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At the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation museums
we do include light sensitive media in our “permanent” exhibits,
including paper, textiles, and occasionally plastics. Our approach has been to
keep light levels as low as practical (if the walls are dark we can get away
with 30-40 lux) and rotate object by object after a year or so for moderately
sensitive items. Items deemed to be super-sensitive now
might get motion activated (ie visitor activated) lights – we have some
that tie into individual fixtures. We’ve been getting estimates of amount
of time the lights are on by means of time clocks attached to the motion
activated circuits and find that we are using less than half of the time with
lights on, averaging many days including high visitation. We’ve also
begun using Recent discussions within the Exhibit Management
group are yielding much better understanding of the time-weighted nature of lighting.
We are open 7 days a week, 9 hours per day. The motion activated lights are a
powerful tool in reducing handling of collections – we are hoping to
change out objects as required instead of by rote. Stefan Michalski’s work on assessing
object sensitivity to light is extremely useful in moving away from a “just
say no” approach to exhibiting collections. Patricia Silence Conservator of Exhibits The Colonial 757 220 7078 Fax 757 565 8907 psilence@xxxxxxx From: Dear All, As the curator for the
textile collections at the musée du quai Branly, I am looking for information
(practical examples) about the displaying of textiles in the permanent
exhibition of other museums, in order to have points of comparison to our own
politics (which is to exhibit many textiles in the permanent exhibition and to
change them all regularly). Any information
you’d have about the following points would be helpful: 1) How do museums exhibit
textiles in their permanent exhibition: is there any example of textile
rotation in order to always have textiles exhibited? What are the criteria and
how often are then the pieces changed? Or are textiles only exhibited at some
specific occasions? Or are they just permanently exhibited and for how long
then? Any information about the
choices for permanent exhibitions is welcome. 2) About practical
aspects of displaying textiles in the permanent exhibition: light control,
mounting of 2D (flat) textiles? Maybe there are books or
articles you would advice about the choices of different museums? Thank you for your help! Best Regards, Anne-Solène Rolland Textile Curator Tel : +33 1 56 61 71 96 courriel : anne-solene.rolland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Musée du quai Branly Département du Patrimoine
et des Collections 222 rue de l'Université
75343 Paris cedex 07 |