Conservator Ellen Carlee on preserving the Alaska State Museum’s collection

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

The Alaska State Museum in Juneau houses a collection of tens of thousands of objects, from canoes and plants to the state’s last publicly accessible theater organ. But how do you maintain all of those items? That’s conservator Ellen Carlee’s job.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ellen Carlee: I could actually talk about what’s in this lab for hours on end. As we go past here, I’ve got these pH strips. They measure the alkalinity or acidity of surfaces. You just get these damp and you press it gently to the surface, and in that way, we’re able to understand if we’ve got crizzling on the beads, which is a deterioration phenomenon. So we’ve been sharing and teaching that technique to our study group.

I’m Ellen Carlee. I’m the conservator here at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, and my job at the museum is to know what everything is made out of, and how it deteriorates over time, and how to make it last for as many generations as I can.

Conservator, like a museum conservator, is a strange profession that people don’t find themselves familiar with. I think there might be a grand total of five people in all of Alaska who have that job, and it’s really a combination of art and science.

So my training background is in chemistry, art history, studio art, anthropology. Our culture, my culture, my Euro-American culture, does not typically mix art and science, but it is really, for some of us that are built that way, it is a really rewarding career.

Here we are in the Alaska State Museum objects conservation lab. There’s a window into the lab right off the atrium that the eagle tree is in, so you can peek into the lab. And I usually keep a table in front of this window that has, kind of, our latest greatest projects and collaboration.

Right now, the window into the lab has some of our bead study group collaboration. We’re doing a survey of the glass beadwork in the collection, and monthly study groups with beaders and culture bearers about what the beaded items are and how to preserve them. And probably in the coming years, we’ll have a bead exhibit that might hopefully be co-curated by some of those participants.

So if we’re going to make things last for future generations, we have to know how they’re deteriorating and what our role in having them deteriorate is.

For example, up until very recently, until I had a bead worker as an intern a couple years ago, I didn’t realize that glass beads could fade, and particularly pinks and purples fade. So our previous advice had been that glass colorants are very stable, and if you put them on exhibit, you don’t have to worry too much about the light levels.

But now we know if you put glass beads on exhibit, particularly if they have pinks and purples from a certain historical period, you better be careful about the light levels, because you could fade those pinks and purples, and then what the artist had intended things to look like won’t be as obvious.

Museums know about certain kinds of deterioration mechanisms with glass, but bead artists know things that museums don’t about what’s going wrong with beads, and contemporary beads, like certain beads, have coatings and dyes and they could fade.

That’s what we have up in the window there. We have some beads hanging in the window for trying to make them fade on purpose, and we have little vials of solvents to kind of show how some of the beads are not as stable as we might think glass might be. So we’re learning that from the beaders and the bead workers.

On this table, we’ve got a couple different kinds of microscopes. We’ve got another kind of binocular microscope to look at the beadwork up close. For example, on those moccasins there, you’ll see that there’s flowers on the vamps, the kind of the toe part of the moccasin, and on the petals, there’s a certain element that’s kind of a grayish bead.

That grayish bead should be super sparkly and bright. So having it look grayish is really changing the artist’s intent of what that flower should be like. If you look at it under the microscope, you’ll see the hole in that glass bead is actually a square where the thread passes through, and it should be mirrored on the inside.

If you look at contemporary glass beads that have that square hole, they’re really sparkly. And so something has happened to those beads to make them not be sparkly. And you can really see that by looking through the microscope.

So it used to be in museums that the museum staff was the authority. You know, we went to school, we had these elaborate degrees, and we would be the deciders and the authority.

And nowadays that’s changing, and it’s changing fast, and I think the Alaska State Museum is doing a good job at realizing that all of us are smarter than any of us, and these collections belong to Alaskans, and there are experts in the Alaskan community who know a lot more than we do about these materials.

So bringing in the culture bearers, the materials experts, the artists, the folks to whom these collections matter the most, and collaboratively, together, looking at museum collections and deciding how best to care for them for the future is kind of the wave of the future.