Funding provided by National Endowment for the Humanities, Sustaining Cultural Heritage

By Allison Evans, Director of Museum Collections and Exhibition Management

From October 2023 through September 2024 the Museum embarked on a planning project to renovate a warehouse space to expand art storage the collection. We plan to renovate about 1,800 square feet of space to expand our art storage. The planning team, made up of experts, created a plan and documents that support preventative conservation and sustainability.

The warehouse space to be renovated will increase our square footage by about 30 percent allowing for large wide space shelving, extremely large drawers to accommodate oversize pieces, increase airflow by reducing overcrowding in both the current art storage and the proposed renovated space.

We will create a space that is clean and safe for art storage with sustainability in mind by decreasing materials used in the construction of the space, modifying and installing energy efficient LED lighting with motion sensors and dimmers, using a sprinkler system that meets current standards and is environmentally friendly, and adapting and updating our HVAC system to increase efficiency and longevity.

The project has not only helped us create a plan to make the proposed warehouse space suitable for artwork and more sustainable but allowed us to make additional plans for our current art storage to increase the long-term sustainability, like replacing the Halon and the modification to the HVAC system. The project has been an excellent collaboration and generated information that helped us establish and solid plan that will take us onto the next steps of this project, the implementation.

The planning team for this project was comprised of internal staff, including the Collections Manager, Rebekah Ryan, VP of Facility, Safety, Security, and Technology, Bart King, Director of Facilities and Technology, Tom Coble, Curator of Native American Art, Dorene Red Cloud and the project lead Director of Collections, Allison Evans. Outside consultants engaged in the planning team were the Architect for the building, Jonathan Hess and Bryan Ziolkowski, RA, Senior Project Manager from Browning Day, Circle Design Group and Nicole Grabow, Director of Preventive Conservation at Midwest Arts Conservation Center.

Click on the button below to learn more about the project.

Learn more