INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION FORCULTURAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
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Reposted from Security Informed
Today’s security professionals are tasked with protecting the entirety of a facility or campus from every possible threat. It’s a big task, given the range of solutions available; from cybersecurity to prevent hacking, to video surveillance to monitor the goings-on within the facility, to the physical security of the building itself.
For most businesses and schools, keeping the entrances and exits to a building secure is an extremely high priority—when an individual cannot get into the building they will have a harder time causing trouble for those within it.
With quantum leaps happening in security technology, architectural revolving doors may not always be top-of-mind when designing a new security system from scratch.
However, with recent technological advances in the last decade, and considering that they occupy less floor space and are extremely good at reducing unwanted air infiltration into an interior, it is definitely time to examine how they can participate in a complete physical security plan as well.
The exterior door to a building or premises, often a public entrance during business hours, is typically the first line of defense against unwanted persons or activity making its way into an organization.
If lobby or security staff sense trouble outside (distress, fights, weapons, protests, etc.), they need a quick and effective way to block anyone from entering the building and creating danger for those inside.
Should this type of incident make its way into a building, it creates a number of risks, including the expenditure of unnecessary resources, loss of productivity, violence, and liability for the business.
For example, recently a well-known financial company in the Midwest was the target of a protest against their financing of a controversial initiative. A large crowd gathered outside on the street, pushed inside the building, and took over the interior lobby.
The protesters not only disrupted the retail banking business at the lobby level, but also attempted to block employees from going to work on the upper floors. The protest lasted hours, making it difficult to do business, and was stressful for employees. In addition, the news cycle around the protest created an image problem for upper management and the overall brand.
Beyond the immediate risks of theft and violence, crime has numerous intangible effects on employees, residents or students that can have a more profound and lasting impact. These include physical pain and suffering, along with a feeling of anxiety, stress, and uncertainty around future security.
According to a survey conducted by Workplace Options in 2015, 53% of American workers have experienced a traumatic event while at work—with workplace violence or criminal activity listed as one of the top four events that cause trauma.
Revolving doors can be a reliable solution for providing this necessary security. They are often deployed in buildings where public use is needed during the day, but controlled access is required in the evening—for example, banks, museums, commercial buildings, condominiums, libraries, dorms, recreational centres, and more.
Thanks to technology employing electricity, today’s manual revolving doors are more capable than ever before and can potentially save lives or buy the time necessary to alert security staff or notify law enforcement to deal with a dangerous situation in time to prevent harm, stress, or liability.
The following security features are now available for manual revolving doors being deployed in buildings right now:
Consider the usage of these features for a building such as a downtown high-rise condominium. During the day or night, residents can enter by showing credentials outside the door to the access control system. Any deliveries would have to stand outside, ring the doorbell and wait for reception to unlock the door and let them in.
If anything threatening occurs during rotation, reception staff can immediately lock the doors to keep trouble out and call for help. At a high-rise office building, it can work differently. The door can be unlocked during the day for public entry with guards keeping a watchful eye outside, ready to lock the doors instantly if trouble happens outside. The access control system can lock the doors at 5pm until 7am the next morning, requiring employees or cleaning crew to present their credentials to enter.
It should be noted that standard revolving doors are not equipped to detect or prevent tailgating (an unauthorized person following an authorized person through an entrance). They should not be confused with a security revolving door, which is intended for individuals trained to use these doors at employee-only entrances.
With this in mind, consider that with access control integration, a standard revolving door will unlock when presented with an authorized credential, but will continue to rotate as long as anyone is inside the door to prevent entrapment.
Tailgating is still a possibility with these entrances, so if this is a concern, your revolving doors should be the first of several layers of physical security including, potentially, additional turnstiles, guard staff, surveillance cameras, additional locking mechanisms for restricted areas, and so on.
Finally, modern code requirements for revolving doors are defined by a number of different agencies—ANSI, IBC, and NFPA. All require that a revolving door’s wings be able to collapse or ‘book fold’ to create a path of escape during a fire, and that a swinging or sliding door must be present within 10 feet of any revolving door, on the same building plane.
To make sure this additional door isn’t a security weak point, the extra sliding or swinging door can be ‘exit only’, or locked to those trying to enter from outside the building, but unlocked to those trying to exit from inside the building.
To keep building interiors safe, standard revolving doors can be a simple, cost-effective and easy to implement solution that helps prevent unwanted entry by those looking to do harm and create unwanted liability. Considering revolving doors can be a first step into securing the entrances and exits of your building, and protecting everyone and everything within.
