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.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday February 03, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction
Museum funds -- An article in the Jan. 25 Calendar on conservation efforts at the Southwest Museum implied that the museum has raised $6 million for a conservation project. The museum has raised $1,575,000 toward its $6-million goal.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday February 08, 2004 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 39 words Type of Material: Correction
Museum funds -- An article in the Jan. 25 Sunday Calendar on conservation efforts at the Southwest Museum implied that the museum has raised $6 million for a conservation project. The museum has raised $1,575,000 toward its $6-million goal.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday February 08, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction
Museum funds -- An article in the Jan. 25 Calendar on conservation efforts at the Southwest Museum implied that the museum has raised $6 million for a conservation project. The museum has raised $1,575,000 toward its $6-million goal.
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.
