Room with many views
Students meet MFAH challenge to create art-storage system

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Protecting art from the ravages of time can really be as easy as A-B-C.

Students at Rice University have come up with a way to store objets d’art that will keep them safe and environmentally sound. They have introduced a prototype of their system at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH).

Over nine intense weeks last summer, four undergraduates and their mentor, Rice alumnus Matthew Wettergreen ’08, came up with a modular system to protect art — statues, objects or really anything — when not on display. What amounts to an Erector Set for the conservation of artwork may revolutionize the way museums handle the complex issue of storage.

For decades, said Wettergreen, who holds a doctorate in bioengineering from Rice, museums have depended on the old-fashioned method of building plywood boxes around things they want to store. But when conservators at the MFAH approached Rice’s Sallie Keller, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, and Gary Wihl, then dean of the School of Humanities, about finding a better way, they inspired the creation of the Engineering and Design for Art and Artifact program.

Wettergreen was recruited to run the program by Maria Oden, director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and professor in the practice of engineering education, and he in turn chose the students — Nicole Garcia, Rhodes Coffey, Caleb Brown, and Kristi Day. They received fellowships from Rice’s Center for Civic Engagement to spend their summer brainstorming, building and learning business planning through the Rice Alliance.

	JEFF FITLOW
	Steel tubing and Plexiglas surround a statue, which can then be strapped or otherwise restrained for storage.

“We took a week-and-a-half to come up with as many solutions as we could,” said Wettergreen, who still has the 500 three-by-five cards containing their ideas.

Packaging was only part of the problem, he explained. “Some of the design constraints were that the art had to be visible and it had to interact with the environment, because some of the pieces are made of harmful chemicals that off-gas. In a concealed and enclosed environment, that off-gassing will further the degradation of the artwork. So you leave it in the open air.”

The team’s elegant solution incorporates interchangeable elements of steel tubing, vented Plexiglas, snap-on casters and myriad connectors that link all the bits together to form an infinitely variable cage for art of any size. “They’re still rather cuboidal, like the plywood boxes, but you don’t have to cut new beams,” Wettergreen said. “You don’t have to cut new wood. You can arrange them into many configurations. It’s very much like an Erector Set for art.”

The A, B and C tubes are 30, 60 and 90 inches long and can be combined to make containers of any multiple of those dimensions. That makes the system remarkably versatile.

“We wanted visible storage. We wanted materials that were not harmful and did not produce acid that would attack other artworks,” said Wynne Phelan, conservation director at the MFAH. “And we wanted a modular system that was easily put together.”

The museum got all that and more. “The design they arrived at in nine weeks blew us away,” Phelan said. “And the bonus, which we were not anticipating, is how handsome it is and how it can transform storage space into a special kind of exhibition area.”

	JEFF FITLOW
	Clockwise, from left, Nicole Garcia, Rhodes Coffey, Caleb Brown, Kristi Day and faculty lecturer Matthew Wettergreen, surrounded by the note cards that were so essential in their design of an art conservation system.

The first real test of the system will happen in public at an MFAH reception planned for next month. Wettergreen and his students will demonstrate by preparing and packaging a 15-foot piece, “La sordidez” by Jose Antonio Berni, for storage. “It’s fairly light for its size,” he said of the piece made of found materials. “But that also means it’s fairly fragile.”

Two other pieces, a bronze “Bronco Buster” by Frederic Remington and a wax-and-plaster bust, will also be packaged.

That the team used standard engineering procedures to solve a problem not usually addressed by engineers opens the doors to a world of possibilities Keller is eager to explore, starting with a fall course taught by Wettergreen on engineering for art conservation.

“I love the fact that our team had students in humanities and art history as well as engineering,” Keller said. “This project went beyond my wildest imagination in terms of what they accomplished. I didn’t think they would end up at a place where the museum is actually going to use their first prototypes to store precious artifacts.

”It’s a really exciting time to build a strong programmatic connection, not only in the storage of artifacts but also in this whole interplay between art, science, engineering and technology,” she said.

Wettergreen, who also founded and directs Houston’s Caroline Collective, a kind of design kitchen for artists, sees that connection as a natural. “The only thing that differentiates an engineer from an artist is that engineers apply a rigorous methodology to arrive at their art,” he said.