Detailed Condition Survey of 48 Great Lakes American Indian Textiles from the Eiteljorg Museum's Great Lakes Collection

FAIN: PG-271727-20

Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Inc. (Indianapolis, IN 46204-2707)
Rebekah Ryan (Project Director: January 2020 to January 2023)

A conservation assessment of 48 Great Lakes American Indian textiles recently acquired from the collection of Richard Pohrt Jr., dating from the 1800s to the present. Included in the collection are rare objects, such as blankets made of wool and silk ornamented with ribbon-work that is appliqued, and finger-woven fiber bags with depictions of cosmological figures important to the Great Lakes tribes, which include the Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Omaha, and Choctaw, among many others. The textiles are made available for research to the originating tribes as well as to scholars and are also used in exhibitions and educational programming.

This is an item-by-item condition survey, a conservation priority identified in the museum’s long-range conservation plan. Starting in June of 2021, Beth Szuhay, a highly-trained and experienced conservator, will work with an intern assistant with a background in collections care to spend 6 days systematically surveying the collection. The conservator and apprentice will do the following for each object: provide a detailed condition assessment, assign the item a condition ranking, make recommendations about an ideal exhibition parameters and preservation storage formats, and when deemed necessary, prepare a treatment proposal for immediate stabilization. These items will be included in a report, which will direct all future conservation treatments, as well as storage and exhibition decisions. This information will be input by staff into The Museum System (TMS) conservation module.