Natural history museum gets grant

Natural History Museum Gets Grant

CNHI News Service

Transcript Staff

A $100,000 grant from the federal Save America's Treasures program will be used for conservation work on three sets of 19th-century Native American ledger-book drawings in the collections of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma. ? The two-year project will allow the artifacts to be preserved for study by scholars as well as possible exhibition for the public in the future.

Save America's Treasures is a federal grant program founded seven years ago to conserve significant cultural treasures. The grant is administered by The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH), the National Park Service (NPS), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

"This is huge," museum conservator Victoria Book said. "Save America's Treasures is one of the most prestigious, most competitive and largest funds available to preserve American cultural treasures. The fact that the museum has received this grant speaks volumes about the importance of these works to America's history and culture."

The museum's grant will provide for a professional conservator specializing in paper conservation to work on one Kiowa and two Cheyenne ledger books containing graphite and colored-pencil drawings on lined ledger paper, a technique common among Southern Plains tribes in the late 1800s. The work is expected to take up to two years to complete.

The paper specialist will analyze the ledgers carefully before beginning the conservation work, which includes a careful manual dry surface cleaning to remove dust, dirt and soot, followed by stain removal and finishing with repair of folds and tears as well as the securing of crumbling edges and sections of missing paper.

After the works have been cleaned and repaired, the grant provides for production of high-resolution photographs of each page so scholars and the public will be able to view the artworks without the need to remove the delicate pages from the museum's collection. The grant also will provide for some of the specialized equipment needed for the conservation treatment, and special cases in which to safely store the ledgers after conservation is complete.

A previous grant from the IMLS will provide for publication of a book focusing on the museum's Silverhorn ledger drawings, to be titled "One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record." Once the conservation of the ledgers is completed, targeted for spring 2008, the museum plans to produce an exhibition of the works which will include both Cheyenne ledgerbooks, several pages from the Kiowa ledger, and a significant number of? photos of other pages from the works, along with explanations of their meaning and significance. ?

Plans also are under way for online exhibition via the World Wide Web.