically mainly entails giving an oli (chant) or a mele (song), which is usually a chant, so you do that before you start work in order to ask permission to be in the area that you’re going to be in. Also to ask permission from the kupuna, or the ancestors, who have been acquainted with that area, or associated with that area, and who are resting in those areas for permission also. Not only that, but also ask the ‘āina, or the land, that we’re working on for that permission, which is very, very important.

Jason Church: I know we’ve been working in the cemeteries, so are there specific oli just for the cemetery work, or is it pretty much anytime you’re doing work with historical objects?

Kaile Luga: I would say it’s anytime you’re doing work, not only with historic objects, but just out in the land in general, because really we aren’t the first people to walk on this land. There are people who walked this land before us. Why we do protocol is to honor them.

Jason Church: At first it was something really new and exciting, and then now by the end of 10 days, when I go back to the mainland to work in cemeteries, I think I’m gonna have to keep doing it. It’s become part of the work day, definitely.

Kaile Luga: Awesome.

Removing invasive vegetation from a grave at Kalaupapa.

Jason Church: Can you give us an example of some of the oli that we’ve been singing before the workday?

Kaile Luga: One very important oli that we’ve been using is to ask permission to be in the area, also to ask for knowledge is Ē Hō Mai. It’s actually one of the more basic oli, so a lot of people here in Hawai’i are well acquainted with that oli. You would do that before going out to work, you would do that before sometimes going into a classroom. It’s a very important and simple oli, but do you want me to do it?

Jason Church: Yeah.

Kaile Luga: (chanting in Hawaiian) So basically, you do one of those verses three times before the beginning of the work day.

Jason Church: I think one of the other important things that they kept telling us is to also, as you’re singing and listening to it, to sort of drop everything, and all negativity has to go away before we work. Which is something I can say is definitely new. I’ve not experienced that before. So that was an important part, I think it lightened the whole day, it made everything go better.

Kaile Luga: Yep. Definitely. Something here in Hawai’i is you don’t namunamu, mai namunamu, don’t grumble, especially when you’re doing work in wahi kūpuna, so places associated with ancestors and people who have lived here before us, or just doing work in general. When you’re farming, mai namunamu or else the kalo [taro; a main staple of the Hawaiian diet] is gonna turn out bad.

Jason Church: Give us an example of one of the oli that we did at the end of the work day.

Kaile Luga: Okay, so at the end of the work day the oli that we mostly use is He Mū, and He Mū is actually kind of an older oli. If I can recall correctly. I’m pretty sure it’s in Hawaiian Antiquities, which was written by David Malo and later translated by Emerson. This oli, I’m sure it was used throughout time until today, but for a while it was kind of lost, and a lot of oli weren’t really practiced until a group of Hawaiian practitioners came together, and they decided they were going to revitalize oli, and have protocol be a part of everyday work. So the Kanaheles went and they found this oli, and they kind of put it out there for everybody. And so this oli that we use at the end of the work day is He Mū. It’s basically cutting off any thing you may have taken with you during the work day. We’re gonna kind of enter the more spiritual realm right now, but you know working out in the cemetery there are good spirits and bad spirits, and working anywhere there are good spirits and bad spirits, but really you just want to leave everything that you took with you there. You don’t want to take it with you, at least that’s what I was taught. That’s the mana’o (thinking or thought) that was taught to me.

Jason Church: Yeah. I know that we did He Mū this morning before a lot of people flew out, because they wanted to make sure that they left any spirits on the island, here on Molokai.

Kaile Luga: Yeah. And it’s not scary stuff, it’s not just scary stuff. You also don’t want to be affecting the place itself either with your energy, so just to drop, cut everything. That’s at least what I was taught. You gonna back me up with He Mū? Jason Church: All right, I’ll try.

Kaile Luga and Jason Church: (chanting in Hawaiian)

Workshop participants begin the process of leveling a concrete grave marker.

Kaile Luga: And so noa is basically like everything is free, and honua is the earth. At the end of the day, everything is free. Free from haumia, which is defilement.

Jason Church: Are there any others, other than the two standard ones we’ve been doing? Any other ones that we should know about?

Kaile Luga: Any other chants? It all just depends on what place you’re at, Jason, but something that I wish we could’ve got on videotape or something was we took a huaka’i or a field trip out to Kalawao, and people were just … especially the kids from UH-Hilo. Man, they were just inspired to pull out their oli, and their hula (dance), and it was beautiful.

Jason Church: Now, what’s the one you guys tried to teach us that none of us could learn?

Kaile Luga: The one that we tried to teach at the end actually is a pule that was taught to me. So a pule is like a … it’s a chant still, but pule is usually translated more like prayer. It’s a pule that was taught to me while I was doing work on Hawai’i Island, over in, and we were working in the ‘ohana (family) cemetery, and we were working around a lot of unmarked grave markers out in the field, also when we were doing our surveys. This pule is called Pule Ola Lō’ihi which is like a prayer for long life. But yeah, it’s asking to have a long life, and usually we would do it after we were done working, just to also … working around grave markers and cemeteries is such a deep … pretty serious, it’s a pretty serious place.

Jason Church: Definitely.

Kaile Luga: Just to remind yourself that life is precious, we all want to live long and happy lives. So this pule, it’s asking for a long life, and I can do it for you I guess?

Jason Church: Yeah. Let’s hear it.

Kaile Luga: (chanting in Hawaiian) So basically in this Pule you’re asking for a very, very long life, until your eyes are squinty like the `iole, the rat, and until your skin is like the hala (pandanus leaves or tree), so all worn.

Workshop participants preparing to sing their end of the day oli to the cemetery.

Jason Church: And even when we were working out there, so we sang before, we sang after, but we would also … and I’ve always done this even before we were here working in Hawai’i, was if we have to step on a grave or climb on a grave, we also sort of ask forgiveness, and apologies to those that we may have bothered. Thank you very much.

Kaile Luga: No problem. Thanks, Jason.

Jason Church: I’m here with-

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Ka`ohulani McGuire, I’m the cultural anthropologist at the park.

Jason Church: So, what do you do out here, Ka`ohulani?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: My main job is ethnography, and oral history work. I’m kind of like the park liaison between the patients and the park. Besides that I also help with cultural protocol. Before I came to the park, cultural protocol wasn’t really done much, so it’s something that I felt was important to do, try to incorporate Hawaiian culture into everything that we can.

Jason Church: During our cemetery workshop, we’ve done songs and chants and oli, between work and end of day. Besides the ones we’ve done out here in the cemetery, what other kind of protocols do you have?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: We do protocol for different reasons, but basically the main reason we do protocol is to pay respect to the place where we’re at. Like say if our work crew is gonna be working at the crater, and it’s the first time they’re going there to start a new project, we always do things at the beginning of a project, and we always have a closing at the end. So, we would do protocol there, and it would be asking for a similar thing, we do E Ho Mai, a lot, asking for a blessing, asking for the knowledge of that place to be revealed to us, and we’re also asking for knowledge that necessarily is not really visible, but knowledge from the unseen, and the spirit world as well, and from our ancestors, our kūpuna. We do protocol in relation to, for example, we found recently an inadvertent burial, and so when we did the reburial, we did protocol for that, and it’s different chants and different culture protocol in relation to burials and working with iwi (bones of the deceased).

