AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

I came to the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2022 to take up the position of the first ever on-staff objects conservator, a role funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. This presentation will detail the work involved in founding a new program of outdoor sculpture conservation in a harsh climate, including research, maintenance, and remedial treatments.

NOMA has one hundred sculptures displayed outdoors, soon to be one hundred and one, mostly sited within the Sidney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden which surrounds the museum on its north and west sides. Some of these sculptures were previously installed for decades outside the headquarters of K&B Incorporated, the result of passionate collecting by the Besthoffs during Sidney’s years as CEO of that company. In 1998, the Besthoffs began aggressively donating works to NOMA for a planned 5 acre garden, which opened in 2003 with fifty sculptures. Steady donations continuing after the opening, mostly from the Besthoffs, were capped in 2019 with an expansion of the garden footprint by 6.5 acres and the addition of 27 further sculptures. Together, the two halves of the garden today have become a city institution in their own right: a magnet for out-of-town visitors, and a much-loved hangout and exercise location for residents.

Outdoor sculpture requires constant attention even in the most benign of climates, which New Orleans certainly is not. There are a number of serious challenges to preservation. Though only one sculpture suffered major damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes are a constant concern, particularly for the three kinetic works. We often find paints have a shorter lifespan than the manufacturer suggests, likely due to the heat and humidity. The garden ponds and embankments teem with birds, nutria, and other animals which seem to delight in leaving droppings on all the sculptures. Visitors frequently climb on the sculptures, despite signage and staff presence. With only a few days per year of help from NOMA’s small and busy team of preparators, just keeping the sculptures clean is a challenge. A project management app helps with communication and documentation of group work days, streamlining a necessarily diffuse process and preventing confusion about which sculpture gets which treatment practices.

Beyond simple cleaning and waxing, many sculptures are overdue for major treatment. I began to study the treatment histories, paint systems, patinas, and artists’ preferences as soon as I arrived, but much is left to discover. In some cases, these issues are thorny, such as the Arnaldo Pomodoro, for which executing the artist’s current preferences would result in a substantial change from the sculpture’s original 1971 appearance. Several sculptures, in my opinion, were unsuitable for permanent outdoor display due to materials or design, and conversations are ongoing about which of these, if any, might be possible to relocate indoors. Preservation choices must be made in balance with the artists’ visions for their works, the needs of visitors, and the integrity of the garden as a total work of art in its own right.