Full transcript for the March 2024 conversation with Michael Cataldi, Mike Dunphy, and Laura Gaylord Resch.
Michael Cataldi (Founder and CEO, Paradise Framing)
Mike Dunphy (Director of Sales and Marketing, SmallCorp)
Laura Gaylord Resch (Assistant Preventive Conservator, The Cleveland Museum of Art)
Summary
In February 2024, Michael Cataldi, the founder and CEO of Paradise Framing, Mike Dunphy, the director of sales and marketing at SmallCorp and Laura Gaylord Resch, the assistant preventive conservator at the Cleveland Museum of Art discussed their innovative approaches to creating and utilizing microclimates to protect works of art for storage and display.
The innovations discussed include types of sealed frames and cases, as well as materials used, and examples of appropriate environments and measuring changes.
2:04 Opening Remarks
04:28 Introduction
06:38 Discussion of Sealed Frame Packages and Microclimates
10:28 What is Art Sorb and Marvelseal?
14:17 HALBE microclimate frames and digital monitoring discussion
20:15 Renting and reusing frames
27:43 Mike Dunphy Introducing SmallCorp
30:05 exhibit cases as microclimates
32:55 creating microclimates
40:41 Preventive conservation background at the Cleveland Museum of Art
51:44 Display case/microclimate maintenance
57:01 Volatile environments
1:01:32 Closing Remarks
*Please note that transcript has been edited for legibility *
(2:04 Opening Remarks)
Amy Crist: All right I'm going to get started even though we still have a few people coming in because we have a lot to cover today. So, hello and thanks for joining us, happy March on behalf of the American Institute for Conservation Sustainability Committee thank you so much for joining us. I'm Amy Crist, current co-chair of the sustainability committee and this is our sixth Conversation with Change Makers in which we are addressing the environmental impact of the buildings in which cultural heritage is stored, exhibited, and studied, and today we're focusing on microclimates.
The topic of microclimates has been raised in previous conversations So today we're going to take a closer look at what they are, how they're designed, built, maintained, and what they can accomplish in terms of protecting objects that are more vulnerable to changes in ambient environmental conditions.
So some quick housekeeping: if you have questions which we truly hope we can get to at the end of the hour, please put them in the Q&A and not the chat. Feel free to comment on the questions and upvote any questions that are important to you and we will try to answer them in that order. We have tried to turn off the “raise hand” function, if it's not off please avoid using the “raise hand” function and use the Q&A. If we run out of time for questions we will try to get them answered after the webinar and post them on our Sustainable Practices Wiki which is part of the overall AIC Wiki. Please only use the chat to share links and react, again use Q&A for questions for the speakers. We have enabled captioning, the event is being recorded, and a recording will be posted on the AIC's vast YouTube channel and we will link to it on our sustainable practices Wiki along with all of our other conversations and eventually we will transcribe the event, and all of our past change makers conversations have been transcribed.
And mark your calendars for our next conversation April 11th 12 to 12:45 Eastern with Jae Gutierrez who is the executive director of the Image Permanence Institute. The conversation will be a great follow-up to today's conversation, she will talk about some of the ongoing research IPI has done including the conditions inside shipping crates and sealed frame packages.
(04:28 Introduction)
Amy: So let me start by introducing our three speakers for today: Michael Cataldi is going to be our first Speaker. Michael opened Paradise Framing after completing his MFA at UCLA in 2015. Prior to moving to Los Angeles he was a preparator at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2006 to 2012 and the preparator for works on paper from 2010 to 2012. He's built a team of museum professionals at Paradise Framing to provide the region's institutions, artists, and collectors with preservation focused framing.
Then we'll talk to Mike Dunphy of SmallCorp. Mike attended Boston College where he studied business and marketing. After 15 years as a SmallCorp customer he joined SmallCorp in 2010 to work in project management and sales and marketing. He's had many diverse experiences since, working with everyone from small house museums to largest institutions and everything in between. He's a proud member of AIC New England Museum Association, New England Conservation Association and many others.
And finally we'll talk to Laura Gaylord Resch. Laura serves as assistant preventive conservator at the Cleveland Museum of Art where she works with colleagues across all departments to ensure the health and longevity of the collection while helping to facilitate safe and meaningful access to the artworks for the visiting public. Laura maintains a special focus on creating preservation environments for all art holding spaces while working to find more sustainable solutions for climate management.
Prior to working in Cleveland Laura worked in collections management at Tudor Place Historic House and Garden in Washington, DC and for preventive conservator Wendy Jessup in Arlington, Virginia. Laura has a BA in Art Conservation and Art History from the University of Delaware, and she currently serves as Vice Chair of the Preventive Care Network for AIC.