I’ve also done repatriation work. Not with the park, but with … before I came to the park. There’s definitely protocols and chants specifically done in that kind of work.

Jason Church: You mentioned that you are liaison between the park and the patients. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: I’ve been coming to the park for about 17 years now, and I actually have been working for the park service for the last 7 years. Because I had a relative that was a patient here, I was able to early on establish a really good relationship with the patients, because I had family here. Even after my ethnographic study was done I continued to come back to the park, I maintained those relationships, and so when the park was getting ready to hire an anthropologist, they asked me to come on board because Kalaupapa is really sort of like a closed community, for the most part. It’s a lot more open now than it used to be, but it was … it used to be much harder for outsiders to come in and break in to the community, and to gain their trust. Because I already had that establishment with the patients, and close ties with them, it’s worked out really well.

I do a lot of oral history work, not so much formal oral history any more, more informal talk story. I spend a lot of time with them, I do consultation on park projects, find out what they think about the work that we do, and how we could improve it, their vision for the future of the park after they’re gone.

Jason Church: So, what do they think about all the cemetery work we’re doing?

Replicating a missing cast concrete element on a grave marker during the workshop.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Well, I’m currently doing consultation with them right now. For the most part, they’re happy with it. They really are because they remember times when the cemetery was overgrown, when it wasn’t taken care of. Like Kahaloko Cemetery out in the middle of the peninsula, they remember when you couldn’t even see it from the road. It was just all trees and bushes. When they first came in ’42, the patients, the last bunch of big patients that came in ’42, they didn’t know it was a cemetery. They couldn’t tell from looking from the outside in. They are very happy.

Jason Church: How many cemetery sites are on the peninsula?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: That’s an interesting question. We talk about that quite a bit because at Papaloa there’s 11 sites, but in my view, it’s really all one big cemetery.

Jason Church: Sure. It definitely looks like [it] with the occasional wall between them.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Yeah. It’s just that they divided it up by religion. Really religion and not really ethnicity. Because the Chinese and the Japanese have their own Buddhist beliefs, it’s really by religion than ethnicity. There is the one in Makanalua 00:01:14] across from the crater, Kahaloko. There is the ones at Kalawao by St. Philomena church. Yeah, there’s several there. And then throughout the peninsula there’s unmarked burials here and there that we’ve found.

Jason Church: Because all these burials are just since it was an established …

Ka`ohulani McGuire: 1866, yeah.

Jason Church: Yeah, so there were definitely burials before that.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Right.

Jason Church: So do you want to mention just briefly what Kalaupapa is and why there are patients here, that sort of thing?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Yeah. Kalaupapa was a former leprosy colony. Now we refer, the State has actually adopted the term “Hanson’s Disease” instead of leprosy. So in 1866, patients were sent here as a matter of segregation by the Hawaiian kingdom and I really feel like the king really had his hands tied in a way. He wasn’t sure how best to deal with the problem. And he was under a lot of pressure by foreigners that were afraid of the disease and wanting to segregate people. And Kalaupapa is basically a natural prison because it’s got water on three sides and almost a 2,000 foot cliff on one side.

So it seemed like a logical solution at the time. So, since 1866 people have been sent here against their will, separated from their families. It caused a lot of heartache and pain for Hawaiian families and it is no longer a leprosy, active colony, since 1969 the segregation law was lifted and patients are free to travel wherever they want and to come and go as they please. But for them, this place is their home. This is what they know, they were sent here, many of them as children or young adults and this is where they feel the most comfortable.

Jason Church: Now we talked about, yeah everything I had read before I came here talked about the heartache, but it’s amazing how everyone pulled together to make such a community here. I mean we’ve only been here two weeks and it’s amazing how many people I’ve met and how many people have hugged me and the handshakes. I don’t think I’ve ever been hugged as much in my entire life by people I just met as here.

Ka`ohulani McGuire leads workshop participants in a ceremony to honor the graves that were conserved during the workshop.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: That’s Hawaiian culture, generally.

Jason Church: Yeah, it’s a very open place and a very welcoming place, I feel.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: You know, for the patients, I would say 20, 30 years ago they weren’t so used to having people touch them. One of the nurses that used to be here, she’s retired now, she tells a story how one patient would come in at 5:00 every morning to the care home and she wasn’t sure how he would react if she gave him a hug and a kiss. And she just started doing that and he finally got used to it and every day he would come and say, “Where’s my hug?” And I find, yeah, patients are a lot more open now to visitors and to touching and that kind of thing. In the past it wasn’t like that.

One story I can tell is the nurse’s quarters, it used to be separated, it still has a picket fence now, but that was a separation line. All the administration staff lived on one side of the fence and the patients couldn’t enter beyond that white picket fence. And so this was … happened in the 1990’s and some friends of mine were here visiting and they invited a patient over for dinner and they were staying, visiting someone that lived at the nurse’s quarters. And so they were waiting for him to show up and it was 20 minutes past the time they had agreed on for dinner and they were getting worried. So they went out to go look for him and they went out to the sidewalk and there he was on one side of the picket fence, standing there crying because he couldn’t make himself cross over that line. Because it had been so ingrained into him that he couldn’t cross that line because of the separation.

So they took his arm on each side and they all walked across the line together.

Jason Church: So if people do want to come to Kalaupapa to visit, people from the outside, there are tours here. How would one come to Kalaupapa?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: So we have a tour, we have Damien tours and you can fly in. We also have the mule skinners from topside Molokai and you can ride the mule down or you can hike in. And that’s just for day tours. If you want to stay overnight, you really have to know someone in the settlement that’s a resident, a patient, or an employee that works here and they can sponsor you in — six visitors at a time.

Jason Church: So there are tours available from Damien Tours to come visit?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Yes and it runs six days a week, Monday through Saturday. One of the things that people tell me a lot and it always amazes me when visitors tell me this, even if they’re only here for the day. They all seem to tap into the feeling of the land and the ‘āina and many of them have told me they feel that this is such a powerful, sacred place. And many people also at the same time feel a lot of heaviness and sadness. Especially out at Kalawao.

Jason Church: Yeah, there definitely is different feelings, depending on where you’re moving around on the peninsula. There definitely is a different vibe in different areas of the peninsula. Well, thank you Ka`ohulani for talking with us.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Nice having you guys here, we loved it. Thank you.

Workshop participants place a lei and pray over the grave marker they have conserved. (The tarp is still on the slow the drying of the lime render.)

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Jason Church speaks with Kaile Luga and Ka`ohulani McGuire about cultural protocols and working in the cemeteries of Kalaupapa National Historical Park.

February 1, 2018

84. Pig Skin and Wieners, the Early Influences on Preservation Architect Jack Pyburn (Episode 84)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the “Preservation Technology” podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation, Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent. In this podcast, they discuss Pyburn’s career influences and current preservation projects.

Jason Church: The first thing I want to ask you, Jack, I know you as a preservation architect, but I notice when I Google your name, that’s not what comes up first. It’s Jack Pyburn, football. Let’s just get that out of the way. I want to know why it comes up Jack Pyburn, football.

Jack Pyburn: Well, I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, not far from here. I went to Byrd High School in the class of 1963, which was one of only three high schools (two white and one African American) in Shreveport at the time. Byrd and Fair Park were the two white high schools. We played in the highest classification in the state, triple A at the time. I’m the youngest of four boys. My brothers ahead of me were athletes. I was the largest of all of them by a fair margin. It was just sort of assumed (by me) I was to participate in sports, and particularly in football, which I did.