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Reposted from ABCNews
Packages intended to be placed on a truck, like the bomb that exploded Tuesday at a FedEx facility in Texas, are not screened as carefully as items carried by passenger planes.
Largely that is because of the high cost of screening every parcel intended for domestic delivery.
Delivery companies such as FedEx and UPS rely on a risk-based strategy. They hope to detect illegal or dangerous shipments by spotting something unusual about the package or the shipper. Some security experts give the companies good marks while pointing out the limitations of their approach.
FedEx and UPS say only that they have security measures in place and cooperate with law enforcement. They declined to discuss specifics, saying that would compromise security.
Here are some questions and answers about security of parcels:
ARE ALL PACKAGES SCREENED?
Cargo on passenger planes must be screened, usually by computed-tomography scanners although explosive-trace detection and dogs are also used, said Jeffrey Price, an aviation-security expert at Metropolitan State University in Denver.
If a package is going to be placed on a truck for delivery within the United States, as with the device that exploded on a conveyer belt at a FedEx facility in Schertz, Texas, "there is much less likelihood that it's going to be physically screened with X-ray or even a person examining the package," said John Cohen, a former counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security.
HOW ARE SHIPMENTS CHECKED?
For truck shipments, cargo carriers train employees to look for suspicious behavior, including anything that looks odd about the package, or a shipper who buys too much insurance for what he says is in the box, Cohen said. Those procedures developed in the 1980s to detect shipments of drugs or guns and evolved to be used to find explosives.
An employee at a FedEx center in Austin, Bryan Jaimes, 19, told reporters he never received new guidance from managers about handling packages as Austin authorities look for what they've called a "serial bomber." He said his job is to load the trucks and that he assumes other workers earlier in the shipping chain give packages a once-over before they get to him.
FedEx and UPS officials declined to say whether they screen ground-shipping packages at drop-off points or distribution centers. On Tuesday, investigators closed off an Austin-area FedEx store where they suspect that the bomb was dropped off.
The most stringent screening rules apply to packages that will be carried on passenger airplanes.
FedEx and UPS each have their own fleet of planes, and the rules are not as strict. Price said the companies aren't required to use X-ray, explosive-trace detection or canine screening but can at their option. He said they are required to physically inspect all packages.
HAVE TERRORISTS TRIED TO HIDE BOMBS IN CARGO?
Yes. The threat posed by bombs given to delivery companies was highlighted in a 2010 plot aimed at blowing up planes flying to the United States.
Bombs hidden in printer cartridges were shipped from Yemen but intercepted in Dubai and the United Kingdom and were defused. The bombs were pulled off U.S.-bound planes after officials got a tip from authorities in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. then banned large toner and ink cartridges from passenger planes and ordered new inspections of high-risk shipments on cargo planes coming into the country.
It has been weeks since a valuable, signed and original Pablo Picasso print was stolen from DeLind Fine Art Appraisals in Milwaukee. The 1949 print, which is one of just 30 in the world, is worth up to $50,000. Milwaukee police and the FBI continue to seek information that would lead them to the prized art.
In the meantime, FOX6 News talked exclusively with a Milwaukee FBI expert who said stealing art is usually the easy part. What happens next is not.
"They take a piece of art or an artifact simply because it's a crime of opportunity," said David Bass, a member of the FBI's Art Crimes Team.
Bass said finding the crook and art may be difficult, but it is also difficult for the thief to turn a profit.
Dealers can look up an item on the internet and Interpol Red List of stolen items to find out if a work of art is stolen.
The FBI has been involved investigating art and artifact thefts from museums, such as from looted galleries in Syria and Baghdad. But Milwaukee also has its share.
"They're not familiar with these objects. They don't know how to handle these objects -- and as a result, they're usually not well-cared for. And as a result, we're very concerned about that -- that they will suffer damage or not be kept properly," Bass said.
Reposted from Jamaica Observer
Minister of Gender, Culture, Entertainment and Sport, Olivia Grange says the government would be moving to amend legislation as well as ratify international conventions as part of a coordinated response to the theft and export of invaluable cultural artifacts which belong to the people of Jamaica.
Addressing the opening of a workshop being hosted by the ministry to sensitise stakeholders on the government's proposed response to the pilfering and illicit export of cultural properties, Grange explained that Jamaica's existing legislative regime does not address trade in cultural material per se and all cultural material are not protected under the JNHT Act.
