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BACC marked this year's Preservation Week – which had the theme "Preserve Community Archives" – by posting action items on our social media pages to help people learn how to better preserve the art in their communities. In the same spirit of the week we compiled and archived the posts here for easy access.  INTRO
Next week (April 25 - May 1) is Preservation Week! What is Preservation Week, you ask? Well, it was all started by the American Library Association. In 2005, the first comprehensive national survey of the condition and preservation needs of the nation’s collections reported that U.S. institutions hold more than 4.8 billion items. Libraries alone hold 3 billion items (63% of the whole). A treasure trove of uncounted additional items is held by individuals, families, and communities. These collections include books, manuscripts, photographs, prints and drawings, and objects such as maps, textiles, paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and furniture, to give just a sample. They include moving images and sound recordings that capture performing arts, oral history, and other records of our creativity and history. Digital collections are growing fast, and their formats quickly become obsolescent, if not obsolete. Some 630 million items in collecting institutions require immediate attention and care. 80% of these institutions have no paid staff assigned responsibility for collections care; 22% have no collections care personnel at all. Some 2.6 billion items are not protected by an emergency plan. As natural disasters of recent years have taught us, these resources are in jeopardy should a disaster strike. Personal, family, and community collections are equally at risk. Now the ALA encourages libraries and other institutions to use Preservation Week to connect our communities through events, activities, and resources that highlight what we can do, individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared collections. This year’s Preservation Week theme is Preserve Community Archives. BACC will be posting action items on how YOU can help preserve the art in your community throughout this year's Preservation Week. Stay tuned!  Last summer BACC was approached by a museum in Salt Lake City, Utah, about the possibility of conserving a selection of paintings by an American painter for an exhibition. The work was housed in the museum’s collections storage in Utah, posing an interesting logistics challenge for BACC’s art conservators who needed to do an initial assessment of the paintings in order to draft a treatment plan but were limited by travel and access restrictions due to the current global pandemic.
 The Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC), the western region’s premier and only nonprofit art conservation center, is thrilled to announce that it has hired cultural heritage champion and experienced arts administrator Leticia Gomez Franco as its next Executive Director. She will start in early December. “I am incredibly honored and humbled to lead BACC as its new Executive Director and committed to the possibilities in this new position,” Gomez Franco said. “Conservation centers play a pivotal role in ensuring the objects that make up our historical cultural inheritance survive the times. Let us dare to reimagine our role as more than caretakers of objects, but also of the stories they keep, the societies they represent, and the people they exclude. Let this be the moment we shift — along with the world — into the uncharted territory of inclusivity. As the leading conservation center in the west, the small but mighty team at BACC is ready to engage communities, demystify the field of conservation, stimulate dialogue, and usher the work into a more inclusive framework.” A seasoned arts professional with deep roots in the San Diego community, Gomez Franco’s commitment to preserving culture, as well as her hands-on experience with exhibitions, artists, and communities, were some of the elements that the hiring committee of BACC’s Board of Trustees found most engaging. Her background in reimagining spaces, decentralizing narratives, and engaging collective knowledge makes her uniquely positioned to expand on programs like those BACC has recently launched to engage with the broader community. Not surprisingly, RISE San Diego nominated her for a 2020 Inclusive Leadership In Action (ILIA) Award in the “culture shifter” category and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures has awarded Gomez Franco two fellowships: one for advocacy in 2019 and another for leadership in 2015. BACC’s Board President, Karen Coutts, said, “Leticia Gomez Franco’s background and perspective are an excellent complement to the expertise of our world-class conservators. With Leticia at the helm we are reaffirming the importance of the work we do every day in conservation and preservation while moving to diversify our audiences and expand our work to new communities.” Gomez Franco most recently served as the Senior Arts and Culture Funding Manager of the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture where she administered over $11 million in grants for community arts organizations, reenvisioned programming guidelines and, in the last few months, made dynamic shifts to administrative processes in response to the global health crisis. She was instrumental in forging long-term systemic change to ensure the City serves and responds to all of its diverse communities. A fan of the literary arts, Gomez Franco was behind the launch of the City's first Poet Laureate program, as well. Before joining the City of San Diego, Gomez Franco served as Director of Programs and Lead Curator for the New Americans Museum, an institution dedicated to preserving and presenting the immigrant experience, and established The Front: A Collaborative of Art, Culture, Design and Urbanism as a formal art gallery and leading binational laboratory of creative thought in the world's most trafficked border region, San Ysidro/Tijuana. As an accomplished curator she has developed more than forty exhibitions at various museums and galleries. Her independently curated work has elicited nationwide press and attention, as well. Gomez Franco holds a master’s degree in Curatorial Theory from the Liberal Arts and Sciences program of San Diego State University, and a bachelor’s in English and Chicana/o Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. BACC is one of the first art conservation centers that was established in the United States and Leticia Gomez Franco’s hire is another step in the organization’s transition to a new business and leadership model as supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Comprehensive Organizational Health Initiative. BACC’s previous Executive Director, Janet Ruggles, retired at the end of 2019 after 37 years of dedicated service to the Center. For more information, or to request images or an interview, please email Staci Golar.  In early 2019 Staci Golar joined BACC as its first staff member in development and marketing, a hire made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Comprehensive Organizational Health Initiative grant given “to help support change and growth capital.”
Golar has spent her career almost entirely in the arts, having held positions at the Museum of International Folk Art, SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the International Folk Art Alliance, and others. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art and a Master’s in Arts Administration. Here she shares some insights on what it’s like to work at BACC.  A documentary that tells the story of one of BACC's founders, George Leslie Stout, is part of the official selection of films at the Arkhaios Cultural Heritage and Archaeology Film Festival.
Directed by Kevin Kelley and produced by Marie Wilkes, Stout Hearted: George Stout and the Guardians of Art, can be watched as part of the festivals's FREE online festivities between now and October 11. Stout Hearted tells the story of George L. Stout, an art student from Winterset, Iowa, who became the leader of the Monuments Men during World War II. This group, a military special forces unit, was assigned the mission of retrieving stolen art from the Nazis. The film also explores Stout's pioneering efforts in the areas of art conservation which elevated the discipline into the world of modern science. In the 70s, Stout was serving as the visiting director at the Timken Museum of Art when he noticed a growing need to establish a conservation center for the San Diego area’s growing cultural heritage. He teamed up with Henry Gardiner, then director of the San Diego Art Museum, to develop a plan for the center and in March 1975 BACC was incorporated as a private, nonprofit organization. |