Articles
In 2014, a small group of volunteers in Marshalltown, Iowa, met to discuss the restoration of the Fisher Community Center Art collection, which had been untouched since the 1960s. The artworks were in desperate need for repair, care, and cataloguing, so the group set to work filing for grants and hiring specialists to help.
The Farnsworth House located in Plano, Illinois experienced a devastating flood in 2008. The Conservation Center was contacted and our team was sent to safely remove the wardrobe during restoration of the house. It remained secure in our fine art storage facility until conservation treatment was approved.
As a Chicago-based company, it’s always a treat when pieces come to us with a bit of local art history. Recently, we had the opportunity to restore a large painting by James Allen St. John, a Chicago artist who is most commonly known for his illustrations of the popular Edgar Rice Burroughs "Tarzan" series.
The Conservation Center is proud to be part of a vast community of individuals and institutions dedicated to conserving the past. We recently had the opportunity to work with such an institution, the Oak Park Public Library, to help conserve a part of their history.
Organization and efficient inventory management are of the utmost importance here at The Conservation Center. It is critical for our staff to properly record each piece as it enters and exits our facility, especially with the recent influx of delicate items from our disaster response efforts. So how do we stay organized?
Usually in our monthly newsletter, we often highlight the extraordinary art and heirloom pieces that The Conservation Center has cared for. And while we couldn’t fulfill the company’s mission without our expert conservators, they are in fact only a part of our whole team. Equally important—and often billed as the “gears and the grease” that keep the company running—to what we do here is The Conservation Center’s expert Shipping and Installation team: the skilled professionals whom we trust with valuable pieces, who spend most days out in the field with their boots on the ground, and who are instrumental in cultivating on-site relationships with our clients.
Blue skies and warmer temperatures had giddy Midwesterners basking in sunshine lately after one of the cruelest winters in recent memory. But spring has also brought stormy weather to the Chicago area, and mother nature unleashed a different kind of misery on local residents: flooding. Many Midwestern cities, including Chicago, have been on guard for excess water that lead to issues such as clogged storm drains. The Conservation Center's Disaster Response team is once again on the ground, reacting to many emergency incidents that have affected personal collections. On a recent triage, more than 15 Conservation Center staff members collaborated to save hundreds of family heirlooms from water damage.
In the field of art conservation the terms archival, inert, stable, safe, etc. refer to materials or processing methods that are expected to allow items to be stored for extended periods of time without loss of quality. These materials should not degrade over time and should not contain volatile materials that will be emitted from the material, or ‘off-gas.’ Both degradation products and off-gassing materials can do serious damage to some art materials. Metal, paper, and shells are examples of sensitive materials that can be damaged irreversibly from proximity to ‘unsafe’ materials.
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