(06:38 Discussion of Sealed Frame Packages and Microclimates)
So, let's start with Michael. As mentioned in your bio you are the founder and CEO of a private framing Studio based in LA, where your work is done at a very high level and we're going to start by talking about sealed frame packages. This is probably the most common way of protecting works on paper or parchment or photographs from damage that could be caused particularly from swings and relative humidity. So, do you want to talk about how these packages are put together? The materials and the design of these packages?
Michael Cataldi: Sure.
Amy: We have a slide for that, if you want to go forward… thanks.
Michael: Yeah.
So we make probably three basic different designs of microclimate packages here. They are used for anything from institutional loans, particularly sensitive or valuable works on paper, and clients who may want to hang artwork in challenging environments from a humidity standpoint, and that often can include places where there are just really large shifts in relative humidity like Southern Florida, here in California, on the coast in Malibu, or even incredibly dry locations like Palm Springs and for some of our clients who may be shipping artwork or ephemera to and from Southern India. So we've… those are all kind of… examples of clients who we've built microclimate packages for. As well as some people who we just cannot convince to not hang artwork in their bathroom. Usually we're able to convince them not to hang highly valuable artwork, but we try to at least put anything that's going into somebody's bathroom in a microclimate package.
This is probably the most common example of that; here we're using any type of glazing, acrylic or glass, we're using an overmat and a mounting board book mat, your traditional book mat, and Art Sorb sheet and a two-ply mat board with Marvelseal on one side and the entire package is sealed on the edge with Mylar tape before it goes into the frame package. It's not the most effective as many people probably on this webinar already know, if it's built with acrylic glazing, since that is permeable to water vapor.
So in instances where it's appropriate, and often especially in California where we are, it's not appropriate to frame things with glass because of earthquake risk, but we will use it in something that has this direct contact between the matboard and the glazing because that's buffering shock and you know, we'll choose to use glass. And often with this package just as with some of the other ones that we'll show you, we’ll substitute a Dibond backing board, so a rigid, aluminum, composite backing board for that two-ply with Marvelseal especially when things get large and we're using glass. And that reduces flexibility in the package, and provides the same kind of protection that impermeable metal backing as the Marvelseal does.
You can go to the next slide.
(10:28 What is Art Sorb and Marvelseal?)
Amy: Michael, do you want to just quickly remind everybody or inform everybody what Art Sorb and Marvelseal is in case they're not familiar with those products?
Michael: Yeah! So Art Sorb is a material that absorbs and desorbs humidity and it can be… like our company is a dealer for that material and so we typically use it only at the 50% relative humidity level, but it comes in several gradations and in several different types of packages including cassettes, loose beads. It's very familiar to a lot of people who do case work or in any other application where silica gel desiccants are used. It has a kind of… It will help to buffer humidity within like, plus/ minus 10 degrees of that established center point and it can be reconditioned. So, once the useful life is expired and the useful life is about five years, in a sealed package, that material can be put into a chamber and reconditioned and reused.
We often are asked, we frame a lot of contemporary work, so we're often asked about particularly building microclimate packages with spacers in them, which is less common, so this is just an example of that construction. Pretty much exactly the same thing just with cotton rag mat board spacers glued to the mounting board to create that sealed package. And it's important to note that everything that we're using inside of the package is of the highest standard, so 100% cotton rag mat board, in instances where we have to laminate things we're using PAT-tested adhesives, we're mounting all of our artwork with wheat starch paste mixed with distilled water, and that's kind of once you seal that package obviously everything that's inside of there is going to off-gas inside of there and so you want to make sure that everything is of that kind of caliber.
The images on the right are of a particular piece of de Kooning work, painting, on newspaper. Several layers of newspaper that were laminated together. And so it shows a variation of this package where you can see through the mat windows on the bottom, there are two, four-ply mats in that one sandwiched together with Art Sorb in between them, and it's glazed with glass on both sides to create that impermeable layer, and then the artwork was hinged to one of those windows so that you could see- you could take the frame off the wall and see the back of of the painting, which is what you see in the lower right hand corner. That important information that helped us actually date the work based on a particular play on Broadway with what's advertised on the back of that newspaper. You can go to the next slide.
(14:17 HALBE microclimate frames and digital monitoring discussion)
So, our company also has a partnership with HALBE: a German frame manufacturer that many people in the United States are not familiar with, some of you who work in institutions may already be familiar with that but I like to tell people that if you've ever seen a Bernd and Hilla Becher photograph, you've seen a HALBE frame.
They're in really wide use in Europe and they've been manufactured with a relatively similar design since the 1970s, but they've made some advances. When we started partnering with them about five/seven years ago, in conservation grade packages, so when we need something that is really impermeable and can be monitored from inside of the frame package, we're often using this particular type of frame that they manufacture which is called a Protect frame.