I played football through high school, I did okay. I was not a great football player, but I did okay, partly because of my size. Actually, my favorite sport was track (throwing the discus). In fact, I competed here at Northwestern a number of times in high school and had good competitors from Natchitoches at the time. I broke the state discus record my junior year and again in my senior year. After my junior year, I really thought I would not play football anymore. I didn’t enjoy it that much, honestly. I loved track, it was something I got a lot of pleasure of and did okay at. I had a four year track scholarship offered at Tulane.

Come football season my senior year, and I said I wasn’t going to play my senior year because I wanted to focus on track, the head football coach, the only time he ever spoke to me, and certainly the only time he ever came to the house, came to my house and basically cajoled me into playing football my senior year in high school.

Again, I was not All-State, maybe All-City and District, but nothing particularly special. A&M football recruiters showed a tepid interest in me. However a local alum from A&M did, and I ended up taking a one year make good football scholarship to A&M and giving up a four year, full track scholarship to Tulane, which does not compute as rational thought, but it’s what happened.

Jack Pyburn’s Texas A&M Varsity Football photograph.

I got to A&M knowing I wanted to study architecture, I did all right my freshman year of football. It’s a mystery why I wanted to study architecture because I had no exposure to it in high school. The A&M athletic counselor tried to talk me out of architecture with the pitch that civil engineering was just like architecture. I spent a semester drawing nuts and bolts in civil engineering until I announced that was really not what I was interested in.

I made the A&M team, I got a full four year scholarship after my freshman year. My parents, my father in-particular had a policy that as a son, you worked your way through college. They did not pay for college for me or my brothers. All of us ended up going to college and as the youngest I am forever grateful for the guidance. I was basically working my way through school playing footballand had chosen architecture as my degree. Gene Stallings came from Alabama to A&M my junior year. He was a very demanding coach.

Architecture was a five year program before the four and two six year program was offered. Football was a four year eligibility. After the four years, I figured I was going to spend a year focused on my academics and low and behold, I got drafted by the Dolphins. I had no intention I was going to be drafted. I heard I was drafted on the radio. I decided to go try professional football, and if I made it, I figured the Dolphins would figure a way to get me into the reserves or differ my service. It was the height of the Vietnam War. If I made the team I would lose my deferment. If I was not back in school by September, I’d lose my deferment.

I made the team, the Dolphins did not have an alternative to the draft for me and, I was called up to the draft board in Shreveport for induction in December of my rookie year, 1967. For some unexplained way, I was deemed to be ineligible for service and thus Vietnam. As a result I, went back to play a second year of football in Miami. After my rookie season I went back to A&M for my first semester of my fifth year of architecture.

I played the second season and completed my second of my fifth year of architecture in the following spring. I graduated in 1969, and at that point I had enough football.. I told the Miami coach I was going to retire, so to speak (quitting was an ugly word)., Because I’d always been playing football, I figured I needed some experience in architecture. I had met an architect in my Miami barbershop so I asked him for a job. He gave me one to my surprise. It turned out his partner was Mark Hampton of the Sarasota School.

Texas A&M yearbook photo of the Shreveport Student Club, note Jack is in the center of the back row.

It was a very trying exercise to try to study architecture and play football under Gene Stallings. Probably not unlike trying to study architecture and play football for Nick Saban, but from an academic standpoint, he let me keep my scholarship the two spring semesters I needed to get my 5th year., In my sophomore year the dean of the School of Architecture, Ed Romieniec met me on the elevator, just he and I, and he told me I had to choose between football and architecture or he would. He ended up being a strong supporter after he knew I was seriously committed to architecture, and helped me through that last couple of semesters. I am forever grateful to Ed.

Miami was in its second year of existence my rookie year. The team had trained in Sarasota their first year. A bunch of folks from the circus that trained in Sarasota decided they were going to try out for football as a promotional or economic venture. One circus actor who tried out was a guy who had an act of doing wierd things with his bare feet. He like driving nails in boards with his bare feet. He decided he was going to enhance either his circus act or enhance his income by playing professional He was going to play football with no shoes on. It worked for his circus act, why not football?

Expansion teams, of which Miami was one, were made up of two groups. They were made up of rookies like me, just come out of college, wet behind the ears, and old veterans who were expendable at all the other established teams and thus available in an expansion draft. One of the guys in the expansion group, who had a very illustrious career but was on the downhill side of that career didn’t want anybody screwing around with the last remaining vestiges of his football career. The first play of the first practice, the veteran player broke the cricus actor’s foot and off we went. That’s an example of kind of the rag knot group we were. Miami was a very rag knot group at the time, and consequently we didn’t win any games, but I had a good time. I enjoyed photography, We would have sports news photographers traveled on the team plane. I got to be friends with the news photographers, particularly Jay Spencer who was the photographer for the Miami Hearld. He taught me a lot about photography

There were two treats from my friendship with Jay.. One of that was he would give me photos he took of play action where I was in the photo. The other treat was that he gave me camera equipment, well used camera equipment but bodies and lenses I would have never bought. I had a good time during the two years of pro football. I got to travel and see places and things that I had not been able to do as a kid. I got to see the major cities of the country that gave the the opportunity to see environments and buildings and environments I had studied.

Jason Church: When you started practicing architecture, what got you from architecture into preservation architecture?

Wiener designed Big Chain Grocery Store in Broadmoor area of Shreveport.

Jack Pyburn: Well, I’ve thought about that. As I said a minute ago, I really did not have a lot of exposure to architecture. We were not a family who was artistic. We did a little bit of going to arts events, a symphony every once in a while. My mother did sew and taught me to sew. In retrospect, I think that was a formative aesthetic and building influence.

My dad was in the oil business. He was a drilling contractor in rural Louisiana. I spent a lot of my youth in rural Louisiana and east Texas. We were stoping at plantation stores. We were just going fishing and eating a can of Vienna sausage and some saltine crackers, and the plantation stores were the only place in the rural environment where one could get something to eat. I was exposed to the vernacular rural architecture that was formative as well. I love the rural context. I enjoy the innate intelligence of rural populations, it represents such talent and potential.

The other piece that exposed me to architecture was … the most underexposed modernist architect, Sam Wiener, whowas very active in Shreveport.

It is one of the amazing modernist architecture stories in the country, I think. I went to Broadmoor High School, I want to Youree Drive Junior High School and Arthur Circle School. I was the first class of those schools, those were all modern schools done by Wiener. My good friend lived next door to Sam Wiener’s modernist house on Longleaf Drive in Shreveport.. I got the newpapers for my morning paper route at Weiner’s sweeping modernist Big Chain Store.

I then went to architecture school, and modernism was what was taught. A&M’s pedagogy was a modernist Bauhaus education. I think all of those things infused me with architecture by osmosis In retrospect, the most telling early experience that suggested I would end up focused on preservation architecture was my terminal project, my fifth year project. I selected the Shreveport riverfront because of the historic buildings on the riverfront.

Wiener designed City Incinerator Building, Shreveport, LA.

At the time, Shreveport was planning the future of the Red River waterfront and conceiving a Parkway named for the mayor, Clyde Fant. Fant was my father’s Sunday School teacher. He gave me an inside look at the makings of a public project. I look back now and I realize my early exposure of existing, in fact, historic environments as a part of my early development.

