My Nonprofit Reviews

Arts and culture collections in the Midwest, though demographically distant from the important East and West Coasts, have embedded narratives that are nationally and/or internationally far-reaching and relevant, as well as intellectually, emotionally, or economically noteworthy for cities, towns, or regions.

ICA has significant experience working with these—collections for which our notions of preservation must exceed the acts of simply stabilizing, cleaning, and enabling safe and climate-controlled display conditions. These collections by their nature require audiences to be able to make the connections among objects and the larger world of ideas in which they exist.

ICA has worked extensively with libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, repositories, galleries, performing arts organizations, governmental and public agencies at all levels, academic institutions, and other collection stewards in our region since our founding in 1952 to ensure that collections are preserved for this purpose.

Three collections, described below, indicate some of the depth and breadth of this work with humanities collections.

ICA is working at the Cranbrook Educational Community, to assess the contents of all the historic house museums on the campus. Cranbrook, located near Detroit in Bloomfield Hills, MI, holds a central position in the scholarship and study of the history of modern art, architecture, design, and material culture. Cranbrook’s campus is on the National Register of Historic Places and among those who lived, worked, and taught at Cranbrook are ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu, fabric artist Mary Walker Phillips, animator Susan Pitts, and Columbian artist Olga de Amaral. Architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen, Rafael Moneo, and Albert Kahn all had hands in shaping the learning and physical environment. (https://www/nps.gov/nr/travel/detroit/d1.htm).

ICA conservators have worked closely with the Missouri Capital Arts Commission to survey and conserve the murals of the Capital Building in Jefferson City, MO. Among the many stories told in the building is the narrative of Missouri’s relationship with the mighty Mississippi River, the waterway that allowed the state to function as the nexus of activities for people and goods moving east and west across the country in the 19th century. (https://www/youtube.com/watch?v=uYm6axT79Hc).

In ICA’s home state of Ohio, we have a long history with the Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) and the private foundation that preserves the experimental farm and home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield (http://www.malabarfarm.org). Bromfield’s estate includes paintings by Grandma Moses (he wrote the introduction to the first catalog of her works), a replica of a late 1930s suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City (built for his business manager who didn’t like to leave New York City, complete with shutters to block out “nature”); and first edition books given to the author by Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, Margaret Wilson, and many others.

ICA works consistently to transform its relationships with the over 3,000 organizations it has worked with from one of providing unique and hard to find conservation services, to one of partnership--partnerships based on the use of current preventive care and best practice information combined with organization-specific individual consultation to help determine the priorities. In this way organizations can plan for and allocate their scarce resources to maximize the best care and outcomes for their collections.