Preserving Ethnic Heritage

FAIN: PG-50511-09

University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)
Lin Nelson-Mayson (Project Director: May 2008 to October 2010)

Purchasing storage furniture to rehouse a collection of ethnic clothing from Europe, Central and South America, Asia, and the Middle East at the university's Goldstein Museum of Design. The textile collection includes clothing and footwear that are hand woven and hand made that and relate to the study of apparel design, international trade, and social history and culture.

The Goldstein Museum of Design (GMD), in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota (U of M), requests $5,930 to purchase three powder-coated metal museum cabinets that will relieve crowding, promote preservation, and provide safer and easier access to a large and historically-significant group of ethnic garments from around the world. The need for these cabinets was identified as high-priority in both a 2007 General Assessment Survey of the entire GMD collection completed by Elisa Redman, a preservation consultant from the Midwestern Area Conservation Center (MACC), and in a 2007 specific assessment of the ethnic garments completed by Beth McLaughlin, a textile conservator at MACC. With the purchase of these cabinets, 650 ethnic garments currently stored in very crowded conditions in old, non-archival metal cabinets would be immediately re-housed. The results of this dramatic storage upgrade would be preservation of the garments and much-enhanced accessibility for scholarship, documentation, and exhibition in both formal gallery display and in university classes and outreach programs.