To our colleagues in or near Puerto Rico,
We are in the planning stages of a free day-long seminar on collections preservation and care in Puerto Rico as part of a larger initiative called Helping Puerto Rican Heritage. Please see below for announcement information. If you are interested in participating, please email to acc@conservator for a questionnaire that will allow us to better plan.
Please pass on this email to anyone you know in the museum field in Puerto Rico or those environs. Thank you.
Marc
(please forgive the strange formatting - is is MuseumL's doing, not ours)
Helping Puerto Rican Heritage
Cesar Pineiro and Marc Williams are in the planning stages of a project called Helping Puerto Rican Heritage. Marc is the former Chief Wooden Objects Conservator at the Smithsonian Institution and the founding Director of the Smithsonian's graduate level Furniture Conservation Training Program (FCTP). Cesar was trained in the second class of the Smithsonian program and practices conservation in Puerto Rico. The project is designed around bringing 25-30 professional conservators to Puerto Rico who will volunteer their time in a number of collections preservation and care activities. The project will be based in the San Juan area. Activities will include the following.
1) Tours of conservation facilities and conservation projects in the general San Juan area. Field trips to outlying areas such as Ponce are anticipated.
2) Speaking to students and others at the University of Puerto Rico who are interested in conservation as a career.
3) Holding a seminar for staff of museums and historic sites on preservation and care issues, grant funding for collections care, capacity building, planning, and other aspects of collections stewardship, as well as emergency preparedness and disaster response for cultural heritage organizations.
4) Hold a day-long collections preservation and care practicum at a specific museum/historic site in need. This will consist of working on an achievable project at a not-for-profit on a specific need of theirs that can be substantially accomplished in one day. Depending upon the specialties of the participants, it could be at several different locations.
At the moment, we have the following institutional participants in Helping Puerto Rican Heritage: University of Puerto Rico; San Juan National Historic Site; Luis Munoz Marin Foundation.
The specific purpose of this notice is to gauge the interest in the seminar within the cultural property museum community. We anticipate that the seminar will be offered at no cost. The tentative schedule follows.
Seminar at Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín for staff of cultural property institutions
9:00 - 12:00 Presentations on grant funding for collections care, capacity building, planning, and other aspects of collections stewardship, as well as emergency preparedness and disaster response for cultural heritage organizations. Hopefully this will be by staff of a major Federal granting agency. Initial response from them has been good, but they can not commit until we have a core group of potential participants.
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 5:00 Questions on collections preservation and care by museum staff attendees answered by HPRH participant conservators. Some of the conservators may make short presentations on various subjects if desired by the participants.
If you would be interested in participating in the seminar, please email [log in to unmask] for a questionnaire that will allow us to plan to better meet your needs. If you do so, once final arrangements are made, you will receive an emailed notice for registration. Thank you.
Marc A Williams, President, American Conservation Consortium, Ltd.
MS in Art Conservation, Winterthur Museum Program
Former Chief Wooden Objects Conservator, Smithsonian Institution
Fellow, American Institute for Conservation (AIC)
Cesar Pineiro, proprietor, Fine Arts International
FCTP graduate, Smithsonian Institution; MA in conservation, Antioch University
Professional Associate, AIC
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