Indianapolis Museum of Art - Conservation

Conservation

The IMA's conservation department was established in 1970 by the museum's first full-time conservator, Paul Spheeris, and quickly became known as a regional center for conservation. In 1978 the department began providing consulting services to regional institutions, taking on contracts from across the Midwest. An early high profile contract involved the preservation of 45 governors' portraits over the course of 15 months. The 1979 exhibit, Portraits and Painters of the Governors of Indiana, was held at the IMA from January to March before the portraits were placed on permanent display at the Indiana Statehouse. Other major regional projects have included the conservation and restoration of the Thomas Hart Benton murals, first created for the Indiana Hall at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and now located at Indiana University, the Wishard Memorial Hospital murals, the Otto Stark and Clifton Wheeler murals in Indianapolis Public School 54, and most recently the restoration of the May Wright Sewall Memorial Torches at Herron High School, the former site of the John Herron Art Institute.

Currently, the conservation department serves the needs of the museum through the expertise of specialists in paintings, textiles, works on paper, frames, and objects conservation. The department has grown in both size and staff throughout the years, with the most recent expansion occurring in 2007. As of 2007, the IMA owned one of the few computer-based X-ray units in the United States, continuing a trend in X-ray technology that the department began in the 1970s. In 1980, the department helped organize and establish the Midwest Regional Conservation Guild, which includes conservators and conservation scientists from Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan. In the mid-1980s, the department received attention when head conservator Martin Radecki assisted local authorities in uncovering over two dozen forged T.C. Steele and William Forsythe paintings worth more than $200,000. The high profile forgery case led Radecki to organize an exhibit in 1989, Is it Genuine? Steele, Forsythe and Forgery in Indiana. The exhibit highlighted conservation techniques and examined how forgeries can be discovered. Another public presentation of conservation took place in 2007 with Sebastiano Mainardi: The Science of Art, a Star Studio exhibit that allowed visitors to watch conservators as they worked on the 16th-century altarpiece. The IMA's Star Studio is an interactive gallery that enables visitors to learn, through the process of art-making and observation, about the museum's collections.

In February 2010, the IMA shifted from current environmental control standards within their exhibition spaces, allowing temperature and humidity fluctuation of a few degrees on either side of the suggested standard. Director and CEO Maxwell Anderson had been involved in discussions with the Bizot Group of museum directors in which the scientific validity of the current standard was called into question. The IMA relinquished the standard after concluding that the majority of artworks could sustain a greater range of humidity, so permitting the museum to save on the cost of energy bills and reduce its carbon footprint.