In my 2nd year of graduate school, I joined UT’s Landmarks Preservation Guild in order to learn more about the care and preservation of outdoor artwork. The LPG is a group of dedicated student volunteers who help clean, monitor and perform preventative preservation techniques on indoor and outdoor sculptures on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and situated throughout the UT campus. My assigned sculpture was Willard Boepple’s “Eleanor at 7:15”. Every other week, I would check in on “Eleanor”, clean off dirt, pollen and bird droppings and apply triammonium citrate to the rust stains on the base. I reported my findings to the LPG coordinator via a Sharepoint website. During my monitoring of “Eleanor”, I helped the team remove a wasp, which had made a nest in her folds and cleaned up graffiti left on the base. It was a great learning experience, seeing how materials change in the weather and how the public interacts with outdoor collections. Very different than an archive with collections held inside secure, climate controlled storage!

http://landmarks.utexas.edu/artwork/eleanor-715

http://landmarks.utexas.edu/about-landmarks