The images on the right are from the Schindler house in Los Angeles this is a a historic House Museum it's a concrete building, and those sliding doors right there are often open to the outside so basically the relative humidity inside of the Schindler house is the same as it is outside of the Schindler house at all times. So, we were asked to partner with them on a project where they were borrowing works from a lot of established collections of architectural ephemera. A lot of works on paper, and we needed to provide them with an environment that would satisfy the lending requirements of a number of different institutions, and so we turned to this to this particular frame package. The benefits of it, which you can't see in any of these diagrams, is that you can actually have a digital monitoring device inside and you can monitor this package, the performance of this package, remotely by Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. But this uses silica gel desiccants in packets, it has an integrated hygrothermograph and then also has this possibility for having digital monitoring, and it's built with an interior aluminum tray, and it's most effective when it's glazed with a laminated museum glass. Essentially some version of what like the Tru Vue UltraVue product, which is like two layers of museum glass with a layer of non-reflective acrylic in the in between. And that all goes into, kind of a gasketed package that is tightened from the back of the frame using these kind of concentric closures.
And here we used it more as a readymade vitrine sitting on top of some display case work that was designed by architects who assembled the exhibition. So, that's able to maintain a much more stable environment than one that's using acrylic, and it now can be reused by the Max Schindler house for a number of different exhibitions, so these are highly durable, reusable pieces. In this instance they were displayed face up sitting on these temporary, or these architect design, display tables. But they were ordered with the intention of being able to use them with a picture wire system that's on the concrete walls, and to be able to deal with the fact that those concrete walls are going to allow a lot of passage of relative humidity, they're unsealed, and so now the institution has essentially an inventory of about four of these of a couple different sizes that work really well with the architectural design of the space and the existing exhibition restrictions. And so, in the future we'll frame other works, multiple works, within the same package, put them in those packages in the space, change the desiccant packets and for any other exhibitions that are upcoming.
Amy: Michael, do you know or are you able to disclose how well these are working in this Max Schindler house?
Michael: So I did not see the hygrothermograph information after the exhibition. We have some of them here in our studio that we monitor regularly, just using the small window in the hygrothermograph that's on the back of the frame, and it basically maintains, every time I look at it, it's at 50%. And so it's been hanging in the same location even when the humidity is fluctuating within our fitting room from, you know, usually around 50/55, down to sometimes 45 or 40, we have seen time and time again that it maintains 50% relative humidity in a really stable way. The Schindler house did not opt to purchase the digital monitoring devices at the time for this exhibition, so we don't have any real-time data that's kind of graphing that out on a kind of one-minute or ten-minute scale as we would if we had those monitoring devices. But we have some of those on the way in our studio and we have a set of these frames as well as a set of the next frames that I'll show you that we use in our rental program.
(20:15 Renting and reusing frames)
Amy: Let's talk about that, I think that's really interesting because I think there's- I think reusing and sharing and getting the most life out of something is just sort of an ethic that can go a long way in our field, and we're talking about lessening our impact. So you have a frame rental program just, with for a few minutes, because we need to pack as much in, talk about that that service that you offer.
Michael: Yeah, if you can go to the next slide it shows a little bit of that. This is a slightly different model of the same, of a frame by the same manufacturer HALBE, it's called the Conservo-distance model, it also has an aluminum tray on the interior, all the pieces attached to a galvanized steel frame that surrounds that with magnets, that's the primary innovation of the HALBE frames, and it's what makes them really reusable because there's no hardware in the sense that nobody's putting screws in them taking those screws out stripping holes out and so on, and they can also be fit face up all the time. And so that's much safer obviously, for a lot of works and it's also really, really fast; it takes our studio maybe six minutes or something to fit an artwork into one of these frames.
So the rental program, we have like five different sizes of these and we rent them to institutions, artists who are having open studios, they're really popular with, people who are having short pop-up exhibitions, and also they get used a lot for very last minute additions to things like Frieze Art Fair, which is happening in Los Angeles right now. So we allow customers to use them for that instance, we also allow customers to sell them and pay us the balance after they've sold them with an artwork, because that just helps us replenish our supply. And so we can build microclimate packages of a more traditional design into this.
