Item-Level Collections Survey of Georgia O'Keeffe's Bound Material

FAIN: PG-280898-21

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (Santa Fe, NM 87501-1826)
Elizabeth Ehrnst (Project Director: January 2021 to June 2024)

A conservation assessment of between 120 and 180 bound materials collected by modern artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The collection includes handmade and rare titles such as Some French Moderns Says McBride, collection of articles by art critic Henry McBride that were selected, designed, and formatted by Marcel Duchamp; a leather-bound edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde adorned with original drawings by photographer Edward Steichen; and numerous books gifted to O’Keeffe by her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, that include ephemera, photographs, and original sketches by O’Keeffe placed within the pages. These books are used by the museum as source material for exhibitions and catalogs, as well as by scholars researching O’Keeffe’s interests and social circles.

A preservation assistance grant will allow the Michael S. Engl Family Foundation Library and Archive, a subunit of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, to employ a book conservator to examine between 120-180 bound materials, originally belonging to our namesake. The book conservator will identify object and condition descriptions, prioritize conservation needs, and make recommendations for treatment, housing, exhibition, handling, and digitization. This is timely work as the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is in the process of concluding a general preservation assessment. Findings from the item-level assessment will inform museum policies, guide future workflows, and be disseminated as linked open data in the O’Keeffe’s collections online database and in the library catalog.