I finished football and I didn’t have any experience working in an architect’s office. I thought I needed to find out what that was like and I went to work for Herb Johnson Associates in Miami who I met him at a barbershop. I told him I was looking for a job and he said, “Come on over.” His design director was Mark Hampton, who was a part of the Sarasota School and who had moved from Sarasota to Miami. Herb’s firm primarily did shopping center work. They designed the Bal Harbour Shops and Dadeland shopping center. It was a terrific opportunity to work with Mark Hampton, early in my career..

I worked for Herb for a year and then I thought I needed a different kind of experience so I went to what’s called a big E, little A, an engineering dominated firm with supporting architectural firm, Connell, Pierce, Garland and Friedman. CPGF had done a lot of work at Cape Kennedy. I found myself there in a strange but very interesting professional environment.

We had an amazing group of Cuban architects that had immigrated to Miami. We had Vincent Scully’s son, was a part of the firm. He was a young guy my age who they had hired, and a guy named Richard Lyons, whose father, Eric Lyons, was head of the RBIA, the Royal British Institute of Architects. We did things like enter the L’oeil competition in Paris. I mean, this was in this sort of nondescript engineering firm that these folks came together. I mean, it was just a fun time.

Then I knew I needed to go back to school. I mean, I had left a lot on the table in both football and architecture. I applied to Columbia, I applied to Washington University in St. Louis. It was, the Columbia program, Preservation program was brand new. I really had no exposure to preservation as such at that time, but Columbia had a good architectural program nonetheless. Probably would have found it if I had ended up going there.

I ended up going to Washington University, primarily for financial reasons, because they gave me support that I needed. I was married with a child by that time. I went to Washington, I got a degree in Urban Design. I actually practiced for a decade as a planner. Fortunately, I got registered. In Florida, you could get registered the year of experience, so I started taking the exam in Florida. Most states were three years at the time. I started taking the exam and got registered.

I was away from architecture for a decade doing community and preservation planning with an exceptional group of folks who had graduated from the Washington University Urban Design program ahead of me. The firm, Team Four, was multi-disciplinary with a focus on urban and community planning. I discovered preservation during that time. We did some very interesting work.

I then moved to Atlanta. Team Four was going to merge with the international planning and landscape firm, EDAW, now part of AECOM.EDAW, Eckbow, Dean, Austin, Williams was a modernist landscape firm from California. They had developed a strong national practice, and started to develop an international practice. They became very much an international force over time.

Team Four was going to merge with EDAW. Team Four was a top heavy (too many senior people for the size of the firm) small practice . Under the merger scheme, I was going to come to Atlanta to manage an office for EDAW. The merger fell through but my wife and I decided to come on to Atlanta. We came and I worked for EDAW for four years. After four years, I was ready to get back to architecture. Existing buildings and preservation was something I felt comfortable with, both structurally and architecturally

I evolved my preservation capability over time, starting small and building the knowledge and capability to do credible preservation work. I had my own practice for 25 years focused on preservation. In 2007 I was invited to to bring my practice into Lord, Aeck, Sargent’s preservation studio. LAS had a preservation practice, was a competitor and a group I respected for their preservation values.

Susan Turner and I shared the same values. She was the principal at LAS. We have about 15 people just focused on preservation work now.

Jason Church: I met you through a mutual friend, Tony Rajer and you had gotten involved with Pasaquan. Tell me a little bit, how did you get involved with Pasaquan, and your role there?

Painted concrete building at Pasaquan.

Jack Pyburn:

Pasaquan was struggling, and it had a small Board. One of my acquaintances through the AIA in Atlanta was on the Board. The board knew they had stewardship of an important resource and needed to understand what was important about it. The site leadership was a doctor from Columbus, Georgia.Pasaquan was a folk art site developed by Eddie Owens Martin who went by the name of St. EOM.

He developed his family homesite in rural central Georgia into a mystical and surreal environment out of Sacrete, chicken wire and house paint. The figures he We developed a preservation plan thatset the foundation for treatment of the site. Ultimately the Kohler Foundation restored the site using the preservation plan and the property was transferred to Columbus (GA) State University for long term care and operation. This was a success story. I wish all resources of this quality could have a similar outcome.

Jason Church: Then did you ever do work with any of the other folk art sites?

Jack Pyburn: Yes. Paradise Garden.

Jason Church: Today, a little later today, we’re doing a webinar all about the preservation of African American historic sites. How did you get into that as sort of, I don’t want to say a focus, but you’ve definitely done a significant amount of work in that area.

A.G. Gaston Motel Birmingham, AL.

Jack Pyburn: Yes.The experience working on African American sites is personally the most rewarding preservation experience I have had or will have. I am thrilled that in my lifetime the breadth of African American history is starting to be give a central place in American history and the preservation of important African American resources is becoming a major focus of preservation investment. There is a ways to go in fully honoring the contribution of African Americans to our history but the movement is underway and there is momentum.

My involvement with the preservation of Africian American resources started with the Historic Structure Report here at Oakland Plantation for the Slave Cabins. In the analysis of the structures, one can physically come in contact with the humanity, courage, determination and intelligence of the African Americans who lived there. It was a very moving experience.

Then I had the opportunity to work on the Vulcan in Birmingham. Very quickly the place of African Americans in the history of the Vulcan became clear, both in terms of the role of African Americans in the steel industry in the late 19th, early first of half of the 20th century. As well as the position of African Americans in Birmingham relative to the Vulcan. They could only go up in the tower one day a week.

That got me involved in Birmingham, and so the opportunity to work on 16th Street Baptist Church came from that, recently the Civil Rights monument and the Gaston Motel, which is being restored. There’s a joint venture between the Park Service and the City of Birmingham, so we’re working on that, working on that right now.

Along the way, I had an opportunity to work on the Modjeska Simkins house in Columbia, South Carolina. A little vernacular structure, very central to Brown vs. Board of Education and the evolution of the legal foundation for that ruling. A variety of other sites like that. That part’s been …

Jason Church: Well, thank you for talking to us today, Jack.

Jack Pyburn: Yeah, you’re very welcome.

Jason Church: We look forward to having you at new conferences in the future and hearing about new projects you’re doing.

Jack Pyburn: Yeah, good, good. That’s great.

Jason Church: Really appreciate it.

Jack Pyburn: Yeah. Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you to listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.NCPTT.NPS.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent Jason Church speaks with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent. They discuss Pyburn's career influences and current preservation projects.

December 18, 2017

83. 3D Documentation in Ladakh, India (Episode 83)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Parks Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Mary Striegel as she speaks with former NCPTT intern Satish Pandey. Satish is currently a professor in the department of conservation at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, India.

Mary Striegel: So, Satish, tell us, when were you at NCPTT?

Satish loading samples in NCPTT’s recirculating wind tunnel.

Satish Pandey: It was way back in 2007. It’s been nearly nine years.

Mary Striegel: What were you working on when you were back there?

Satish Pandey: When I was there on a six week internship, I was working on a project which was dealing with looking at deposition of pollution gasses on limestone, treated limestone, so looking at the efficacy of consolidants and the impact pollution gasses in the atmosphere can have on it.

Mary Striegel: What was the best thing that you learned when you were at NCPTT?