There's an instance in the image on the lower left here, that's from the California State University Luckman Gallery, so this is University galleries in institutions that don't have collections, institutions that don't have frame storage, things like that, this is a really good option for them. And we found we initially planned for upwards of 20 uses per frame before any type of materials need to be replaced. We've never reached any kind of limits yet where we do that, probably because we paint them. We paint all of the frame moldings ourselves, and we do some minor woodworking to them when we receive them and that allows us to touch them up regularly in between use. And at any point in time when anything does need to be replaced, we can replace like individual components of individual frames à-la-carte essentially, so we don't have to- the whole thing doesn't get discarded. And in the future when they do reach the end of their usable life as a rental frame they'll probably just go up for sale for a really reduced amount for an artist to have in their studio as a tool for open studios and things like that, so we're looking at a lot of different ways to to extend the life of them and and really make it a more sustainable model.
Amy: That's great, I just I love the idea of having something quality that you can repair and not just, sort of, expendability of just junky stuff one time or two times and you just have to get just in general it's- it’s great to see the, you know, investing in something that's worth investing in and then being able to repair it and use it. It's really great.
Michael: Yeah, it's worth noting that they're all- all the interiors are inert, they're all UV-filtering acrylics in them. They're- individually they're quite expensive frames to begin with, and then we've invested some time and labor and materials in upgrading them, like we paint them to match Rising white mat board. So it's, so when they get sold they're actually kind of pricey for their size, but that's having it be an incredibly high quality product, much more high quality than most people will go for when they're looking for a budget option. This is what we think of as one of the real good points of it, and we hinge and mount everything with the same conservation standards in mind whether it's going into a really, really expensive custom frame that we're building or into one of these rental frames. So we tell clients like, if you need to take this artwork out of here and put it in a frame from Ikea, a lot of the most important things when it comes to preserving that work are already going to be done correctly.
Amy: Yeah, for sure, yeah those hinges are important. Michael, thank you so much! We need to go on to the next Mike but that was great to hear about everything you're doing at Paradise Framing.
(27:43 Mike Dunphy Introducing SmallCorp)
Amy: All right, Mike Dunphy from SmallCorp, you're up next.
Mike Dunphy: All right!
Amy: For those of us who are not familiar, although most of us, many of us are, probably, talk to us about what SmallCorp is.
Mike: So at SmallCorp we design and manufacture archival microclimate exhibit cases, a lot of finished corner, aluminum and acrylic picture frames, and a lot of products for conservation and exhibition. We work with museums, galleries, picture framers, artists and photographers, exhibition departments but most importantly conservators. And we're a family-owned company formed in 1972 and we've been in Greenfield, Massachusetts since 1977.
We're pretty well known for quality workmanship and for our willingness to try new things, but we're also known for our environmental consciousness. We've been on a 20 plus year mission to reduce our impact on the planet and through greatly improved energy efficiency of our facility. So we've installed high-efficiency LED lighting on motion sensors throughout the shop, we've improved the insulation and we use electric heat pumps to heat and cool the shop year round. As you can see in the slide in 2008, and then again in 2015 we added some large solar arrays, and those cover all of our electrical use, and as you can imagine, with a facility of this size we use a lot of power. You can actually see on our website how we are doing on a given day, I think there might be a slide of that, and we also- so you can see the building load versus the energy produced and that was yesterday morning.
We also recycle our scrap metal and compost our wood and our cardboard and actually offer free electric car charging with that solar electricity for our employees, and there may be a slide of that as well. So to us conservation is conservation of all of our resources: the cultural and the historical of course, but the natural as well, so hopefully that makes us a good fit for this discussion, and hope to make a contribution here.
(30:05 exhibit cases as microclimates)
Mike: I was going to discuss how exhibit cases can help in the context of sustainability, and if you're trying to relax the the 50/50 paradigm and hopefully reduce your energy cost you'll need well-sealed exhibit cases to protect against potentially larger fluctuations in humidity than you would experience if you kept the internal environment strictly at 50 degree 50% humidity. So a couple things it's important to recognize when you're talking about sealed exhibit cases, the difference between archival and sealed because they aren't the same thing. You want to have archival, inert materials inside your case, and you do want your case to be well-sealed, but you can have a case that is well-sealed and is filled with noxious- the materials that will do bad things to your objects. On the other hand you can have a case that is made of completely inert materials, but that isn't sealed and won't protect against humidity fluctuations. So it's most important before you go about creating a very well-sealed exhibit case that you know what is inside it, so you're not sealing something that's bad for your objects inside the internal environment.
So the things that make an exhibit case efficient and hopefully able to impact your sustainability efforts are the ability to create a microclimate that is different from the climate in the room, and the more extreme the variations is, it's going to be a little bit harder to maintain. But ultimately with an exhibit case, you're looking for it to be well-sealed and to minimize the air exchange rate per day, and that means that all the joints are really well-sealed with inert sealants and that you have a good quality gasket at all your openings, and that the gasket is compressed to minimize the air flow in and out of the case. It's also important to have good air flow inside the case, you want to have holes or gaps that allow air to flow from your, say, silica gel area to places where the objects live. And there's a couple simple measures as well to make the case efficient, meaning keep it closed. Every time you open it it's like opening up the refrigerator and letting out all your cold air, so the fewer times you can do that the better, and along the same vein, the fewer number of doors and openings you have on an exhibit case you'll be able to minimize the air exchange that way, because the doors and the openings tend to be places where the cases leak.
