Maintenance Culture: Recapping our Summer Workshops
As summer comes to a close and another fall ramps up, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on our Maintenance Culture summer workshops. In June we hosted a workshop in the library of the esteemed Menil Collection in Houston and in August we were in Detroit at Trinosophes—a mission-driven arts non-profit with an experimental music focus.
We have made some significant changes to our workshop curriculum since our first workshop at the Seattle Public Library this spring. As a first-round grant project, we are always iterating, tweaking, and improving, and we have been working to bridge the gap that sometimes exists between object-focused museum work and archival practice. Digital preservation offers a unique entry point for bringing these overlapping but different fields together.
Mikaela Selley and Meaghan Perry walking workshop participants through the preservation decision making process. The Menil Library at the Menil Collection, Houston, TX, June 2023.
One of the other ways we are attempting to bridge this divide is by having each of our workshops facilitated by a digital or audio-visual archivist and a conservator with expertise in new media. Together, these facilitator teams are able to bring high-level concepts to the Maintenance Culture audience, which we have already stressed is a multi-disciplinary one composed of professionals with different training and backgrounds.
In our Houston workshop this pairing proved to be a very successful approach! Conservator Meaghan Perry (Momentum Art Conservation) along with archivist Mikaela Selley (Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project) walked participants through the preservation and conservation challenges that can come up when caring for born-digital creative works, and they used the Menil’s own elusive work--Sound Figure by Max Neuhaus as a case study.
Max Neuhaus’s, Sound Figure, is installed at the Menil Collection’s main entrance, which is shown here.
While an invisible installation piece might seem like an ambitious example to present to a room full of beginners, Meaghan and Mikaela remained committed to Maintenance Culture’s collaborative approach and kept their discussions of an intangible artwork grounded in our concrete themes and actionable steps.
In Detroit, preservation specialist Emily Shaw (Myriad) and media conservator Eddy Colloton (Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden) partnered to present the Maintenance Culture approach to collecting and stewarding complex born-digital creative works. The creative arts venue, Trinosophes, was a great setting for thinking expansively about what even traditional archives can do to support preservation of these unique works in their collections in the future.
Trinosophes in Detroit, MI is also home to the Detroit Art Book Fair. Image credit: DABF, Instagram.
There are just two more Maintenance Culture workshops scheduled for 2023. We’ll be at the Huntington Library, Museum, and Botanical Gardens in California in late October and in Louisiana at the New Orleans Jazz Museum in early November. As always, there is no cost to attend a workshop.