Million Dollar Investment in San Diego for Inclusive, Accessible, and Radical Art Conservation4/18/2023
SAN DIEGO, Calif. —April 14, 2023--Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC), the only nonprofit regional conservation center in the western region, has received one million dollars from the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. This funding will support BACC in its mission to become a radically sustainable and radically inclusive art conservation nonprofit as it reaches its 50th anniversary milestone in 2025. This will include investing in organizational infrastructure, inclusive programming staff, and expanding its service to include objects and preventive conservation, two areas that will ensure that its impact reaches a broader, more diverse audience. By expanding BACC’s capacity and creating leadership development opportunities among its staff, the impact of this funding goes beyond the organization and its service area, impacting the entire field of conservation. This funding only underscores the necessity and urgency to make art conservation knowledge and services accessible to all communities. Mellon funding is also supporting a Radical Equity analysis to elevate the organization's HR process and protocol and ensure that BACC is practicing the same vision for equity and transformative healing externally as it is internally. These are just a few of the many goals BACC is committed to accomplishing with Mellon support. BACC is committed to shifting the way regional conservation centers engage with collections and communities. Putting this vision into practice, BACC is undertaking various inclusive conservation programs and broadening the role of a regional conservation center by supporting training and education opportunities, partnering with stewards of community cultural collections, expanding its conservation knowledge base to include culturally conscious and responsive methods of care, and learning from and dialoguing with artists and caretakers of diverse cultural heritage and ancestral collections. Addressing a historic disinvestment in BIPOC communities by the field of conservation, BACC has initiated workforce development programs to introduce art conservation as a career to a more diverse audience in hopes of remedying what is one of the least diverse fields of the arts sector. Leticia Gomez Franco, BACC’s Executive Director since 2020, reminds us that for BACC, inclusion is not a deliverable; it is a process. BACC fully intends to live in this moment to ensure the ongoing transformation is intentional, thoughtful, and impactful. “As a woman of color, a community organizer, and social justice advocate, leading BACC means practicing accountability for this organization, and for the field at large. The intentional institutional exclusion of our BIPOC communities from cultural preservation requires a reckoning. Support from the Mellon Foundation acknowledges and celebrates who BACC is unapologetically becoming. BACC is building the vision for what cultural preservation and art conservation can look like: inclusive, accessible, and radical.” ### About Balboa Art Conservation Center The Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC) provides art conservation and cultural preservation services for cultural institutions and the general public. The San Diego-based nonprofit is one of only eight regional nonprofit art conservation organizations in the country and the only one in the western region. Founded in 1975, BACC provides art conservation and cultural preservation services to cultural institutions and the general public, focusing on the care of works of art, cultural objects, and historic artifacts, technical imaging, and analysis while also providing educational opportunities for emerging conservators. Learn more at bacc.org. About Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org. Image Description: Art Conservators performing surface cleaning on a painting in the Balboa Art Conservation Center's Paintings Conservation Lab. San Diego, CA The Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC) has announced the appointment of three exceptional board members to its already stellar roster of leadership. As one of the few nonprofit regional conservation centers in the United States, and the only such center in the western region, the San Diego based nonprofit is poised for a phase of transformative change as it shifts into a radically inclusive and accessible art conservation organization. The BACC Board will help nourish this shift and ensure that the organization's vision for inclusion has long term systemic impact. Erika Katayama is the Associate Director, Interpretation at Seattle Art Museum. With 20+ years of experience in multiple museum departments, she has worked at federal, state, and private institutions. Ms. Katayama is committed to access and inclusion within all areas of museums and is currently writing a book about issues of diversity (and the lack thereof) within exhibition design. Her previously held roles on the West Coast have included advisory committee membership for DEAI initiatives for the California Association of Museums, Sr. Director of Audience Engagement at the Museum of Us, and Director of Visual Learning at the Museum of Photographic Arts. Joel Garcia (Huichol) is an Indigenous artist, cultural organizer, co-founder, and Director of Meztli Projects, an Indigenous-based arts & culture collaborative centering Indigeneity into the creative practice of Los Angeles. In various roles, he has worked with Indigenous communities across borders in support of issues of land, access, and self-determination. His work explores healing and reconciliation, as well as memory and place. He’s a current Stanton Fellow and former fellow of Monument Lab, and co-facilitator of the Intercultural Leadership Institute which proposes to hold space for cultural production outside of white supremacist frameworks. Karen Coutts is the founder of KC Nonprofits, a consulting firm which helps advance the missions of San Diego’s nonprofits—with an emphasis on those focused on arts and culture. Since 2011 Karen has provided clients with fund development services, strategic planning, and high-level project management. Prior to her work as a consultant Karen was the Director of Development for The New Children’s Museum, where she completed a $30 million capital campaign and was part of the team that opened their new facility. She spent eight years in the development department of the San Diego Museum of Art overseeing corporate, foundation, government, and planned giving as well as membership. Katayama, Garcia, and Coutts began their 3-year terms in January 2023. The BACC Board of Trustees is led by Board President Dana Springs, Deputy Chief for Administration, San Diego Volunteer Lawyer Program, and boasts a board membership that is 50% BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). In addition to its racial diversity, BACC board members are located throughout BACC’s service area, including Seattle, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego. They bring a range and depth of expertise in community organizing, arts management and advocacy, conservation, education, and financial planning. Their diverse perspectives and skills are essential as BACC seeks to fulfill its vision for equity and healing within our own structure and workplace, as well as the communities we serve.