(32:55 creating microclimates)
Mike: So there are a couple ways to create a microclimate and there's active systems, those work really great it's a machine that will generate humidity or dehumidify your space, so it's largely hands of,f sometimes you have to add a little water or take away a little water but it does have an upfront cost and it requires that you have air lines inside the case between the machine and the object area. It also means that the case requires electricity and sometimes that's not possible in every scenario so most people end up using a passive system which is silica gel.
Silica gel is naturally occurring beads and it's related to the Art Sorb that Mike Cataldi was talking about, that's a- that's one brand of silica gel. Silica gel has tiny beads with internal pores that create a massive internal surface area, like several hundred grams, several hundred meters of surface area per gram of silica gel, so it's an incredible sponge that will absorb and desorb humidity for you and store it for you, inside your case. Once it's conditioned to a specific RH like, say 50%, it'll serve as a buffer to battle against the shifts in the external environment, which ultimately will creep inside your case. So it'll help you smooth the peaks and the valleys in your humidity changes inside the room. The big question though is: how much silica gel does one need? And you can- there's several factors in that: there's how big the case is, you know a bigger case is going to take more silica gel to keep it, maintain a consistent RH, how long you hope to go between servicing the gel, if you're only going to have it in there a short amount of time for a very short exhibition you don't need nearly as much. It's important to consider the ambient RH versus the RH that's desired in the case because the bigger the difference the harder your gel is going to have to work, and you'll probably need more of it.
There's the allowable deviation which is the difference between- or it's how willing you are to let the humidity inside the case shift, so if you don't have to have it strictly at a set 50% for example, if you can relax that a little bit and have some fluctuations, you'll be able to save some energy and use less silica gel. But the exchange rate per day of your exhibit case is the hardest to calculate, and what the exchange rate is, is how often air from outside the case seeps into air inside the case and how often they exchange. So even a really well-sealed exhibit case will have an air exchange rate of like, 0.1 or 0.2 per day, and that means that the air inside the case is exchanging with the air outside the case every five to ten days. But a not well-sealed case will have an air exchange of 1 per day, which means it's exchanging the air inside versus outside every single day, and as you can imagine that makes your silica gel work a heck of a lot harder to maintain the RH and won't last as long.
How do you calculate the exchange rate? That can be a challenge. Obviously we have a facility that's kind of set up for it and so what we do is, we add carbon monoxide into the case along with a monitor, and we use a monitor and a data logger to see the rate at which the carbon monoxide dissipates from the case, and that way you're able to tell how fast the air is exchanging inside versus outside. But if you're not sure and you don't have a good way to do the testing it's best to be conservative and use an exchange rate of like, one per day, and because that's kind of a worst case scenario. Then you can track what you're doing with a data logger and see if you can fine-tune your results over time.
But there are some hands-on ways to improve the air exchange rate even if you didn't buy the cases and you don't really know much about them. You can address the biggest leakers in the case, which are the openings. Every door, every opening, needs a good quality gasket and the gasket needs to be compressed. That's really important, just like the door on your refrigerator. Additionally, any joints inside like, say, the inside of the silica gel compartment need to be sealed with an inert sealant because if the silica gel compartment's leaking then it's not going to be nearly as effective in protecting the object. And what you see on the screen there is what we use when we are struggling to find out why a case isn't as well-sealed as we think it is and that's a sonic leak detector. They're not very expensive and you put an emitter inside the case and you seal it up just like you would with an object, and then you put on your headphones and use your probe and walk around listening to where you can hear the noise leaking out of the case, and it's a really effective way to figure out where the problem is and try to fine-tune it. So highly recommend getting yourself a sonic leak detector and some data loggers, and have at it. So I hope that was helpful and I am always glad to talk about this stuff in more depth if people are interested.
Amy: I want a sonic leak detector for my home to figure out which windows I need to recaulk the most.
Mike: Exactly.
Amy: [laughs] That was great. We're running a little bit late, but I just wanted to really quickly ask, and if you can provide as concise answer as possible, there's a big difference between getting a case made that has the active system compared to the passive system, and most of what we're talking about today is passive: using Art Sorb or an absorbent in some way shape or form. When somebody comes to you and you determine that you they need to maybe go as far as having an active system, or even with the passive system, how airtight it needs to be, like what are you- what are you going to ask the the client and what sorts of objects are you making cases for that have an active system?
