A proper environment

Museum curators know a lot about the environment. Not the big, global warming, ice caps melting, Al Gore, carbon dioxide kind of environment. I mean smaller environments, like the climate within their museum. A curator’s job is to keep their artifacts in as tip top shape as humanly possible for this generation, the next, and a few more to come. The environment we create and control in the museum will either protect or destroy that artifact. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but, if you’ll pardon the cliché, definitely for the rest of its life. And like a lot of people, a collection needs stability and comfort more than anything.

A few years ago I worked as the first and only staff member of a brand new museum. My collections storage facility was in the back of an old firehouse, and the environment was horrible. See, a clean room at sixty-five degrees and fifty-five percent relatively humidity is a pretty comfortable environment for most artifacts. My firehouse was dirty, temperatures plummeted down to forty in the winter, and soared to ninety in the summer. Our valuable collection sat there freezing one season and baking the next, and without insulation or air conditioning in my dusty old building I could do very little to affect my environment.

I’ve been thinking a lot about environments lately. It’s been eight years since I started my first museum job. That job led me to graduate school, different jobs in different towns, and a lot of different people. And nothing shapes your environment like the people around you. The stability and comfort of your friends and coworkers goes far to making a person happy. But when your environment changes too much, too frequently, it can be toxic.

Unfortunately, like my poor, vulnerable collection in the back of that firehouse, my most recent museum job was in a very harsh environment. Staff cut each other down, shut the door on new ideas, and fought constantly. My environment was toxic, and I had to leave it. And now I have to consider yet another change in my environment, more new people, and new adjustments. But just like me, a museum collection can react badly when you move it. See, collections get used to their environment, and though it may be toxic, artifacts learn to breathe with the changes. Uprooting from one extreme and placing them in another shocks them, and they can easily break in the process.

I don’t think I’m ready to leave my environment yet. There’s an element of comfort, even in bad times. I’ve learned to breathe with the changes. My environment may not be sixty-five degrees or have fifty-five percent relative humidity, but it does have one important factor – stability and comfort. Right now, that’s more important than anything.