“But we are moving to change that. In this regard, we will be proposing amendments to the JNHT Act to address the more fundamental legal issues,” said Grange.
The culture minister said Jamaica's efforts would not stop with amending the JHNT Act but that action would be taken through ratification of international conventions, which would be the focus of the workshop discussions.
“We have been studying, with the aim of ratifying, two conventions to deal with the illicit trafficking of cultural heritage:
- the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, and
- the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects
“Both Conventions support each other. The UNESCO Convention, in establishing a framework for international cooperation, takes preventative measures against illicit trade of declared/designated cultural property and imposes provisions for the return/restitution to the place of origin. And the UNIDROIT Convention underpins the provision of the UNESCO Convention in the area of return and restitution of cultural objects.”
Grange further added that it was critical that key stakeholders, including customs agents, members of the security forces, cultural regulators and practitioners, as well as collectors are engaged in efforts to protect Jamaica's material cultural heritage both inside and outside of our borders.
She said wide consultations will help in determining “what constitutes the legal transfer of significant cultural objects; what cultural objects cannot leave the country; how we will limit the illicit movement of artifacts within Jamaica; how to restrict/contain the removal of artifacts from archaeological sites; how to facilitate the sharing of private collections with the Jamaican public and how to prevent the loss (destruction and export) of cultural heritage objects.”
Grange shared with her audience that in 2016 a team of Archaeologists, led by the Jamaica National Heritage unearthed three whole skeletons, four zemís, over one thousand ceramic sherds and thousands of shells at a site in St Catherine.
Reposted from StaySafeOnline
In 2017, ransomware became so powerful that it managed to finally make a name for itself as a business model. Ransomware as a service (RaaS) allows hackers to simply buy or sell their own ransomware for the purpose of damaging individuals or businesses.
Considering that, and the fact that all the other businesses affected by hackers, cybersecurity has become extremely important for every business today. It doesn’t matter what industry you pertain to – the reality is that hackers can access your data and sell it for a profit or perform other maleficent actions.
This is why investing in business IT solutions can help protect your company from this type of attack. Creating the right protection plan is essential to your business. Even if you believe that your business is not important enough to attack, the reality is that every organization could become a victim. Our dedicated team created a quick list of three things you need to do to keep your files safe.
One of the main benefits of business IT support and data protection solution is that they can keep your data safe from prying eyes. Hackers won’t have easy access to your sensitive data. Also, having a professional data backup and protection plan will make you less prone to malware and viruses. You get to save money this way, and in the end, hackers will find it more difficult to take advantage of any human errors. Plus, protecting your data will help you stay in compliance with the current laws. Use this type of service, and there will be less need to worry about the safety of your data.
Most companies that use cloud services may be targeted by hackers. With help from a great IT support team and other dedicated services, you can help negate that issue. A dependable business technology solutions team password protects all your content, filters it and heavily monitors company information to ensure that only the authorized parties will be able to access designated files. This way everyone will get to see only what they need to.
A dependable IT support team knows that cybersecurity issues can appear at any time, regardless of the hour. Services like these can bring you the best business computer services and reliable solutions in no time.
If you opt for round–the-clock IT support, you won’t have to worry about any data security issue, and the team can also help you deal with any other type of IT issues, not only security related stuff. This also ensures you that the company files are safe. A well managed IT services firm would also have heavily monitored data centers. Only authorized personnel goes into this building, which means that all your sensitive data will be stored by a professional and reliable business.
As long as there’s data online, there will always be hackers that try to steal it. Don’t let hackers take advantage of your company’s information. Invest in the best business IT solutions right now.
Reposted from Motherboard
At around midnight just over 28 years ago a pair of thieves broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts masked by darkness. The intruders, who were disguised as police officers, tied up museum security guards and used box cutters to rip the paintings. They made off with $500 million worth of art from the museum’s walls.
Among the stolen pieces were three paintings by Dutch Baroque artist Rembrandt and five by French impressionist Degas. Today, the case remain the largest unsolved art heists in history and no arrests have been made. The spaces where the 13 artworks once hung lay bare.
While we may never know the location of the physical paintings, a group of technologists are using augmented reality to virtually return these stolen works.
Using Apple’s ARKit, a team of nine technologist at Cuseum—a group that helps bring AR experiences to museums—have recreated Rembrandt's, “A Lady and Gentleman in Black” and “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee,”—two of the 13 stolen artworks. The group is calling the project, which is not sanctioned by the museum, Hacking the Heist.