Mike: The active systems tend to be used, at least in our experience, in very large cases that would take massive amounts of silica gel to condition, or in situations where the internal RH is at an extreme. Say, if it's a bronze sculpture and it needs to be kept really dry, the mechanical system can do that and provide some peace of mind that you don't have to keep track of your silica gel as closely as you might have to. Those are the- those are the probably the driving factors and why somebody would choose the active system. I guess the last being if they don't have any staff who has time or ability to go and service silica gel they could do the active system as well, it's a little more hands-off.
Amy: Okay great, that's- those are some good, good guidelines to understand for the differences between the two. Thank you so much!
Mike: Thank you!
(40:41 Preventive conservation background at the Cleveland Museum of Art)
Amy: More great information. Next we're going to talk with Laura, who works at the CMA: the Cleveland Museum of Art and I used to work with Laura, and Laura was always walking around with a truck full of silica gel [laughs].
Laura Gaylord Resch: [laughs]
Amy: So she knows all about taking care of those cases. Do you want to start by giving us a little bit of a context for how cases are used at the CMA? Where, to be, you know, honest with you, the CMA is not relaxing environmental standards really all that much yet, but there is a lot of case work at the CMA.
Laura: Yeah, yeah, so I'll start off by saying I'm so glad to be going after the Michaels because you guys set me up so well, there's a lot of overlap here, which is really great. Yeah, we have a ton of case work here at the CMA, and while we're not planning to relax our RH, you know, anytime soon, it's something that I think we're really interested in thinking about for the future, and I know that my colleagues and I in the conservation department are really trying to keep a close eye on that because I do think that we're all going to be thinking about doing that in the future.
So I have case work all over our museum campus and there's multiple different types of buildings on site, and they have different levels of control. We do run pretty tight here; we're generally doing 50% plus or minus 2, which is pretty tight, but that being said we are reliant on an external steam provider, and we're reliant on Cleveland power, and those two sites do have issues at times. Things happen. and also our steam provider is also the same provider that the Cleveland Clinic uses, so obviously if something goes down the clinic is going to be first priority for re-servicing, as they should, and so we're going to get those folks online before we get back online. So because we have the luxury of having a preventive conservator on staff, and I can make this a big part of my focus, we end up microclimating almost all of our case work here, just in case some sort of shutdown does occur.
Amy: Thanks. You want to talk about the specifics of the cases, many of which are made inhouse, right? And using some pretty innovative materials.
Laura: Yeah, so we're making the vast majority of our casework on site. We do occasionally work with some external casework manufacturers like Glasbau Hahn but most of our casework is made on site, and I have a slide up here with just some of our standard case styles. We are re-making these same sorts of case profiles, you know we sort of rely on these same types if we have to make new case work for exhibitions. And we also are doing a lot of repurposing of these types of cases trying to, you know, use what we have in our current stock for each new show that we put on. I think I have another slide that shows some of my common materials.
Yeah, awesome. So we try to make, well we, as a policy we make everything within the case environment, like within the display environment, out of something that has passed the Oddy test. So we're using Obomodulan, which is this pink material that you can see here, it's a polyurethane board and it tests really, really cleanly, and we're using that instead of any wood products. So we've eliminated MDF or you know, any sort of plywood from our display environments. We do have older cases that have those materials, and so in that instance what we do is we Marvelseal those surfaces so that you know, there's a vapor barrier in place between the display and the silica gel chamber, so we're not getting any of those materials off-gassing into our display environment.
I'm also using silicone gaskets. I have a picture here from clean seal which is generally what I use but I will say that they just emailed me this month that they're changing their adhesive that they use and so I'll be retesting that when they come out with the new product to make sure that it's still going to work for us. I'll run that through Oddy testing. And then the vast majority of the time we're using acrylic vitrines instead of glass, and you know, the Michaels both covered reasons why you would think about acrylic versus glass. Acrylic is not completely moisture impermeable but I have found that it does a pretty good job for us in terms of allowing me to make pretty tight case work, but if we're going to have a really oversized case it probably is going to be a glass panel instead of that acrylic.
Oh great, so this slide here we have some of the different improvements we've made to some of our casework to make sure that we have adequate airflow between the silica gel chamber and that display deck. So this that you're seeing here, my colleague is lifting up a deck surface and we've actually inserted this perforated aluminum paneling, and that way we're able to really increase the airflow. It's then covered with an Oddy approved display fabric so, you know, the visitor doesn't see that this is hiding underneath the display area, but it's allowed us to really up the movement of air between the chamber where the silica gel is held and the display area. And I'll say that in my testing that I've done with our case performance that's really been a sticking point- is ensuring that we have adequate airflow between that silica gel chamber and the display area. I think that in the past we had been using air gaps around the deck that were not actually big enough to have us have that air movement, so that's something that folks should keep an eye on if they're going to be designing their own casework in house.
