The History of the Organization

By Dr. Joyce Hill Stoner

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Lawrence L. Reger served as President of Heritage Preservation (and its predecessor the National Institute for Conservation) from 1988 until February 2015. He had been the Director of the American Association of Museums (AAM, 1978-1986) and previously Director of Program Development and Coordination, Director of Planning and Management and General Counsel for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA 1970-1978). Larry was originally trained as a lawyer. As a result of this background, he was able to bring a much-needed understanding of the workings of the Federal Government to the field of Conservation and how to explain quickly to government leaders what art conservation is and why it was keenly needed. AAM regularly worked with representatives and senators. Why wasn’t AIC doing this? Larry began that important evolution. His colleagues included such luminaries as Nancy Hanks, the second chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; Lynne Cheney, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Andrew Heiskell, Chairman, President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Mr. Heiskell is former Chairman and CEO of Time, Inc. Mr. Reger was well versed in preparing and delivering testimonies that inspired busy executives to pay attention to the care of cultural collections.

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Arthur Beale recounted: Even while still working for the AAM, in 1985 Larry began collaborating on a joint venture with me and the NIC and arranged a meeting in New York City with the two of us and Gerald George, then Director of AASLH. Larry had been asked by the Charles Ulrick and Josephine Bay Foundation to develop a proposal to encourage cooperative efforts for the care of collections. Their interest had apparently been sparked by the then recently released AAM publication Caring for Collections: Strategies for Conservation, Maintenance and Documentation. Larry prepared for the meeting by producing a five-page draft proposal that opened as follows: “Collections are the heart of every museum: without them there would be no research or interpretation, in effect, no reason for being. As museums approach the 21st century, collections care—maintenance and conservation—will be an important topic of discussion.’’ The proposal was presented to the Bay Foundation and at the end of the meeting Robert Ashton, Executive Director of the Foundation, expressed his interest in seeing a formal proposal and asked which organization would be submitting it. Larry answered, NIC.

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In the late 1980s, Larry worked with Sydney Yates, the chairman of the committee with oversight for appropriations for NEH and presented testimony about brittle books; this resulted in a substantial amount of money from Congress to the NEH for care of brittle books. In a later testimony he proposed the National Heritage Preservation Program to support collections care training programs, and Congress adopted that. To testify for care of anthropological collections he conspired with Tom Nicholson of the American Museum of Natural History to bring to Congress a box containing a textile with a bird motif from an extinct South American civilization. The two most important members of Congress, Chairman Yates and the ranking Republican, had to get up to look in the box. Nicholson said, “Among our collections, we have these textiles, and this is the only thing we know about these civilizations.” Yates noted that he had in his home a pre-Columbian textile with a bird motif; Larry noted that this sort of serendipity got the attention of key members of Congress.

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Under Larry’s leadership, Board members, CEOs and conservators of collecting institutions and service organizations of all kinds were brought together to discuss and recommend strategies, programs and needed support to forward the goals of significantly improving the preservation and conservation of collections. One of the most important was that national and state organizations work cooperatively together to promote better care of collections among their constituents/members. He saw the annual NIC meetings as “more about bringing people in from the outside, especially agencies and on Capitol Hill, and doing some educating.”

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In 1989 he oversaw the launch of Save Outdoor Sculpture (SOS), a community-based undertaking to identify, document, and conserve outdoor sculpture in the United States. Its goal was to advocate proper care of a public resource on a nationwide basis. About 2011 or 2012, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art became an active partner with what was by then called Heritage Preservation for the program to document and preserve outdoor sculpture that was not under the aegis of any museum. Another parallel preservation project, Rescue Public Murals (RPM), brought public attention to the unique artistic and historical importance of murals in the United States. This program attracted the expertise and funding necessary for their conservation.