Satish Pandey: The best thing that I learned, a couple of things. The best thing is that before being to NCPTT, I have never worked with custom-built equipment like the environmental exposure chamber that I worked on being in NCPTT. It had its own challenges to operate and get some good results on that machine, but it was one of the fantastic machine that I have ever seen. By the end of my internship, it started to give really nice data.

Mary Striegel: Well, you know, that was one of the things that people who’ve worked with that environmental chamber have always said, that after they’ve had some time working with it-

Satish Pandey: Absolutely.

Mary Striegel: … they see the beauty of the design of that instrument.

Satish Pandey: Yes.

Mary Striegel: Tell us, what have you been doing since you were at NCPTT?

Satish Pandey: When I was at NCPTT, I was doing my PhD at University of Oxford. I finished my PhD in 2010, then after that I have been a post-doctoral researcher for nearly two years with the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. I returned to India in 2011, towards the end of 2011 an of History of Art, Conservation, and Museology. It’s a small institution with three departments dealing with the history of art, conservation, and museology. I teach in the Department of Museology as a faculty member.

Mary Striegel: I had a chance to talk to you earlier this week about how you were using three-dimensional imaging. You might want to tell us a little bit about that.

Patish preforming 3D documentation of deterioration in wall paintings in Nagaur Fort, India.

Satish Pandey: Yes. 3D imaging, when I started working in my post-doctoral research, 3D imaging was used by a number of people to record and document cultural heritage. Most of those work were dealing with documenting the entire monument, the entire building, looking at the fancy, three-dimensional data. Now, when I started working on it, we tried to use 3D imaging to image small changes on timescale that happens in surface like wall paintings. Most of the wall paintings that I’ve been working on, they’re encrusted with plenty of salts and the problem of surface coating that people have put on the surface in previous conservation attempts. The problem is, most of those coatings and salts are sensitive to moisture and changing humidity conditions. All those changes that take place during changing moisture, they have kind of temporal impact on that. Every deterioration problem connected to salts and surface coatings can be monitored using 3D in real time. That is what I have been trying to, although we had some success dealing with 3D imaging of salts and surface coating, trying to monitor the changes that happen in salt crystallization over a short period of time.

Mary Striegel: That sounds like it was a really good project. Was that part of your thesis work?

Satish Pandey: No, that was part of my post-doctoral research.

Mary Striegel: I had a chance to hear a wonderful presentation you gave here at the AIC. I’d like you to tell us more about your most recent work, working with the monasteries. Tell us a little bit more about that project.

Satish Pandey: After getting back to India in 2011, I was trying to work with community to develop sustainable conservation attempts. One of the projects that I have been working on is in the northernmost part of the country, the region of Ladakh, which is a cold, arid landscape with almost nil rainfall. That was the kind of atmosphere until recently, but now we see a lot of climatic changes in Ladakh as well.

The real problem in Ladakh is, for the last ten years, the region has been open for tourism and there is plenty of tourist influx happening these days to see the cultural heritage that is part of that region. Most of the local people, who were not exposed to tourism and economic growth that has been happening across the country, are now suddenly kind of focused towards making more money coming from tourism. There are lots of other avenues opening, you know, and the uncontrolled development to sustain tourism and the uncontrolled way of exploiting the natural resources are creating disastrous situation for cultural heritage in Ladakh.

I have tried to work with community, trying to convince them to understand the historical value of the cultural heritage they have, rather than just the aesthetic and economical value. The economical value is the way that it is being exploited at the moment, given another ten years or so, the cultural heritage will be completely destroyed. Then there will be nothing for tourism to depend on.

Mary Striegel: We’ve talked about that there’s the economic pressures, but there’s also, with the tourists, there’s many visitors in short periods of time. You’ve mentioned that there’s also the lack of understanding of the traditional materials.

Awareness workshop for Buddhist Monks in monasteries in Ladakh, India

Satish Pandey: Yes. Most of the vernacular architecture in Ladakh is made with local materials: stone rubble, most of these are clay based houses. Even monasteries are made in clay, clay rendering. Nowadays, with changing pressure from tourism, people are shifting to modern and quicker materials, like cement concrete. Use of cement concrete, in many cases, has very different kinds of requirements. The reason is, in winter season, temperature really goes down to say about minus 30, minus 40 degrees Celsius. In a concrete housing, energy requirements are very high. The heating requirements are naturally very high, which has not been there with all these mud renderings. Mud being the natural heat insulating material, the energy requirements of that kind of housing was not too high. Nowadays, with changing emphasis on tourism linking all these monasteries with transport system, with proper roads, has created a lot of problem in the local environment.

Mary Striegel: You also mention that there now are many groups trying to work there.

Satish Pandey: Yes. In the last ten, fifteen years, with the kind of attention the cultural heritage in Ladakh has got, there are a number of organizations, NGOs and people, working in Ladakh, trying to preserve the cultural heritage. All those attempts are sporadic. They all work in isolation, and there is no real information sharing that which group is doing what. There is a lot of funding coming from other countries, and people are very scared to share their information, and they are worried that their funding and their project may be jeopardized if they share information to other people.

That is a big problem. These conservation attempts, working really on objects, on paintings, on monastic objects, is not sustainable unless the custodians of the place, of the cultural heritage, know how to maintain and upkeep it. The problem is, you know, the monks and the local people around, they do not know what work is being done on the artifact. They do not know how to maintain it in future, after the conservation work is done. What happens in next few years, with the current practices that are happening in monastery, the cultural, traditional practices, the state of artifact that was either conserved or somebody has done some work on it, goes back to the condition it was before conservation. That kind of conservation intervention has really no long-term effect on it.

Mary Striegel: There are some short-term fixes going on, but no long-term strategy.

Satish Pandey: Absolutely. There is no long-term strategy trying to look at the holistic approach on sustainable conservation so that all these people who are custodians of the cultural heritage are aware about dealing with different conservation attempts and also the pressure that cultural heritage is having from the increasing tourism in the region.

Mary Striegel: Do you think that this type of problem is going on in other parts of the world as well?

Satish Pandey: Probably, probably, because tourism is a new industry these days. It is not that tourism has not been an industry in the past, but it is increasing these days, and materialistic view of exploiting cultural heritage might have adverse impact on cultural heritage in other parts of the world as well.

Mary Striegel: I want to thank you for taking time to talk to us today. Are there other things that you would like us to know?

Awareness workshop for Buddhist Monks in monasteries in Ladakh, India.

Satish Pandey: The other things that I would like to say, that most of the places where we think of conservation, instead of looking at the conservation as a long-term solution, we also need to incorporate number of other things, like, for example, when I teach my students. There is an artwork. If I ask them, “Look at the artwork and tell me what you see,” the first thing, being a student of conservation, the first thing they notice is what is wrong with the artifact. During the course of noticing what is wrong with the artifact, what deterioration is going on in the artifact, they forget that, after all, it is an artifact. The historical value, the aesthetic value, naturally, they do not notice that. They think that, since I am teaching them conservation, I am expecting them to see conservation. Conservation is not without looking at the historic and aesthetic value of the artifact. The first thing that we have to notice is the historic and aesthetic value of the artifact, and then we have to see, in the context of its values, how the conservation attempts are going to influence the entire concept.

Mary Striegel: That’s very good. Tell me again where you’re teaching and how many students do you usually have?

Satish Pandey: I teach at the National Museum Institute in New Delhi. Each year, we take about 15 students. On any given time, I have nearly 30 students who are studying art conservation.