Yeah, and this is another case style; so we have a really large Asian artwork collection here at the CMA and a lot of scroll paintings are on display, and when we do shows with lenders those are a type of object that might have a specific humidity requirement involved, so these are some of our hanging scroll cases. They're cut, sort of cut off in the middle here in these images but they're quite tall, and we have an external gel chamber that you can see at the bottom in the two images closer to the right, and you can see how I have external access to that space so I can install silica gel as needed, and I can also take in and out data loggers if that's required as well. And then this, you know, the image on the left here, sort of shows how my air gap works so it's actually just that that piece of board sits on top and I can slide it to sort of adjust how the air gap looks.
I'm so glad that Mike talked about leakage testing because I have kind of Jerry-rigged a leak testing setup for us here at the CMA obviously we can't really deal with carbon monoxide here, but what I do is I use a CO2 cartridge that you can- I buy them in bulk, just like on Amazon, and which I know is not entirely sustainable but that's a whole other topic-[laughs] but we, you know, we can get these bike cartridges and then you can put a CO2 logger, and I hook it up to an external battery just to make sure that it doesn't die on me in there during the test and then I squirt in the CO2 with a bike tire inflator until, you know, until my CO2 logger is reading zero parts oxygen. And then I just kind of sit and wait and let it run and I see how fast the CO2 leaks out of the case, and then Steve Weintraub has, I believe it's Steve Weintraub, has a whole formula in his “making the case for an airtight case” publication you can just run the numbers that you get through that and it'll give you an air exchange rate for your case work.
Amy: So, just to clarify, the idea behind whether, you know, Mike talked about the carbon monoxide you're talking about the carbon dioxide… The idea is that you have a monitor that can detect either the carbon monoxide or the carbon dioxide so you, so, which is different from like the normal atmosphere so you can just kind of see how quickly that's changing. That's the idea behind using these?
Laura: Yeah, yeah exactly, so you know you can get a CO2 logger fairly easily on the internet they're not all that expensive and, you know, I don't think that this is perfect but it works for me to get an idea of like, you know, what cases I have that are tighter than others, and a rough air exchange rate and that helps me a lot when I'm planning how much silica gel to use.
(51:44 Display case/microclimate maintenance)
Amy: Great. I don't want to rush you, but I definitely want you to talk about your process for maintaining the cases. Especially if anybody here is thinking about adding this to their workflow like what is involved human hours wise
Laura: Yeah.
Amy: Setup wise, equipment and space.
Laura: Yeah, so yeah, this like, we can start with this slide. This is something that's kind of helpful, I think that a lot of folks when they hear about reconditioning silica gel are picturing something like, kind of… I don't know, more stressful than it actually is. All I do to dry out gel that I want to bring, say I want to make a case at 40% RH, I will put silica gel or Art Sorb or whatever I'm aiming for, honestly if I'm doing a drier case I'm probably using a more general silica gel, I am putting it in these enamel trays in an actual normal oven that we have in the objects laboratory here, and baking it at around two hundred until it reaches zero.
And then if you can go to… I wish, yes this is great, so I have a whole bunch of airtight bins and this is the Lock Tight brand. They sell a ton of stuff, it's for food storage but I found that they work really well for silica gel conditioning. If I want my gel to be drier, I put some super dry gel in here and then add bags of gel that are at 50% and it like, pulls those down. And the way I do it is I put a data logger, you can see kind of the ghost of a HOBO in there one of the Bluetooth enabled I think they're like mx1101s? I put them in there and I can keep an eye on that humidity and basically take out the super dry gel when the system reaches the humidity that I've set as my goal. I've been doing this a long time so I will say like once you start doing it,it's a lot easier to do it and it becomes easier to guess like how your gels are going to react and how, you know how long it might take, and and how leaky are, you know, the jars or the bags you're using to isolate this until you're installing it in your case work like there is a little bit of learning your way, learning how it it works at your specific institution with your ambient humidity levels. so it's a combination of reading some of that literature that's out there and then also like experimenting until you figure out how it works for your facility.
I think I have a slide about gel conditioning that's like a little drawing I think it's backwards I think we passed it already. Yeah this one! So this is what I would do if I want to raise that humidity. If I want a more humid gel I'm often using Art Sorb because Art Sorb tends to work a little bit better at those higher ranges. And I'm going to just use one of those locktight boxes, pour my Art Sorb beads into the container, and then all I do is get a sponge and get some water into that sponge, put it into the box with a data logger, and lock the whole thing up. And then I just sit and wait and watch it. I will sometimes get it out and kind of stir it around and then put the cover back on but again it's just waiting and watching and seeing how long it takes for your logger to get to your goal point.
