My middle kid is finishing college in Cedar Rapids this summer. She walked at graduation in May, but she has one more class to do, so she’s staying out there. All semester, and still this summer until the grant hours run out, she has been working at the Art Museum, helping to set up the new storage system in the lower level of the museum. She and her boss gave us a tour when were there for her graduation. They finally have a place where they can keep the whole collection in one place, instead of having it scattered around in outlying storage. The system has really neat movable (electrically controlled) modules with shelves or grids to keep everything in place, out of the old-fashioned wooden shelves where they had to be stacked against each other and such. They were so excited showing it to us, and so happy to have it done.
And tonight she was almost in tears when I talked to her. Heartsick was what she said. They were only able to get about half of the things out of the storage system before they were forced to leave, by rising water. They prioritized, of course, taking the most valuable, the most vulnerable, the most important, first, but still, there are things stuck down there in that nasty filthy water. All that work this spring, and now a lot of it will have to be redone, and some of the collection will surely be completely destroyed.
The good thing is that one of the museum workers has a son who happened to be hosting a poker night, so they ended up with about twelve high school boys in a line passing pieces up out of danger. It was good of them to help.
I know that in the larger picture these are only things, and this can’t compare to losses of people’s houses and lives, but it hurts me to know she’s out there where I can’t give her a hug.
I’m sure she’ll be safe, herself, as the school is way up on a hill, but those pictures are so scary. So many people will be in such bad shape for quite a while there. She had to go pick up a friend of hers earlier today, after friend tried to drive through water in the street. It was deep enough that she couldn’t open the car doors. Fortunately there were couple of guys around who pushed the car off into a parking lot, where friend could get out and wade to where Fair was waiting.
They were lucky indeed that those boys were there to help and that some of the collection was salvaged. I hope that the remainder can be recovered and restored.
This reminds me of the position that researchers at Tulane were caught in. One researcher had a lifetime’s worth of tissue samples in a freezer. Then Katrina put the lights out and he lost all those years of work.
It’s a varied collection of paintings, sculpture, fabric items, some furniture, carved wood items, all the things the museum rotates in and out of its displays. They have a large number of prints, dating from the fifteenth century forward, American artists and others like Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt. Their foremost focus is on native Iowan artists, so they have an impressive collection of Grant Wood, not all of which can be displayed at any one time. As with most smaller museums, money is kind of tight, but with this grant they had finally been able to get everything sorted, catalogued, and put into archival, safe storage. The actual galleries should be safe, but this was the basement level.
The storage modules run on tracks in the floor, but by the end of the time last night the water was over their ankles, so they didn’t want to use the backup battery system to run them. Probably not a good idea to run electric current through the water you’re standing in.
And to make matters worse, this morning she missed a step on the stairs in her dorm, as she headed out to help some more, and twisted her ankle, probably sprained it. This just isn’t her week. She made me promise I wouldn’t drive out there.