 

In his 2012 FAIC oral history interview with Anne Kingery-Schwartz, Larry noted:

We were asked by Congress, “what is a pressing need?” And so we presented testimony, and significant

funds were appropriated to the Smithsonian American Art Museum to do Save Outdoor Sculpture. I

think it’s fair to say, as we do, that it is the largest volunteer cultural heritage project ever conducted.

Volunteers were trained in major metropolitan areas and states, and then the rest [were] covered by

state-wide programs, to go out and identify outdoor sculpture, and there was an assessment of

condition and an assessment of who did it, and the history of the sculpture

 

Also his history interview, Larry noted:

During two major disasters, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the Midwest floods, we found ourselves with a very small staff and our board, and the staff felt we should do something to be helpful. And we’re running around and basically by the next board meeting we really realized we haven’t done anything else except trying to help respond to these incredible emergencies. Other associations were doing the same thing. AAM, ALA, AIC, Association of State and Local History, and the Getty was were very much involved, especially because of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Because all these groups have similar interests and in some way they should at least be talking to each other, we had what we call The Summit; this was actually in 1994, and the Getty provided significant funding for that. Here in Washington, it was in the American Institute of Architects Conference Room, which is one of the best conference rooms I’ve ever been in because it has seats and a rounded little table that you could spread things out.

 

Larry recruited Arthur Schultz to expand the reach of NIC. Schultz was the chairman of the National Committee to Save America’s Cultural Collections (NSACC) and also a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH). Schultz agreed to serve on NIC’s Board of Directors in 1990 and suggested to Larry that one way to promote increased support for collections care and conservation was to find ways to reach collectors. Schultz knew Franklin Murphy, who was head of the Times and Mirror Corporation, which owned Abrams Publishing. Expert authors from the conservation community were recruited to write essays for the book Caring for Your Collections, 1992 (edited by Arthur Schultz and published by Abrams) and found themselves feted at the White House by Barbara Bush (an unprecedented activity for most conservators).

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In 1997, NIC changed its name to Heritage Preservation. Jane Long and Larry Reger both explained this name change in their FAIC Oral History Project interviews [both conducted in 2012 by Anne Kingery-Schwartz]. Larry had continued his outreach efforts and at a formal dinner, seated next to Madeleine Albright, he explained to her that he headed the NIC, and he found it yet again difficult to explain that conservation was not about wildlife. Good and concise communication had always been one of Larry’s most important precepts.

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With funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Heritage Preservation published an important survey report, Heritage Health Index, in 2005. It included material supplied by more than 3,000 institutions – museums, historical societies, government archives, libraries, scientific organizations, and universities. Some 612 million artifacts were found to be at risk of deterioration because of improper or neglected care. That report was featured in a December, 2005, New York Times article by Lynette Clemetson, “History is Slipping Away as Collections Deteriorate.” One week later, the report was featured in a PBS broadcast by Harriet Bashar, “U.S. Museum Collections in Dire Conditions.”

 

Jane Long noted in her 2012 FAIC Oral History interview: I have to credit Larry because right after September 11th, [2001] he said, “We need to call the executive committee together to think about what can be done and how we can help,” and then we later had a full meeting of the task force and had emergency people in from New York to tell us about what had happened and that’s when we decided to do a report as well because there’s nothing like an emergency to raise awareness for preparedness.”

 

A Conservation Assessment Program (CAP), funded by IMLS, but administered by Heritage Preservation, provided assessment by professional conservators of the condition of collections and historic structures. It enabled successful applicants to focus on their most important artifacts and set priorities for their conservation. Between 1990 and 2012, 2,600 museums in all states and territories benefited from the CAP program. In 2012 alone, 101 museums participated in the conservation assessment program. In his 2012 interview, Larry explained his approach to programs such as the Conservation Assessment Program, CAP:

 

“Giving people what I call, short, medium, and long-range goals. So, if they need to replace their entire environmental system it’s not that you don’t tell them that, but you don’t make that necessarily their first priority. If they can do it, you urge them to do it. But you give them something that they can feel a sense of accomplishment, and that, more importantly, they can feel a sense of accomplishment within the overall goals of the collecting institution.” (He also noted “when we started CAP. I actually got a baseball cap done with ‘CAP your Museums.’”)

