Improving Preventive Conservation for Cultural Heritage in the Caribbean: The Museo de Arte de Ponce

FAIN: PF-266673-19

Museo de Arte de Ponce (Ponce, PR 00717-0776)
Soraya Serra-Collazo (Project Director: January 2019 to September 2019)
Bianca Ortiz (Project Director: September 2019 to present)

A planning project to address climate fluctuation in the Museo de Arte de Ponce’s Edward Durell Stone-designed exhibition building. Constructed in 1965, the Ponce Museum is one of Puerto Rico’s preeminent collecting institutions, containing approximately 4,500 objects from the eighteenth century to the present. The project would focus on optimizing exhibition and storage environments, with a particular focus on passive operation and strategies for responding to natural disasters.

The Museo de Arte de Ponce proposes a two years planning grant to support an environmental optimization study designed to better understand the environmental behavior of collections spaces in the museum. This study will support the MAP’s goal to better achieve our commitment as custodians of humanities heritage and environmental sustainability in an age of increasingly frequent natural threats to collections preservation and organizational capacity. This project plans to collect and analyze comprehensively the environmental data for all collections spaces in the museum. Through documentation and assessment, the project key priority will be to identify potential strategies –both operational and for future capital investment– to optimize collections exhibition and storage environments in Puerto Rico’s challenging climate, with a particular focus on passive operation and environmental strategies during disaster events. This project can serve as a case study for the Caribbean region.