Mary Striegel: They’re very fortunate to have you, Satish.

Satish Pandey: Thank you so much.

Mary Striegel: Thank you, again.

Satish Pandey: Thanks a lot. Thank you so much.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye, everybody.

Today we join NCPTT's Mary Striegel as she speaks with former NCPTT intern Satish Pandey. Satish is currently a professor in the department of conservation at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, India.

October 6, 2017

82. Talking Red Masonry and the Rebirth of Lime with Jimmy Price (Episode 82)

Transcript

Red mason Jimmy Price demonstrating joint tooling techniques at a NCPTT workshop.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Jimmy Price, historic Red Mason and founder of Virginia Lime Works. In this podcast they talk about how Price helped bring Lime back to masonry in America.

Jason Church: Today I’m here talking with Jimmy Price, former owner and founder of Virginia Lime Works, owner of Price Masonry Contractors and Jimmy, in the world of historic preservation, you’re really known as the guy who brought lime back. Tell us a little bit about that. What is your background in masonry and how did you get into lime?

Jimmy Price: I started in (19)72 and I started out laboring, pushing a wheelbarrow, worked at a foundry for a while but didn’t mind working because I always worked hard all my life but had a 19 year old wife at home and set working seven days a week third shift just didn’t seem natural to me and I grew up on a farm, my dad had a grocery store so I was used to being kind of independent working outside so I came back and took another job and ended up going to work for my uncles that were masonry contractors and I started an apprenticeship with them. Funny thing about coming full circle in a way, the black guy who taught me how to make mortar, he was one of the biggest strongest guys that I ever worked with and his name was Quentin Parnell and he taught me how to make mortar and just good old soul that ever was. He served with Patton during World War II so he had been all over to be a laborer but he was a really good man.

Later on, I’ll get back to him in a little bit but as we went on, after my apprenticeship, I went in business for myself and doing schools and shop and summers and things like that but always been a history buff and military history has always been a big thing that I’ve been interested in so finally I got to thinking, so I’m going to start doing what I wanted to do and some of the recession years of the early years, so I decided to downsize some and start picking up and getting into some historic work. And one of the first major projects was Greenhill Plantation, which was a slave breeding plantation in Virginia and it ran about twelve hundred slaves on that plantation and 5,000 acres, but that was the crop was the slave trade there. And we had a grant to do all this work for the state and that kind of got us started … We had some other smaller things, but then this was a major breakthrough.

Photograph of Poplar Forest from the Library of Congress. Frances Benjamin Johnston Photographer.

So, as we got into it, found out that the owner in 1790, who in the heyday of this plantation, was John Pannell and it’s kind of funny that Quentin was from Gladys from this area so all the Pannells, right then, that was the Pannell blood line and they were noted for their big males and that was Quentin, the nicest fellow you ever met, and that’s who taught me how to make mortar, ended up being back restoring their roots and where the whole family came from. I always thought that was a pretty good twist to it. After that, we got into some other different things and then Thomas Jefferson’s home at Poplar Forest. We got in there and ended up being in there for off and on 14 years with Travis McDonald there at Poplar Forest, but the more we got into it, it’s like … And I really enjoyed … It’s like how can specialize in historic masonry when the right mortars haven’t been made in 100 years and everything that’s been done or going on has failed.

That’s kind of what was driving force, like, okay, well, if we can do this, it’s got to be a good thing. I guess I’ve never been afraid of anything so I’ll give it a try and do it, so that’s what we did. Through Poplar Forest, I worked with the architects, Mesick, Cohen, Wilson and Baker out of Albany, New York. They were fantastic because they believed in tradespeople and to learn from tradespeople and what they have to offer and what their insight is, what their opinion is and not just what the architects say. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for those guys because they encouraged and wanted you to learn and grow and help them figure it out. And that’s exactly what we did.

We found a stone source for Poplar Forest and built a wood fired lime kiln to start off with. I guess the bad thing was we were successful because we kept going. So, there’s lots of trial and error and failure and failure and you don’t do this and you don’t do that and after several years and tons of firewood of burning and burning and you learn all your mistakes and all of that and tweaking. I built another bigger kiln and went from there. So, it’s kind of like bootlegging lime with what it was because how could you get a permit. How could you do it when you didn’t know if you was going to succeed or work. It was just burning a wood chimney, so I just did it. And that’s kind of how it went with.

By doing so, you just reinvented that wheel and then that started into the techniques. We were already working with lime at Poplar Forest and that’s what we ended up doing was producing all the lime mortar for the wing of offices at Poplar Forest and all the interior plaster work. We ended up doing all the brick work and then as it was coming along and we was finishing up the brick work, out of necessity and we already had a good crew at Poplar Forest, and in following at Chisholm Irish Masons who did the brick work at Poplar Forest. When he finished up, the plaster didn’t show up and Chisholm ended up plastering that at Poplar Forest. We had to try our skills and pretty close, but it was a lot we needed to learn too. My travels in Scotland in England that I met Alex Hollins, a Scottish plasterer over there and he ended up becoming my mentor and got him involved coming over with us to cross train us and work with us at different phases at Poplar Forest, like first coat and second coat and finish coat. He was more of a gypsum plasterer, but did some historic stuff. He had done Sterling Castle there in Scotland. One of the bigger restorations for historic Scotland.

James Madison’s Montpelier. Photograph by Carole J. Buckwalter.

We became close friends and worked together a lot over the years and kept growing from there and learned a tremendous amount from him. It’s like reaching back into antiquity and pulling a lot of this forward and what have you. It was a great experience there. Then you end up having two really good crews of top line plasterers. Today all these skills have been lost. After Poplar Forest and the main part and the plaster work was done there, just as Chisholm ended up leaving there and going to President Madison’s home at Montpelier. Funny thing was, the same architects that were doing Poplar Forest was doing Montpelier and here we followed Chisholm’s footsteps again from Poplar Forest to Montpelier and we did, I guess it ended up being $25 million dollar restoration in Montpelier and supplied, I think it was 240 tons of lime plasters and mortars to do the work at Montpelier.

One of the unique things about Montpelier and the learning curve and moving forward at the same time and understanding of all these historic mortars, that archeology has letter of ownership where Madison owned a particular quarry in Gordonsville and it matched up to a period of time of construction and then it was sold, but then he bought it back. And it was during another period of construction that Mont P was all brick. It was no stone so why would you need a quarry. So, a good choice would be he’s using this to make the lime mortars for Montpelier. So, we took mortar and plaster samples from those eras of construction and from this quarry site and sent them to a material scientist in Scotland, Bill Reavy, and he did an XRD and Petrographic analysis and what have you and came back it was the forensic side and that was the exact stone that we used and was a dolomitic argillaceous limestone that was moderately hydraulic.

So, by having this information and the skills that we had developed over the time, we knew on cooking that stone and we actually got the stone that was a real odd slatey stone, I probably wouldn’t have thought it was a limestone if I saw it. It ended up that’s what it was and it was kind of slatey so you had to split it just like slate and when you loaded the kiln, it was like loading a dishwasher almost. You couldn’t just throw it into a pile. You had to … Just like loading a dishwasher with plates and then the opposite way because you have to maintain the airflow through a kiln and that’s how we burned the limestone for Montpelier and took the same sands and clay content from the boarding house to replicate that mix.