"Something like this would not have been technologically possible a year ago but now with some of the recent advances in AR the phone has the ability to recognize vertical surfaces and images and react accordingly,” Brendan Ciecko, a technologist at Cuseum told Motherboard over the phone. “It dawned on me that a lot of people don't actually realize what the paintings that were looted look like.”
Ciecko’s Apple ARKit build runs on the latest iOS currently available only to developers. As soon as Apple releases the new version of iOS to the public, museum goers can download an app and view the virtually restored paintings on their own devices. Until then, the technologists hope to lend some iPads to the museum so that visitors can experience the work even if they don’t have the app.
Currently the team’s work is still a proof of concept, but according to Ciecko they intend to work with the museum to create a project open to the public in the near future.
Augmented Reality technologies have made strides in commercial use in the past year. The technology has also been utilized by many for artistic endeavors, like this group that recently used the technology to host their own AR exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.
“Back in the day AR used to be pretty twitchy,” Ciecko said. “You would scan some sort of marker and it would pull up the video but it would be pretty twitchy because it couldn't track in high fidelity.”
Apple’s ARKit uses an iPhone or iPad camera to detect surfaces and does not require a marker or a QR code to place 3D objects in the environment. In the case of the Gardner museum paintings these technological advancements are essential because the actual space where the painting should be is empty.
Rather than rely on a marker, Ciecko and his team had to detect the canvases adjacent to the missing paintings. The team used the surrounding paintings as anchors rather than the more traditional approach of laying an image over another.
Since the work was not sanctioned by the museum, Ciecko and his fellow technologists experienced a close call with one of the museum's guards during their early stages. According to Ciecko after spending over 45 minutes in front of the paintings to test the technology, the guard became suspicious and a supervisor was called.
Tourists passing by saw the images of the paintings on the technologists’ ipads as they tested their AR and would often ask questions and take pictures according to Ciecko.
Looking to the future Ciecko said he hopes this work will inspire more people to use AR to create cultural and educational experiences.
“Looking at this specific institution there were 13 pieces that were looted," he said."It is a dark and evil act to loot an institution that is open for the public enjoyment so we really wanted to highlight our feelings about this especially as technologists, especially as artists and especially as Bostonians.”
Reposted from the Post-Gazette
Valuable atlases, maps, and large plate books that show the colorful breadth of Western civilization have been stolen from the rare books room of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Oakland, right under the gaze of Andrew Carnegie’s portrait.
The theft of 314 items was discovered last April when an appraisal for insurance purposes began of the rare materials in the Oliver Room, library spokeswoman Suzanne Thinnes said. Deemed a crime scene, the room has been closed since April 3, 2017. Since that time, detectives from the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office have been investigating the complex case.
“We’re very saddened by the breach of trust. This theft occurred over an extended period of time” by a knowledgeable individual or individuals, Ms. Thinnes said. She said the library could not provide an exact value of the missing materials.
Michael Vinson, a rare book dealer for 26 years, who reviewed a detailed list of the missing items, was more direct.
“I think the value would easily be $5 million. This is an immense cultural crime,” he said.
Among the missing books is a first edition of Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” from London, dated 1687. Mr. Vinson noted that another copy of this book sold for $3.7 million in 2016 at a Christie’s auction in New York City.
Also gone is a first edition of Adam Smith’s book “The Wealth of Nations,” which, Mr. Vinson said, would be worth $150,000. Nine books printed before 1500 were stolen, too. These texts are called incunables because they were printed in the first 50 years after Johannes Gutenberg began printing. Mr. Vinson said the nine incunables would be worth a total of $50,000.
Mr. Vinson received an email earlier this month from a trade association detailing the theft.
At the urging of Detective Lyle Graber from the Allegheny County DA’s office, the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America alerted its 450 members. Detectives Fran LaQuatra and Perann Tansmore also are investigating the case.
The New York City-based organization’s email, dated March 6, included a spreadsheet listing the stolen items with titles, authors, publishers, publication date and a brief description of each work, but not in every case.
“We are hopeful the release of this list will lead to their recovery and could produce information that strengthens their investigation,” Ms. Thinnes said.
“This is a great loss to the Pittsburgh community,” she added. “Trust is a very important component of what we do on a daily basis. The library takes very seriously the security of all its collections.”
The staff member responsible for the collection is no longer employed by the library, she said, declining to elaborate.
