Maintenance
In 1991, The New York Times published a feature article on maintenance of the garden. An employee monitors the sculptures with weekly inspections, driving around in a golf cart "outfitted with brooms, brushes, a ladder, calipers, thermometers and a can of Pepsi." Nature and pollution can threaten the artwork. In the spring, birds like to nest in a work by Nevelson, chipmunks prefer the mysterious inner spaces of Judith Brown's "Caryatid", a welded steel sculpture made of automobile parts. At one point, carpenter bees started chewing into Robert Davidson's "Totems," a 45-foot (14 m) Western red cedar sculpture. Removing bird guano is a constant task. The huge model statue of a bear was a favorite target for some.
The piece "Grizzly Bear" by David Wynne faces harm even from the temperature. "When the sun hits that black rock during the day the temperature can go up to 120 degrees on the surface, and drop to 40 degrees at night," according to Douglass Kwart, a freelance objects conservator who was overseeing the conservation program at PepsiCo as of 1991. "That change puts the stones through tremendous stress, because of contraction. Water is absorbed into the stone and driven out, absorbed and driven out again."
As of 1991, maintenance staff at the garden wrote up a weekly report on each piece of sculpture after observing each for damage.
Read more about this topic: Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens
Famous quotes containing the word maintenance:
“It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“My course is a firm assertion and maintenance of the rights of the colored people of the South according to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, coupled with a readiness to recognize all Southern people, without regard to past political conduct, who will now go with me heartily and in good faith in support of these principles.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“... in the fierce competition of modern society the only class left in the country possessing leisure is that of women supported in easy circumstances by husband or father, and it is to this class we must look for the maintenance of cultivated and refined tastes, for that value and pursuit of knowledge and of art for their own sakes which can alone save society from degenerating into a huge machine for making money, and gratifying the love of sensual luxury.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)