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Charles Hummel noted in his memories of the NIC/Heritage Preservation: “Larry Reger did a very good job as Executive Director of Heritage Preservation. I guess IMLS saw that. That's why they entered in the contract with IMS to run CAP. CAP was an incredible success because it provided support for conservation professionals to go in and work with them and force them to look at their collections.”

 

“As a member of the National Museum Services Board 1994-2001, appointed by President Clinton, I occupied the so-called ‘Conservation Seat.’ I personally observed the great success of CAP in annually attracting overwhelming numbers of applications for the program’s available funds.”

 

“The Heritage Emergency Task Force was founded in 1995 to protect cultural heritage from the damaging effects of natural disasters or other emergencies. It grew to include forty-one national and Federal service organizations, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

 

And “Heritage Preservation as an organization ended in 2015. The importance of its programs relating to conservation, preservation, and care of collections in the United States was made manifest by the fact that many of its programs were adopted by the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works [AIC] or by FEMA.”

 

Here are some of Larry’s precepts that he brought to his quarter-of-a-century leadership of NIC/Heritage Preservation, based on his 2012 FAIC Oral history interviews:

 

My measuring stick is in 5, 10, 15, 20 years, will people say, “It was much, much better to have done it than not to have done it.” Not that they will they say, “It was perfect.” That’s not achievable.

 

The thing we have to realize is that for emergency managers and first responders, it’s going to take real work to get their attention. We should not ask for too much of their attention because, to be honest with you, people come first, and that has to be their major focus. But if you can bring them into a museum or library or archive, they love it because— if you don’t ask for too much of their time-- it’s fascinating. They go to schools, they go to hospitals, you know, they go to businesses. But you take them behind the scenes and it’s interesting to them. But it’s not easy because it’s not really on their radar and they have such significant responsibilities that we have to be careful how much of them we ask. It’s a process; slowly Alliance for Response is forming these metropolitan and state networks and hopefully regional, at some point. I think we’ve got 17 of them now. Slowly those are growing. And it’s like with a lot of stuff we do, some are more active than others and then active ones sometimes become less active and the less active become more active.

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One goal focused around the initiative of the last director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services called “Connecting the Collections.” This really, as far as I know, is the most robust program to promote the importance of conservation and collections care in museums, libraries, and archives. Several millions of dollars were invested in this.

 

Another goal: cultivate knowledge of the importance of saving our cultural and historic heritage collections among policy makers, administrators, the media and the public. The Heritage Health Index has made a very important, and I hope significant, impact on the importance of conservation and collections care. It’s the first time that there is statistically valid information on the condition of collections. Again, as with Save Outdoor Sculpture, when we have the volunteers do it, we had a very simple condition assessment, but we also had conservators go out and test it, and they said what they did was good.

 

We’ve got to find ways to convince people that people with means or access to means, if you can end up showing this incredibly well-put-together storage area and their name is on it, and you have something which you can show, whether it’s a plaque, whether it’s a tiny, little exhibition or whatever, or whether it’s a big exhibition for a while about what you had to do, I think it’s as compelling as anything else you have to say.

 

Collections care has got to be viewed as an important resource. I want to make sure that I do not only talk about funding. We have this brochure called “Capitalize on Collections Care,” which has examples. One of my favorites is this poster: “At least somebody’s running a clean campaign this fall.”

 

You know, you ask museum directors and—the Librarian of Congress-- at Dianne van der Reyden’s retirement, said “What’s the most interesting to do when we want to show people the library? Look at the conservation lab and the science lab.”

 

Leadership has got to come from the conservation community, and it has to come from without the conservation community. (Larry Reger with Anne Kingery-Schwartz March 30, 2012)