“This was part of a magnificent collection that would cover the entire breadth of Western civilization. [Edmund] Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’ is a landmark in literature,” said Mr. Vinson, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M. and holds a master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago, where he specialized in the history of the book.
The list, obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, includes a first folio edition of Spenser’s classic poem that was published in London in 1609.
A three-volume set by Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, titled “History of The Indian Tribes of North America,” is worth $100,000, Mr. Vinson said.
Also missing is John James Audubon’s oversized book “The Quadrupeds of North America,” an octavo edition of his illustrations of four-footed mammals published in the 1850s in New York City.
Gone is “The North American Indian,” a photographic record of native American cultures created by Edward Curtis from 1907 to 1930. The list does not say whether the library owned the complete, 20-volume set or just a few volumes of this landmark work.
A complete set of the Edward Curtis volumes would be worth between $1 million and $2 million, Mr. Vinson said.
Herman Moll’s “Atlas Manuale” is an early, important work that is gone along with more than 20 maps of the Americas and Bermuda. An accordion-style folder holding 35 Japanese prints was taken, too.
Located on the Oakland library’s third floor, the Oliver Room was named in 1992 for William Reed Oliver, a benefactor and trustee who served on the library board for more than 40 years. Mr. Oliver, an assistant treasurer for Jones & Laughlin Steel, was 94 when he died in 1994.
Susan Benne is executive director of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, which maintains a database of missing books.
“It’s in no one’s interest to have stolen materials in the marketplace. It can create victims along the way. Sometimes the alleged thieves are sophisticated and they have a very good story that seems believable,” Ms. Benne said.
Last month, Ms. Benne said, she was contacted by Detective Graber and asked to distribute the list.
“There’s demand for good material all over the world,” Ms. Benne said, adding some items could be recovered. Garrett Scott, a book dealer in Ann Arbor, Mich., “was an excellent liaison between people who were trying to recover books in Italy after thefts there and a Swedish library that had some thefts there.”
Plate books consist of text with hand-colored aquatints, lithographs or engravings. Books showing the costumes of China, Austria and Turkey are missing. Complete atlases are attractive to thieves, but even incomplete atlases are, too, because they can be sold plate by plate.
“A thief very well may break up an atlas plate by plate because that makes it difficult to detect ownership,” Mr. Vinson..
Joyce Kosofsky, co-owner of Brattle Book Shop in downtown Boston, has worked in the book trade since 1978 and agreed with Mr. Vinson. She called the list “jaw-dropping. It’s an impressive list of books — the range of what’s there,” she said.
“These are high-end rare books. I’ve never seen a list this big. This is a major theft,” Ms. Kosofsky said.
At Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, security is strict and no one is above suspicion, Mr. Vinson said.
Beinecke library curators cannot take their keys home, checking them in with a guard when they leave. Bags are searched every time someone leaves the building, Mr. Vinson said.
At the Carnegie, the Oliver Room is not accessible to the public, Ms. Thinnes said. Before the lockdown last April, visitors needed to make an appointment so materials could be pulled in advance. A few staff members had card key access to the room. Lockers were provided for visitors. Security cameras are located in the stacks and some materials were kept under lock and key.
Mr. Vinson believes that the thief may have been a library employee or employees because only a handful of people knew the security procedures.
“The books were immensely valuable. But they were also across a wide variety of fields,” he said.” Only a few people have that knowledge — a general antiquarian bookseller, a librarian or a curator would know the value. It has inside written all over it.”
“They are probably all in a storage unit or an attic somewhere if it is insider theft,” Mr. Vinson said.
The IFCPP certification team would like to congratulate 12 new Certified Institutional Protection Instructor graduates and 10 new Certified Institutional Security Supervisor graduates for their successful completion of CIPI and CISS courses in Philadelphia, February 27-March 2. We’re lucky to work with such a great group of professionals.
Our sincere gratitude to The Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art for hosting these important classes, and for their generous hospitality. We couldn’t do it without the support of our member institutions.
And thanks very much to Stevan P. Layne, CPP, CIPM, CIPI and Geoffrey V. Goodrich, CIPM II, CIPI for their outstanding instruction! Great job guys!
The ASIS Foundation, the charitable research and education arm of ASIS International, has published applied research that assesses and provides recommendations for the security of historically important archaeological sites. Compiled by the ASIS International Cultural Properties Council, the report, Archaeological Site of COLONIA CLUNIA SUPLICIA (Clunia) Peñalba de Castro, Burgos, Spain, was made possible through a grant from the ASIS Foundation. ASIS International is the leading association for security management professionals worldwide.