It wasn’t a replica mix. It was the like for like mortar that Madison did use. Well, you don’t get to do that every day, so it makes it interesting there. And then another one at the same time we had going on was the Chapel at St. Mary’s, Maryland. That was the first English speaking Jesuit chapel in the colonies at the time. Fourth colony there be in Maryland. We were very unique to work with the same architects. Just kind of having that team put together and following along, plus, like I said, I enjoy the history side of it, like the present and we actually did the Jesuit chapel, which had been lost for 300 years.

St. Mary’s City Historic District Catholic Church. Photograph by Pubdog.

It was built in 1667 and they worshiped there for about 40 years till King William came in to power in 1704 and basically outlawed the Catholic religion or the sheriff locked the doors on the New Jesuit chapel and after seven, eight years they came back and torn it down and use the materials elsewhere because they wanted to worship there. That’s what they did because they were living on the West frontier in wood clambered buildings and dirt floors and you have a big mass of ornamental brick church on the western frontier, so they tore it down to use materials elsewhere in the colony and had been lost and went back to the plow for 300 years. Then back 30, 40 years ago, a couple walked the fields behind the plow while he was planting trying to find bricks or chunks or anything that … It was referred to as the Chapel Field and uncovered a chunk of brick right when they almost gave up.

That started 30 years of archeological uncovering the crucifix wall in the foundation and all the 70 graves buried inside the chapel under the floors and 650 graves were on the exterior and we approached it as a world class project and we wanted to present it that way, so we burned all the oyster shell mortar for all the exterior mortar and lime mortars for the interior mortars and then we … Actually another guy made the brick that was doing the same sort of thing with brick as I was with lime. He took the clay source from St. Mary’s and took them to his place and made a slot molded wood fired brick. Same ones just like they had and we used those and then we actually used a modern Cushwa brick, mortar brick for the interior and backup work and the face work. We hand carved just like the traditional masons back then, which we would have been referred to in the 16 hundreds as Red Mason, because we were the hero of brick, whereas the White Mason was the hero of stone.

That’s the way St. Mary’s was done. We hand carved over 7,000 brick shapes to do all the moldings and then was plastered and rendered to look like cut stone with a more formal finish. Then a little added twist to it. Like I said, I like to have fun with what we’re doing, so I ended up using traditional putlog scaffolding 42 feet in the air, so two pine poles and lashed together like Boy Scouts and over $14,000 worth of rope in the job and we saved probably $100,000 worth of scaffolding rental cost and fees with that and a lot of people came to see the scaffolding. They enjoyed what we were doing. That story went and pretty much been doing consulting here and there and different training from time to time.

I had a structural engineer involved, so once the structural engineer put his stamp on it, it kind of takes it someone out of the hands of OSHA, but both the present governor and the past governor there laying brick with me and had all the support of all the local judges and that sort of thing and some district judges and on up, so I had those guys laying brick that one day too, showing them around.

So, all the little incidental things that I needed extra help, because we worked for the Foundation, so if I needed help with skinning of all these poles, I have work release guys start picking trash up on the side of the highway to keep the parents from having a higher speeding ticket. Speeding tickets and insurance costs, they came to me and everything we do and nice and all the poles skinned and what I needed to be doing and brick being toted, so we just collaborated to save money for the Foundation and make it work and it was quite the demonstration and then at the end of the job, it was a traditional color wash and penciling throughout … The only color wash and pencil job in the United States. We ended up having mostly, I think probably about 10 girls that the college hired to help, because they had a real delicate hand to it, and they penciled most all the joints. It took them several months for the girls to work on the scaffolding and pencil everything. It really turned out pretty nice.

We finished in 2007. It was a very nice job and that’s where we were at when we finished up there. I guess the worst timing in the world. We finished up in October basically Montpelier and St. Mary’s. Lehman Brothers collapsed in October and that slammed the brakes on everything. We had 15, 20 of the top guys in the country and ended up having to lay them off. So, that was living part of the recession here, so being in the private sector, we were affected. The rest is kind of history from there, but we’re still alive.

Logo for Virginia Lime Works.

Jason Church: So, how did you go from doing your own work and burning your own lime, to starting Virginia Lime Works?

Jimmy Price: Well, just by demand because nobody had it and we were the first in the United States actually to do it. In the preservation community, when you hear something going on at Poplar Forest because that’s when we got connected with the National Park Service because Tom McGrath and Chris Robinson brought because of some of the stuff that they’d heard and what we were doing a Poplar Forest brought two van loads of the HPTC staff down and when they saw … We were pretty advanced at that time with what we were doing and basically the only thing survived at Poplar Forest was Jefferson’s brick work, so we were living archeology is what we were doing to save Jefferson’s brick work, so there was a little bit more to it than just laying a brick and chunks of mortar in a hole. That sort of thing.

We did a lot of reconstructive surgery with brick patch making our own brick dust from brick from Poplar Forest and reconstituting and dental work as you would call it and different things and crack repairs and basically growing brick and that sort of thing to go back and do the restoration work, so when Tom and Chris came down with the crews and they saw that, they wouldn’t make me feel good, kind of put them and said whoa, we have a lot to learn to catch up. In the meantime, started collaborations, so I end up working backs and forth with the guys down in Frederick for years and still collaborating so I’m here today so it’s been great and a lot of fun. A lot of good friends and that sort of thing, comradery and the whole thing, so it’s like a family reunion seeing everybody again.

That’s kind of where that started at and once that information starts circling out and it’s the same need, everything that everybody was doing was failing with cement mortars and hybrid blends of kind of like the park service mix with that little bit of cement. Just enough to cause it to retain moisture and still failed, but it was sympathetic, you were trying to make it work and that’s what drove it further. Fortunate to spend a lot of time in Scotland and collaborating on plasters and lime washes and things like that over there because we had the mortars and we were way underway for mortars and the learning curve and then we found out more about natural hydraulic limes in France that just were coming into the UK a little bit then, so next thing we started bringing the hydraulic lines in to the United States and took a chance, I said, okay, we’ll see what we can do.

Nobody has it, so we just kind of were the leader and bringing it in and making it work and then we’re still working with the training and stuff like that too to help them out because we wanted everybody to be successful because it’s a pretty big learning curve because of geographic location and what somebody’s doing in Charleston you’re not going to be doing it in Boston or Michigan and that sort of thing.

It’s kind of trying to keep everybody safe as you can to make sure they’re successful with their projects and things so, that’s kind of developed that part of it and I figured, well, I have my whole family involved. My daughters were in the office. One of the daughter’s is doing the color matching. My son-in-law was running the plant part making all the stuff and then my son is doing all the technical stuff. He is a computer whiz. So, everybody had a very distinct role in the company. It wasn’t just using your kids. Well, they were used, but everybody had a special talent that I couldn’t have done it without them. Just with those specific talents, because I can build I’m a good builder, but I’m not the best mechanic in keeping a machine that I don’t know anything about and keeping it running and that’s what my son-in-law, they can keep the mixes running the baggers and the airpackers and all the electrical and I say, no way. I’d be lost as could be and the same thing with the computer stuff. I’m still computer illiterate right now.

Jimmy Price demonstrating finishing techniques over lime stucco at a NCPTT workshop.

