Working out the bugs

One of the dirty little secrets of art and cultural history museums is that humans aren’t the only ones with a taste for the objects in the collections. Given the chance, insects greedily feast on art and artifacts made of paper, cloth, straw, wood, fur, feathers and leather. They also make nests and give birth to little creepy-crawly things that do more damage.

The problem is usually kept under control at well-financed museums with modern buildings. That is not the case at the chronically underfunded Southwest Museum, where an immensely valuable collection of Native American material is crammed into a picturesque but hopelessly antiquated, pest-friendly building in Mount Washington.

Founded in 1907 and lodged in its landmark Mission Revival structure since 1914, the Southwest is home to 350,000 artistic objects, including world-renowned holdings of textiles, ceramics and baskets. It is also the domicile of silverfish, termites, moths, lice, beetles and fleas.

Bugs just love the Southwest Museum.

The staff has struggled to eradicate insect intruders for decades but never with enough money to fully protect the collection. Since 1990, the museum has received more than $1 million in 18 grants for conservation, and it has made infrastructure improvements partly geared toward pest control. The most ambitious conservation project, largely funded by the Ahmanson Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, has secured the Navajo and Hopi textiles in an air-conditioned chamber at the museum. But the bugs keep coming back to other areas.

“This is painful,” John L. Gray says as he and his colleagues discuss the infestation. The executive director of Griffith Park’s Museum of the American West (formerly the Autry Museum of Western Heritage), which merged with the Southwest last March, Gray also heads the Autry National Center, the umbrella organization that administers the museums.

But now -- with about $6 million in funds from the Ahmanson, Parsons, Keck, Weingart and Rose Hills foundations, the J. Paul Getty Trust and trustees of the Autry National Center -- the time has come to deal with the insect problem, Gray says.

A major pest control and conservation project is expected to begin in March and continue for about three years. The museum will be closed for the first six months, while much of the collection is moved and the building is fumigated.

Getting rid of the bugs wasn’t the point of the merger. The long-range plan of the Autry National Center is to create a three-part complex in Griffith Park -- with new buildings for the Southwest Museum and a research center joining the existing Museum of the American West -- and to renovate the Southwest’s 90-year-old building for programs that have yet to be determined.

“Over the long term,” Grays says, “our priority is to build the preeminent center for the study of the American West to be spread across two campuses, one in Griffith Park and the other in Mount Washington.”

The quiet phase of a fundraising campaign to implement the plan is underway, with the goal yet to be announced. Gray hopes that the new Southwest facility -- with state-of-the-art storage, open to the public -- will be ready in 2007. Meanwhile in Mount Washington, Los Angeles preservation architect Brenda Levin, of Levin & Associates Architects, has assessed the Southwest’s historic building and produced a comprehensive facilities report with recommendations for rehabilitation.

But the first priority, Gray says, is to “save and conserve the Southwest Museum’s collection.”

Step 1: clean and assess

As the $6-million budget suggests, this isn’t just a matter of bringing in exterminators, tenting the building and fumigating. Much of the collection is stored in the museum’s seven-story tower. Leaky, moldy and accessed by a spiral staircase that runs through the center of the structure, the tower cannot be converted to an up-to-date storage facility without destroying its historic components and reducing its interior space, so its days as a giant closet are nearly over.

That means hauling out some 10,000 pieces of ceramics stored in cardboard boxes on the top floor and balcony. It would be dangerous and extremely slow to take the boxes down the spiral staircase, so they will be moved out through upper windows and lowered to the ground on a huge dumbwaiter, to be erected outside the tower.

The task is only slightly less daunting on the lower floors. Although textiles were removed from a subterranean room known as “the lower dungeon” several years ago, tens of thousands of ethnographic pieces are still stored in the ground-level “upper dungeon,” in rooms with narrow walkways between shelves and cabinets.

“These are the things that are at greatest risk,” Southwest director Duane H. King says as he surveys an overwhelming array of beaded bags and moccasins, bark paintings, kachinas, feathered headdresses, ceremonial objects and tools.

