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Sunday, March 21, 2010
Return To Glory
By Dan Mayfield
Journal Staff Writer
Last summer, the giant snake on Lomas Boulevard was looking kind of sad.
The snake, officially known as "Kolowisi" by the city, had faded. He'd been scrubbed dozens of times for bird droppings removal and he looked more like a giant purple worm than the once-majestic predator that watched over the lawyers' offices on Lomas.
But then, almost overnight, he was returned to glory and now he glows again with a fresh coat of bright red paint. It was the work of Jennifer Northup and her assistant, Shawn Turung, who are the city of Albuquerque Public Art Program's official conservators. Northup and her small army of subcontractors repaint, reglue, retile, clean up and fix up the city's public art collection, which has grown to more than 640 pieces since 1978.
As the collection grows and ages, it's becoming more important for conservators like Northup to work with the city to maintain the vast public art collection. From simply removing bird droppings to complete conservations, the public art collection needs constant attention.
"The public art program is 32 years old and we have some responsibility to take care of these things," said Sherri Brueggemann, the program's director.
The conservation process costs about $150,000 annually, Bruggeman said, for the entire 640-piece collection.
For almost 10 years, Northup has been the chief conservator for the city. "The biggest thing for the collection is the sun," she said. It fades paint and destroys the delicate patinas on some pieces.
And when Northup is called in to rework a piece, she has to be careful not to say "restoration," which means something entirely different in the art world.
"Restoration is an old-school thought," Northup said. "When they were pulling vases from the ground in Greece, the archaeologists would repaint them and say, 'They must've used this color or that,' and they were injecting their own ideas on it. We can't do that."
When the city purchases a piece, artists also submit a detailed dossier on their colors, plans and materials so conservators can re-create in the future their plans exactly, whether it's jewelry, pottery, a bronze statue, painting, collage or anything else.
But the wide variety of art means Northup must have a broad base of subcontractors who can help her. She soon will bring in a tile specialist, for example, to help her fix the tiles on the crumbling "Cruising San Mateo" by Barbara Grygutis, also popularly known as "Chevy on a Stick," on south San Mateo.
Grygutis gave the city extra tiles, just in case, and Northup will use those to fix chipped ones this summer.
Recently Northup and Turung were working on two of the 15 pieces of the "La Pared de Imegenes (The Wall of Images)" series from 1996, by Byron Wickstrom. They normally are hung on the sound wall at Unser Boulevard and 71st Street. They, too, have been faded by the elements.
Using special, and smelly, chemicals from a lab in California, Northup and Turung coated the copper and brought back its lustre to what Wickstrom originally intended. With scraps of green paint as a guide, the two painted on the chemicals over and over until the green matched the original.
"When he did this piece, he used traditional chemicals," Northup said. "I can re-create his colors."
Though the pair were working in Northup's rented studio at the SCA Gallery Downtown, most of the time they work outside.
"People, even homeless people, come to me all the time and ask what I'm doing," Northup said. "They're all very protective of the art."
Northup usually notices when certain pieces need attention, and knows that some are on a conservation schedule. But, said Dan Fuller, a collections manager and project coordinator for the collection, most of the time citizens simply call 311 and report that a piece needs work.
"I get calls almost every day and we have to do a lot of triage," he said. "Graffiti and vandalism get taken care of immediately."
Often, though, pieces are put in the long line for work.
"We like people to get upset because we can't watch them all," Fuller said.
"It takes a village," Turung said.
But sometimes work has to wait for the weather.
"A lot of work can't be done when it freezes," Northup said. "A lot of materials don't cooperate when it's freezing."
And workers often freeze, too. In the winter Northup and Turung work in the studio on smaller pieces and in the summer they work on the larger, outdoor pieces.
But, Fuller said, the city does get calls for pieces of landmark art it doesn't own, like the giant lumberjack on top of a cafe near Central and San Mateo, or the giant red arrow that was in the parking lot of a grocery store, which the city can't do anything about.
Northup originally planned to work in museums but fell into conservatory work when she moved back to New Mexico.
"What happened was, I got my first degree in anthropology and archaeology because I like stuff," she said. "I went ahead and got another useful degree, art studio. Then I had to come up with something that was a marriage of both things."
She went to Harvard, where she earned her second master's degree in museum studies with an emphasis in conservation. She still keeps her conservation supplies in red-and-white Harvard boxes in the studio.
Her internship was at the Boston Children's Museum, "which was great because it smelled like children and it was noisy."
The collections at the Children's Museum, she said, captivated her, and she came back to New Mexico expecting to get a job right away.
"But it didn't happen," she said. Instead, Northup started working with private clients in Santa Fe, conserving their work and working as a bronze sculptor in Corrales.
But, when the city of Albuquerque was redoing some of the work for Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard 10 years ago, she got a call to help with some of the bronze sculptures from the city's collection.
"They said can you come down tomorrow and help make them presentable," Northup said.
Since then she's worked with the city, and her three-year contract was recently renewed.
"I wanted to be a sculptor, but this is how I paid my bills," she said.
Turung, her assistant, has a background in conservation, but with an emphasis in architectural conservation. In Houston in the 1990s she worked with architectural firms to conserve historic buildings, which often housed Works Progress Administration murals.
The work does take its toll on the pair in untold ways.
"I'm beating the heck out of my car," Northup said. Her green Volvo is showing its age from driving all over town, with a giant plastic crate in the back that holds her supplies.
"I'm buying a new truck tomorrow. A 1965 Chevy C-10. It's a work truck and it should be much nicer," she said.
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