If you are working in a place that is very humid or very dry, you have to know how your materials will interact with that environment. And, when the piece is created and installed, the maintenance should be clearly spelled out in writing for the owners. In many cases, the artists don t know how their works will hold up, nor do they understand how to maintain them or repair damage. Early on in the General Services Administration s art conservation program, Artists came in to do conservation, and deterioration recurred, Weber said. After that, we stopped using the artists and relied exclusively on conservators.
Artists generally seem happy to defer to the conservators anyway.
Two notable exceptions are the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, and the Fairmount Park Art Association in Philadelphia, where maintenance and conservation concerns are part of the commission process. We re too small a museum to have a full-time art conservator, said Jane Weinke, curator of collections at Leigh Yawkey Woodson, so I ve spent a lot of time with conservators at the Upper Midwest Conservation Association a regional conservation lab that works for small museums in the area to learn how to take care of works and to spot the kinds of works that are going to need a lot of care. Seeing as a conservator sees certainly makes you look at artworks differently. That knowledge of the durability of materials and how they interact with the environment has benefited the museum, which regularly purchases artworks for its sculpture garden. Weinke noted that artists sometimes provide maintenance instructions, but their ideas are frequently not appropriate to the conditions at the museum.