All of these objects will be removed through a ground-level door, where a temporary deck and walkway will be constructed to facilitate the move. But before anything leaves the tower, a team of conservators and technicians will do an inventory and look for objects that have special needs, says Linda A. Strauss, director of collections, exhibits and conservation at the Museum of the American West.

Strauss, who will oversee the project, plans to hire three independent specialists, a paper conservator, an objects conservator and a collections manager. They will hire additional people to carry out the initial phase of the project, which Strauss describes as basic preservation.

“It mainly involves cleaning, vacuuming and rehousing objects in archival materials,” she says. “Each piece will be cleaned, photographed and put in its own little home. A bar code will be applied to each box, and each piece will be entered in the new collections management system. It’s not real glamorous; it’s basically the greatest good for the greatest number of artifacts.”

Preservation and authenticity

Items that are particularly fragile or have sustained damage will go to the conservation laboratory at the Griffith Park museum, where a new conservator will be hired to work on the Southwest’s artifacts. The goal is not to make these objects look like new but to “stabilize” them, Strauss says. “If paint is flaking off, we want to make sure it’s glued on. If beads are loose, we want to run some fine thread through them to make sure they don’t fall off. We want each object to look its age, honest but well cared for.”

Artworks and artifacts deemed sacred by Native Americans will be removed from the site for special treatment. The museum building probably will be tented and fumigated, with the collection inside. But sacred objects will not be fumigated because that process is thought to kill the spirits of the objects.

“We are beginning to contact Native American groups that have artifacts here and get their input as to how they want the items treated and stored,” Strauss says.

All the rest of the pieces will go into temporary storage in the wing of the Southwest building that displays California, Plains and Northwest Coast material. That means the museum will lose a big chunk of its exhibition space, but renting a secure building to store the collection off-site would be prohibitively expensive, Gray says.

When the museum reopens in the fall, some of the material that has been squeezed out to make way for storage will be exhibited in the wing known as Sprague Auditorium. The lower floor, which holds small exhibitions, the shop and offices, will remain intact.

Taking a philosophical approach, King notes that “conservation and infestation issues have to be dealt with in all museums.”

He has a point. Many museums routinely fumigate or freeze infested objects. In 1993, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launched a well-publicized attack against moths that were feasting on Edward Kienholz’s 1966 sculpture “Back Seat Dodge.” Using a technique developed at the Getty Conservation Institute, LACMA conservators encased the sculpture in a giant plastic bag, extracted the oxygen and replaced it with nitrogen to kill the intruders.

But the Southwest’s project is unusually ambitious, and it’s a huge step for the museum, King says. “Now, with the merger, we have a full-time conservation staff to look at our needs on an ongoing basis and to deal with those needs immediately, as opposed to having to identify a need, apply for a grant and wait for the money. There’s no question there are increased opportunities and benefits from the creation of Autry National Center and its approach to the care and treatment of the collection.”

The merger has been viewed with alarm by those who fear that the Southwest will be subsumed into the new organization and worry about the ultimate use of the historic building. But there appears to be no organized opposition to dealing with the bug problem.

The Friends of the Southwest Museum Coalition, a consortium of Northeast Los Angeles community groups, does not oppose the proposed six-month closure for the conservation of the collection, spokesman Elliot Sekuler says. What concerns members of the organization is maintaining the Southwest as “a living museum,” he says. And that’s an issue that will have to wait.

“Pest management is something you have to keep on top of,” Strauss says. “You can’t let it go. Every two months we put out 80 traps in areas that might be subject to infestation, then collect them and put out new traps. The traps go to the conservation lab, where they are opened and looked at under the microscope. One of the nastier bugs, the carpet beetle, is almost invisible to the human eye. We look, count them, make sure we know what is happening where.”

The same system is used at the museum in Griffith Park, she says. “But it’s such a problem here at the Southwest, we really can’t do much until the fumigation. When we move the collection out of the tower into the main part of the building, we will have more control of the ingress of insects and the climate.

“It may not be perfect, but it will be a great improvement.”