Throughout the remainder of 2023, we will be highlighting each of our Board Members to better understand what excites them about being a part of the BACC Team at this transformative time. Keep an eye on our socials and check back here to meet them all! Check out our Board’s bios here. FROM INTENTION TO INTENTIONALITY: LESSONS WE’VE LEARNED ALONG THE WAY -LETICIA GOMEZ FRANCO6/30/2021
I originally presented this as a talk titled From Intention to Intentionality: Centering Equity, Inclusion, and Representation in Cultural Preservation at the two-day colloquium, Diversity in Collections Care: Many Voices, organized by The Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) in March 2021. Because it memorializes the beginnings of a monumental shift for Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC) , the script from that talk has been transcribed and formatted to be shared here. I join you today from the ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay Nation. Colonially known as the San Diego/Tijuana border region of Southern California/Baja California Norte. The Kumeyaay peoples continue to maintain their connection to, and care for, this land. Last summer, like many of your institutions, in the throes of dual pandemics, covid-19 and systemic racism and violence against the Black community, BACC decided it was time to make a change. After much thought, staff conceived of Preserve Community Art. This initiative was born in response to both a long standing need to acknowledge systemic racism and exclusion in the field of conservation as well as in direct and immediate response to the Summer of 2020 movement led by Black Lives Matter to address racial injustice. In its initial form, Preserve Community Art sought to support the documentation and preservation of San Diego Protest Art. The staff got to work on creating guidelines for protest art preservation and preventive care and put a call out to community members who could benefit from what BACC had to offer. The staff at the time, put much thought into how to approach this work. It was, after all, a new direction. Assuming, like most of us do, that if we took the time and the resources to build it, "they" would come. BACC built it, but much to its surprise "they" did not come. BACC did have the opportunity to work with a couple community led projects, but in all honesty, the Black community, whose historical exclusion from these services was what inspired the creation of Preserve Community Art - was not engaged. I titled this talk From Intention to Intentionality. BACC's intention was to address the disparity in access to conservation services and engage the Black community and communities of color in art conservation. But intentions, as well intentioned as they may be, are passive. Intentions are what we wake up with in the morning. What we say to ourselves in the mirror to remind us that we've got this. What we whisper into the wind. We put intentions out, because we believe in some cosmic flow that will take them somewhere and materialize them for us. But Intentions are just that. Mutterings of what we want. The journey from intention to intentionality is a long one. It starts with intention, sure. we need those. to verbalize what is in our hearts. But without intentionality, those intentions just sit there idly. For BACC, Preserve Community Art was intention. 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. BACC’s Assistant Conservator of Paintings, Morgan Wylder, recently received the Professional Associate designation from the American Institute for Conservation. To obtain this designation, conservators or preservation specialists are required to have completed an undergraduate degree, received formal education in their field for at least two years, and then completed at least three years of full-time conservation or conservation-related work. Applicants must also submit a portfolio of conservation projects, essays about AIC's Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Conservation, and letters of recommendation from other AIC members with Professional Associate status. As the field of conservation has no official legal licensing to determine who can be called a conservator, the Professional Associate designation is one way that conservators can demonstrate that they have had both extensive training and understand the ethics of the conservation field. All Professional Associates can be found on the American Institute for Conservation's website under the "Find an Expert" tab. Congratulations, Morgan! |
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