Hurricane Katrina Relief

Carefully planned programmatic goals and activities could not anticipate the devastating forces of Hurricane Katrina. We are proud of the national leadership role our department and Winterthur have taken in responding to the needs of cultural institutions devastated by Katrina. Our work has clearly demonstrated the importance and value of public advocacy and outreach.

In an effort to provide urgently needed collections recovery and preservation expertise and practical emergency preparedness and response education, an emergency team composed of faculty, staff, and students from the Art Conservation Department and Winterthur responded within 1 month of the disaster. Our work, in close partnership with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, has focused on Biloxi, MS, with special attention to two devastated institutions of immense importance to our understanding of 19th-century American history and material culture at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum and Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library. Our primary goals include providing cultural institutions with sustained recovery and response assistance and future conservation professionals with real-life emergency response training and education.

This major undertaking, funded with significant in-kind support as well as two grants totaling $413,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional private and public support, includes on-site professional consultation (we have hired a part-time conservator to work on the Gulf Coast) and collections stabilization, 13 summer internships, 6 preservation workshops scheduled from May to October 2006 aimed at cultural institutions, 14 public seminars, expert speakers, funding for supplies and equipment, and support to ship damaged works for examination and treatment to all graduate conservation training programs in the United States. This successful project is truly collaborative and dependent on regional and national partnerships