Rossland Museum's Art Collection Reorganization

Our Collections Assistant took on a number of exciting and intensive collections projects this summer. She highlights one of the bigger ones here:

Collections Storage BEFORE framed items had a final storage location.

Claire Sutherland

The art collection at Rossland Museum & Discovery Centre was much larger than I was expecting when I first started the task of the reorganization and storage of the collection. 

My first priority was to first sort through the different types of art within the collection. This included sorting between traditional art, such as paintings and drawings, framed photographs, signs, framed archival documents, and framed artifacts.

Once I completed the basic sort, the next step was to determine which pieces were included in the museum’s inventory and which required additional documentation. I started with pieces that had documentation: we knew where they came from and had information on the work of art itself. We also wanted to make sure that all of the traditional art was stored properly in our flatbed storage as these works are more fragile than framed photographs or signs.

As organizing went on, we found that everything would not actually fit into our flat bed storage! With the guidance of Sara, our Collections Manager, we decided to take most of our framed photographs out of their frames. We made this decision because we knew that most of our framed photograph collection were already digitized and part of our online database, that most frames had no historical significance to the photo, and that we could store a hundred more photographs if they were unframed.

Removing photographs from frames.

I spent a considerable amount of time removing photos from frames. After removing many rusty nails and a decent amount of broken glass, I finally finished removing the photos from their many frames. Then came organizing the paintings and drawings in the flat bed storage. Sara and I reorganized these many times before we got them to fit properly!

COMPLETE Art Drawer

COMPLETE Art Drawer

A final important task was to move a large and significant stained-glass window from the collection room to a safer, more secure spot. We concluded that the stained-glass window would fit safest on top of the flatbed art storage. We did a condition report, took pictures, and created a mount before moving day.

The transportation went smoothly, and the window is now sitting safely in our collections room.