Conservation Artists Documentation Program

Conservation conducted several recorded interviews with artists Mel Chin and Kate Shepherd and with fabricators to better understand works in the permanent collection and their treatment. Conservators worked with visiting conservator Reinhard Bek to clean, treat, and restore movement to the kinetic sculpture M.O.N.S.T.R.E., 1964, by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. Papier-mâché elements were stabilized, and a rubber toy alligator, which had significantly deteriorated, was replaced in time for the Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s exhibition.

Eight members of the Conservation team presented their work at the American Institute for Conservation conference in Los Angeles in June 2022, lecturing on topics including the creation and preservation of Niki de Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings, artists’ intent and how it affects preservation of works whose inherent appearance mimics conditions of damage, novel treatments for wax-resin lined canvases, and research on the visual distinctions and identification of charcoal drawing materials in works on paper.

Conservation purchased a fiber optic reflectance spectrometer (FORS) in order to non-destructively characterize the colorants on a rare 13th–14th-century Chimú artwork known as the Prisoner Textile, which was on view in the Menil’s exhibition Enchanted: Visual Histories of the Central Andes. The team built a reference library using the Zumbühl and Antuñez de Mayolo Peruvian dyestuff collections and will compare FORS measurements taken on the Menil’s Prisoner Textile to those standards in search of the specific colorants used in its creation.

The Artists Documentation Program (ADP), founded in 1990, is a collaborative project between the Menil Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art to record and make publicly available interviews between artists and conservators. In these filmed conversations together with their artwork, conservators speak with artists about the materials and techniques they use as well as their wishes for the preservation and presentation of their art. In Fiscal Year 2022, former chief conservator Brad Epley and paper conservator Jan Burandt interviewed artist William T. Williams. The discussion focused on the painting Mercer’s Stop, 1971; a series of works on paper; the artist’s perspective on the aging of his work; and long-term preservation of artworks included in the landmark exhibitions The De Luxe Show and Some American History.