The other thing that I think folks need to think about is that you're probably going to want to condition your gel a little bit higher or a little bit lower than what you want your case goal to be because remember, say for this you know this drawing that I did, say that I want to make my case 60%, I'm actually going to aim for my data logger in this little system to be around 70 because then when I install it into the case it's going to sort of meet in the middle with that 50% air and bring my display area down to 60. But that's something that I've just learned with our style case and toying around and figuring out how things work with my casework and my ambient conditions, so I think folks might need to do a little bit of experimenting, but it's totally doable.
Amy: The art and science of silica gel conditioning.
Laura: [laughs] yeah!
(57:01 Volatile environments)
Amy:[laughs] As we get down on time here, it's worth mentioning quickly, we talked about it before, that you also add activated charcoal sometimes, and you've all mentioned how you can't just create this microclimate of volatiles that are going to cause damage to the artwork, so you add oftentimes charcoal to the to the trays as well, right?
Laura: Yeah… I may have a slide close to the end that shows a shelf. This is my humidity chamber, this is one of the luxuries of working at a large institution like the CMA. I have a walk-in freezer but instead of temperature it's set to 50% relative humidity at all times. That's where I store all of my gels and Art Sorb cassettes when they're not being used. If you go one slide over… Yes. This is my shelf of scavenger materials. So I buy granulated charcoal and I encapsulate it in little baggies of inert material that's moisture permeable. You could also use aluminum pie pans and put the charcoal into those, and that is, you know, something you can use if, say I have a case that has a bunch of silver on display, that's going to help me to collect any volatiles that may be within the case.
I also have some corrosion intercept fans which let you insert the corrosion intercept foam, there's all these different tools out there that you can use to help capture those volatiles. I will mention quickly too that sometimes you want to think about, do I really want a super tight case for this object? We have… an example I can think of is some contemporary artworks that we do want under a vitrine to protect their surfaces, but they're made out of, there's this one sculpture we have that's made out of all these, like, composite found materials that the artist came across, so everything from rubber hose tubing to grocery bags are all incorporated into the sculpture and I don't want to be trapping those types of materials together with the metal components that are on the piece, and there's some organics in there, I don't want to be cooking all of that stuff together under a vitrine and, like, in an environment that's super, super tight. So I'm fine with having that case be as leaky as possible and you know we've taken gasketting out, we've done what we can to make sure that we're not just, like, baking all of those fun off-gassing materials together with the artwork.
Amy: Right, they're stewing in their own juices.
Laura: Yeah [laughs]
Amy: And do you want to show your last slide? It’s a really great example of how the cases do buffer! they do hold
Laura: yeah!
Amy: when things went wrong.
Laura: Yeah I did want to grab this, most of these slides are from a talk I did in I want to say 2020 for AIC and I'm happy to send that talk to folks if anyone wants to see it and have my notes and such. But this is an example of a power outage we did have, so you can see on the chart on the left that is like, my facilities building management system chart and it shows what happened with the big humidity spike and temperature drop that we had versus within my case over here that had 60% gel within it. You can still see the temperature drop so that's a good note, like we're not controlling temperature we're just worried about the humidity here and there is a bit of flux, you can see some flux, but then the gel does its job and, you know, it's very minimized compared to what was happening in the ambient conditions in that surrounding room in the gallery.
Amy: Yeah, it looks like it went down 10 degrees pretty fast.
Laura: Yeah.
(1:01:32 Closing remarks)
Amy: Yeah. That's great. We're at one, however, I have to get my thank yous in and I'm going to leave the zoom if Nick can leave the zoom open for a little bit in case people want to put any questions in the Q&A we can follow up with those and put them on our Wiki. I know we like to try to keep time for Q&A but we such good speakers today and so much good information to get through I didn't want to cut anybody off. So, I will, hopefully we can leave it open.
Thank you Michael, Mike, and Laura for sharing your expertise, this was fantastic information thanks to AIC for continuing to support our committee's conversations. Thank you Nick and Elena behind the scenes for getting everything set up for us and thank you to everybody who attended. The link for the recording will be available soon and I hope to see many people in April for a conversation with Jay and I'll just sit here as anything pops into the Q&A so that we can leave the Q&A open but thank you so much everybody. There's one I only see one thing in the Q&A and Nick you can probably stop the recording now.
Have more questions?
Contact the Speakers:
Michael Cataldi
Mike Dunphy
Laura Gaylord Resch