The research, which evaluates the security of Clunia, an ancient Roman city on the Iberian Peninsula, includes a detailed site survey undertaken by James H. Clark, CPP, and Ricardo Sanz Marcos under the advisement of 2017 Cultural Properties Council chair Robert Carotenuto, CPP, PCI, PSP. Clark and Marcos identified conditions—such as weather, looting, and careless behavior—that could create security vulnerabilities for the site and its resources. The research team believes that the recommendations they draw from this survey are applicable at other archaeological sites.
“Most of the completed research on cultural site security focuses on how to protect them during times of war,” says Carotenuto. “These historical treasures are threatened during peace time as well. Our report demonstrates to the security community that you can apply common physical security techniques to protect any site.”
The Clunia report is the latest in the ASIS Foundation’s series of Connecting Research in Security to Practice (CRISP) reports—providing practical, researched-based solutions to help security professionals effectively tackle a wide range of security issues. Previous CRISP reports address issues of insider threat, supply chain security, sports team travel security, and more.
Reposted from The Art Newspaper
Nearly six months after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, museums on the US island are resuming their everyday pace and pushing forward with new initiatives.
The Museo de Arte de Ponce on the island’s south coast is “basically back to normal”, the museum’s assistant curator and exhibitions co-ordinator, Helena Gómez de Córdoba, says. Though some staff—among around 400,000 utility customers on the island—remain without power at home, the museum’s collection was unharmed and the building received only minor damage. It reopened on 28 September, one week after the hurricane.
Visitor numbers to the museum actually rose in October, partly because many locals were not working and schools were closed. The museum offered free admission that month, and nearly 300 guided tours and workshops. “It was good to see people just enjoying themselves and learning,” De Córdoba says.
Although attendance since then has been slightly down, the museum hopes to draw back visitors—both locals and tourists—with its spring exhibitions. A rescheduled show of works on paper from New York’s Frick Collection opens this month (Small Treasures from the Frick Collection, 17 March-8 August) after a four-month delay.
Another exhibition, due to open on 15 April, will present Puerto Rican art from the collection made between 1959, when the museum was founded, and 1965, when it moved into its current building. “It’s suddenly become very poignant,” says the show’s curator, Pablo Pérez d’Ors, since the museum is an “important landmark in the construction of an artistic identity for Puerto Rico”.
The Ponce museum has also helped other institutions on the island, such as the museum at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Cayey, to examine and preserve their collections. Likewise, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) in San Juan safeguarded works belonging to other Puerto Rican museums until January. MAPR’s own collection received only minimal damage and staff returned to work immediately after the storm, helping to run the museum as a communications and conservation hub for local cultural institutions.
The San Juan museum reopened to the public on 10 November, three days after another disaster: a flash flood, which caused more damage than either Hurricane Maria or Hurricane Irma, including the destruction of the education department’s facilities and materials.
Since the reopening, MAPR has been “very active” and “people have been very responsive”, says the museum’s director, Marta Mabel Pérez. A show of works by six Puerto Rican artists opened last month (until 13 May), while four young local collectors are lending works to an exhibition opening in May. The museum has also teamed up with the online auctioneer Paddle8 to present a benefit sale of 91 works, some donated by Puerto Rican artists, to be held on 14 March.
The island’s museums are also thinking ahead for future emergencies. In October, MAPR co-founded the Coalition for the Heritage of Puerto Rico. The three-year pilot project aims to release a guide in May, to advise cultural institutions on preparing for and responding to disasters. The coalition is working with Brinnen Carter, a chief of resources at the US National Park Service, to draw up a budget that will include new safety deposit spaces for museum objects.
The San Juan museum also received a $110,000 grant from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, of which it is an affiliate organisation, to meet conservation costs after the hurricane. The museum is, however, around $3m in debt due to the loss of revenue, structural damage and the cost of restoring works.
This month, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative (SCRI), set up after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, is co-organising two disaster conservation workshops at the museum. The first event, aimed at museum professionals, will cover issues such documenting collections and evacuating, assessing and preserving objects. Another workshop, on 24 March, will teach members of the public and artists how to conserve works in their homes or studios.
The workshops will be led by Corine Wegener, a cultural heritage preservation officer at the SCRI. In disaster planning, she says: “People come first, but culture needs to be somewhere on the list—that’s our goal.”
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