| PF-50479-14 | Preservation and Access: Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections | Shelburne Museum | Protecting Shelburne Museum's Decoy Collection: Climate, fire, security, and lighting upgrades for Dorset House | 10/1/2014 - 9/30/2017 | $350,000.00 | Richard | L. | Kerschner | | | | Shelburne Museum | Shelburne | VT | 05482-0010 | USA | 2014 | Arts, General | Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections | Preservation and Access | 350000 | 0 | 350000 | 0 | An implementation project to preserve the Shelburne Museum's wildfowl decoy collection, which numbers nearly 1,400 objects and spans more than 150 years of decoy making primarily in New England, Long Island, the New Jersey coast, the Chesapeake, North Carolina's Outer Banks, and the Gulf states. To protect the collections, the museum would improve environmental conditions, security, and fire protection in the 1832 Dorset House, where the decoy collection and related art and artifacts are exhibited and stored.
Support is requested to stabilize and protect the Shelburne Museum Decoy Collection which is considered the finest and most comprehensive collection of decoys in the world. This two-year project is designed to control harmful temperature and humidity fluctuations, mitigate the risk of fire, reduce light exposure, improve security conditions, and improve exhibition and "open storage" conditions to allow better physical and intellectual access for the collection which is housed and exhibited in the historic and elegant Dorset House, built in 1832, that is located on the Museum's grounds. Shelburne Museum will employ a successful holistic approach of performing environmental, security, and fire system upgrades, while simultaneously conducting curatorial research and reinterpretation, exhibit upgrades, object conservation, and planning for programming to increase visitors' accessibility to the collections and their intellectual context. |