If I go give a talk and the button doesn’t come on, I’m in a panic. I’ve had that happen plenty of times just like the other night here. You’re always relying on somebody else. That’s kind of the evolution of it there. After that part, then after being on Quinque like Chris Robison was over there at the same time. We actually shared apartments a couple times during the training and the Quinque experience. I was over there for 10 weeks and on that stint and getting to do different things I like to do, but when you’re submersed in that culture and seeing from medieval buildings to Georgian buildings to everything in between and it’s just stone, lime mortar, lime plaster, lime paint and these buildings are performing fantastic right now, that’s what pushed me.

I said, we’ve got to do something better because all the buildings are making everybody sick right now. Just like historical buildings that if you’re not repaired properly, mold and damp issues and unhealthy building syndrome, that sort of thing is so bad and modern buildings doing the same thing. If you’ve got the best brick, the best block, the hardest cement and flashings and everything that you can do, how come these buildings are so sick and you can’t get the dampness out of the walls and out of the building. It’s kind of blending the technologies of old and new from what worked historically, but doing it in an easier way and that’s when I ended up developing environment building system that we came up with.

Right when we came with that, so, we had that going with a lot of testing and things like that and right when we had the big opening house in August 2007, so we had the cottage that we had built and brand new building and try to set it on fire. I had diesel fuel and gasoline on a couple sides and lit it up and had the fire department there and a big media event and tried to burn it down and that didn’t work. Just soot up my lime plaster up a little bit. It didn’t hurt a thing, so we blocked the doors up with plywood and caulking and rubber and pumped 32,000 gallons into a brand new building and we all jumped in and went swimming and had a big time. Today, no mold, no mildew and no paint peeling and you kind of wonder what is going on that we can’t grasp this technology, but it’s the difference of myself living in two worlds of seeing the old ways and how they work and the new ways at the same time and trying to make it work and the timing. I said, “Lord’s willing and he’ll come back around when he’s ready.”

Have the building system like that. Then like next month Lehman Brothers collapsed and everybody slammed the brakes on with, to me, the best building system that ever came up with and it can only be improved upon from this point moving forward. Yes, it’s been quite a ride I guess you could say.

Jason Church: So, what’s next?

Jimmy Price: I have no clue. Every day’s an adventure. Like I say, we’ve had a rough few years here when it takes $10 and you only get $6 and you just keep on. I’ve been in construction and ups and downs for 46 years, I guess, now and it’s been challenging and I get it. It’s just what it is and especially if you’re in the private sector. You’re on your own. If something don’t work, you don’t get paid and you do without and then you recover and go again. That’s kind of where we at, but everybody used to say, with everything we did, and so proud of the family of what we did and all that. I laugh, but I don’t know that I’ll put a family through that.

It’s life and it’s what it is, but the knowledge and information is still there. Things can still be done. I’m just kind of waiting for the next step to see how things unfold and develop. Still training. This is kind of the first one for a while. I did do a historic church back in the Fall. Kind of neat. And really first class brick work and I think that some of Jefferson’s masons from Charlottesville and UVA. I was on my toes when I said that I had that much respect. These guys were good and I had to really … Took me a little while to get their style down, but most of the time if you’ve done enough of it, it takes a little bit to see with their eyes and pick up their style as we did. That was a fun job to do that last Fall there.

I’ve just been working on some of my own work. I get pulled in some different consultancy things from time to time. Thinking about getting back into, you know, because there’s such a need. So many people ask and I step back into it a little bit and set up at the office to do some, maybe, week long training sessions once a month or something like that and see what happens there.

Jimmy Price mixing quick lime at a NCPTT workshop.

Jason Church: We’ll keep our eye out for new Jimmy Price trainings.

Jimmy Price: We’ll do that and the lime paint that we had. I really loved that out of all the different paints. You can do a simple lime wash that is pretty straight forward, but the lime paint, I just love that to death. And with the girls and all, I think I got a couple of grandkids getting ready to go to college, so they’re kind of thinking, I could use the extra income. Let’s get the paint back out there again, so there’s another little step, so you might see something there. We’re just taking baby steps to … Like say after having a rough few years and kind of see where it goes from here.

Jason Church: Any projects that you remember fondly?

Jimmy Price: We had a lot of neat ones, but once in a lifetime … You kind of say that and then all of a sudden you get pulled into something else, but St. Mary’s was a very unique project. I’m a history buff anyway and to get to apply history in a modern situation and, like I say, with the scaffolding that we did, we had people come and just to see the scaffolding and really not the church sometimes because it was over the top. It was a hoot and the people of St. Mary’s that I worked with you couldn’t have had any better. Dr. Henry Miller and Roger Hill that we worked with up there. They were fantastic, so it was good to be a part of living archeology, which is what it was. And that’s what we got to do. And then when you’re doing it, okay, it’s one more thing that nobody else has experienced and it just opens you up that much more and understanding. It’s a little harder at first and then, hey, there’s nothing to this. I can build that scaffolding just as fast as you can do conventional scaffolding, pretty much. Once you get into the groove and get your initial setup.

So, it’s things like that, that … And to do the brick carving and things that we did like that and is very unique at the same time and you had control of the job site and not waiting on shapes from the brick companies. We had so many different shapes and things I think it would have drove the architects completely crazy to do all the shop drawings and then if you ever got them approved and got them done, you would have never got to do them, by the time it would have taken years and it was easier for them because they had Montpelier going on and they just had your basic drawing. I knew I had my pieces worked and cuts and everything like that, so all I needed was a profile. They gave me a profile and I went from there and we’d do the carving and stuff during the winter months when we’re not on site. We were working a traditional season again, so it kind of started in April and finishing up in September and that sort of thing.

Jimmy Price talks to conference participants at Trinity Episcopal Church in Galveston after he completed masonry repair at the church.

It was a very unique one, but Poplar Forest was very unique too, to get started and do that whole thing there, too. It’s been a very interesting thing because when you find out and you go somewhere and you’re looking at something and you’re up in the attic in one of these historic buildings or down in the basement and nobody sees the stuff and you get to check out and you learn from it and see and then you go to the UK to be on top of Hampton Court Palace with all these hundreds of hand carved chimneys and things like that on top of Stirling Castle, Canterbury Cathedral and Fonte De Gaume.

I’m glad you said that because one of the neatest things I’ve ever saw when we were bringing over materials from France, we got to go to Fonte De Gaume and see the 40,000 year old cave paintings. That was cool. You go inside and see these bison and then all the animals that there holding a torch in there and chiseling around the outline of these bison with a little stone tool. Like a stone chisel, then painting, and using the stone features for the shape of the stones to form and define the legs and bellies and things like that. And then they can walk right outside and get eaten by a Saber Tooth Tiger. I thought that was really cool. It’s been pretty cool to be in some of these places and things have been quite the adventure I guess. I don’t think it’s quite over with yet.

Jason Church: Definitely not.

Jimmy Price: It’s been pretty cool. And then on top of Rosslyn Chapel that nobody would be in the top of Rosslyn Chapel on top of the roof and all, up in the scaffolding doing restoration there. Yeah, its been quite a hoot.

Jason Church: Our listeners will have to stay tuned to your next adventures.

Jimmy Price: Well, we’ll see what happens. Hope so.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you’d like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Jason Church speaks with Jimmy Price, historic Red Mason and founder of Virginia Lime Works. In this podcast they talk about how Price helped bring Lime back to masonry in America.

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