Inventorying a Civic Art Collection when you don’t know what you are looking for.
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Intro myself – title, been at Arts Commission for 6 years Historic sculptures by Benjamin Dominguez in Whittier Narrows Rec Area Just restored Maintenance demo
Los Angeles County est. 1850
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The reason for this discrepancy and some background of how we got here The County was established in 1850, and over 150 years later…
Civic Art Program, est. 2004
• Civic Art Policy adopted • 1% for civic art • Civic Art Program
mandated to manage the County’s art assets
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The Civic Art Program is established in 2004 when the County first adopted a 1% for art policy The Civic Art Policy also mandates that the County’s collection is inventoried every 5 years Significance of Clara S Foltz & civic art synchronicity
Los Angeles County Civic Art Collection
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We have a little over 300 artworks in our collection that we know of, either commissioned or historic But I am going to describe how we inventoried artworks we did not know existed
Embarking on L.A. County’s first comprehensive baseline inventory of Civic Artworks
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Problem Our first inventory wrapped up in 2009 Imagine you are a collections manager for a brand new civic art program, you have no inventory list, you have a 4,083 square mile territory, you have 36 departments, you have no budget, how do you start figuring out what artworks the County has?? Our intrepid collections manager at the time identified 90 historic artworks just by making phone calls and visiting as many sites as she could In 2014 it was clear we needed to do a comprehensive inventory and leave no stone unturned to establish a baseline
Where do we begin?
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2014 – We now need to do a comprehensive inventory that actually goes door to door to find out what the County has in terms of art assets This is still a big UNKNOWN We do an educated guestimate the number of sites we need to visit is about 800 We set out to figure out how the heck to pull this off
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Scope So first we have to figure out where we are going and how we are going to tackle visiting the sites CEO Real Estate provided a list of about 3,000 County properties: owned and leased We create a priority system and figure out how to consolidate some of the sites We get it down to about 900 sites (not far off my guestimate of 800 sites)
County Facilities Surveyed
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And have I mentioned the County is big!? 4,083 Square Miles It is larger than the combined areas of Delaware and Rhode Island Most populated County in the US with over 10 million residents, the population is larger than 42 of US states = a lot of County services The County is home to more than one-quarter of California residents It takes more than 4 hours over 90 miles of freeway to traverse the County 43,000 people per square mile in densely pop places like K-town vs. 3 people per sq mile in places like the Angeles National forest
Field Registrar
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We created a Field Registrar position who’s job it was to hunt down civic artworks in all sorts of places.
Fire Station site visit
Data Collection Tools
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Physical tools of the data collection (which neatly fit into the Field Registrar’s back pack) We have to strike a balance between the agility of the data collection with the completeness of the data For example we decide that iPad photos will be sufficient for documentation purposes Forms have to be easy to use on an iPad
Condition Reports
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Field Registrar completed condition reports for civic artworks already known in the collection and a similar survey form for new artworks Handily we were able to export condition report forms from our database for artworks already in the collection
Condition Reports
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Expanded version of condition report/data collection form
Hugo Ballin, Medical Sciences Fresco, 1932
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Add photos of collection
Elena Manferdini, Inverted Landscapes, 2015
Data Collection Form For Newly Discovered Artworks
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Solution For previously uncatalogued artworks We originally considered using Excel on the iPad or a lap top – too unwieldly Figured out we could use Survey Monkey Multiple choice questions tailored to each week’s site visit schedule Facility info, art info – what we can glean from visually inspecting it and asking the escort Environmental conditions Artwork conditions Standard terms Exports as Excel – easy to ingest into our collection database Embark
825 County Sites Visited 12,696 Miles Driven
868 Miles Walked
1,575 Previously Uncatalogued
Artworks Found
369 New Contacts Made
198 Condition Report
Updates
Statistics
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After 1.5 years of site surveys and data collection
Chief Executive Office
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Ben Abril paintings at HOA County employee artworks included in LACMA and NHM three paintings restored to NHM (thought missing for 20+ years)
Probation Office
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1979 Inv0775: East Los Angeles Office (Probation) By the Chicana Service Action Center Week of 20151109
Sheriff Stations
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Fallen deputy portraits in almost every Sheriff’s station Commissioned by staff and clearly site-specific Range in professional quality Tell a compelling narrative about the department
Probation Camp
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Dorothy Kirby Juvenile Hall (Probation), 1956-60 Mid century chapel at Dorothy Kirby Juvenile Hall Even if this is not an art asset it is an architectural asset (and treasure) Should Probation decide to refurbish the chapel we can help source an architectural conservator who specializes in historic preservation
Public Library
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Hans Zimmer painting at Cudahy Public Library (10/23/2015) Questions include why so small and why was it installed up in an out-of-the-way place After we completed the site visits we reviewed all the findings to decide whether or not artworks meet our accession criteria Color code: green = undoubtable; yellow = borderline; red = nope We ended up with approximately 350 that meet or closely meet our accession criteria
Things we found that are not going to be accessioned…
Press!
Inventory on the Radio!
Provenance Research
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Because facilities had multiple artworks, we ended up with 128 emails that contained the 350 artworks that met our accession criteria Originally we were going to use Survey Monkey again, but when we tested it out we only got a 8% return More personal approach to using the data we collected to solicit information from our County colleagues to verify ownership Easy to follow email with three simple questions which is followed by a phone call Bridget sent out a total of 128 emails and received over 120 responses in the first week 88 of the responses actually had information about the art (more than we expected)
Maintenance Guidelines
Help Departments Recognize and Protect County Art Assets
Advocating for the care of the Civic Art Collection
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List of critical sites for budget forecasting
Clare Haggarty / Deputy Director of Collections Mhaggarty@arts.lacounty.gov lacountyarts.org/publicplusart