The week of June 22nd to 26th was a busy week filled with a great deal of silver polishing that commenced after a delivery on the 22nd. In between working on the sliver collection for the Derfner Judaica Museum in NYC, I was also slowly chipping away at cleaning half of the African Headdress, so I could document a clear before and after treatment example in a photo (shared below). This week I also had the opportunity to shadow my boss, Rachael Perkins Arenstein, on a back-of-house IPM (Integrated Pest Management) tour of MOMA in Manhattan. Joined by their head of facilities, one of their conservators, and the IPM company that they have employed, we spent almost three hours walking through mechanical rooms, theaters, staff hallways and more.
MOMA does not currently have a preventive conservator on staff, and like many other institutions, they are starting to shift some focus on implementing preventive conservation practices in the museum. We started our tour at the lowest level of the facility, a mechanical room just above the water table. In the three-ish floors that we covered, all of them were below ground, and considered “back of house” spaces, not open to the public. In addition to numerous mechanical rooms filled with HVAC units and condensers, we also saw the amazingly large freight elevator (it was giant, might be the biggest one I have ever seen), MOMA’s framing/woodshop, and several receiving dock areas where incoming art for exhibitions is brought to be de-crated and accessed by the collections team.
Some of the main concerns that were discussed included the potential for pest issues across these spaces, as the presence of pests in these areas means that there is the potential for the same issues to occur in the galleries, which is not ideal for both the art and the visitors. One suggestion that was brought up that I really liked was the idea to take a mechanical zoning map (basically a floor plan with the mechanical system overlayed on top) of the museum and add the locations of data loggers/environmental monitoring, as well as areas of future/and or known pest activity to the map. This means that there would be a comprehensive document with all of this information that could be easily accessed by any staff or outside contractors that needed it.
After the tour I took some time to explore the galleries, starting from the top floor and working my way down and eventually to the gift shop. Currently, the top floor of MOMA is exhibiting a Duchamp exhibition. This exhibition runs in the general chronological order of Duchamp’s’ life and explores his path as an artist. Duchamp was inspired early on by cubism, a movement that grew out of the European impressionists and post impressionists after the turn of the century. I particularly enjoy these earlier works including his works of nude figures that at first glance don’t appear to be anything but a mess of geometric shapes, but upon closer investigation, the human form becomes visible to one’s eye.
From there I began my descent, wondering through galleries of impressionists, cubists, abstract expressionism, minimalism, and conceptual art. Some of my favorites included Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup cans. While I admit that modern and contemporary art is not generally my interest in study or viewing, I did appreciate the works that I saw on view.
That’s all for now, the next chapter will include my adventures at NYPL for both exhibitions and meetings, so stay tuned!
*Images related to this visit can be found on the Instagram page linked here: https://www.instagram.com/thesummershift/
the summer shift 
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