My husband and I had the pleasure of visiting our daughter, at the
beginning of May, who is doing a Textile Conservation fellowship at the
Smithsonian Steven F. Udvar-Hazy
Center, also called the Hazy Center for short. It is the Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum (NASM)'s annex at Washington
Dulles International Airport in the Chantilly area of Fairfax County, Virginia. It holds numerous exhibits,
including the Space Shuttle Discovery, the Enola Gay,
and the Boeing 367-80, the main prototype for the popular Boeing
707 airliner. Whereas the
downtown NASM contains many smaller artifacts, the Hazy center contains huge
artifacts unable to be displayed in the downtown facility.
Because she is doing a fellowship
at the Hazy Center, we were able to have a behind the scene tour of the conservation
lab and some items that are undergoing conservation treatments. Unfortunately, we were unable to take any
photos without having permission to post them.
Our daughter’s specialty is Textile conservation which entails preservation
treatments of artifacts to stabilize or reverse adverse effects due to previous non-optimal
storage or display techniques. Her skill
set to preserve an item can involve sewing a new cover, repackaging an item
using archival materials that contain no acid or other harmful chemicals,
analysis of artifacts using spectroscopy or FTIR equipment to determine composition,
or application of special textiles that will not interact with the artifact and which
can be painted to appear as if the artifact is in perfect condition. All
treatments must be reversible and carefully documented so that they can be “undone”
if at a future time current acceptable techniques are found to be unacceptable. She has been involved in making a seat cover
for the Spirit of St. Louis, stabilizing a cloth covered wooden propeller
designed and built by Samuel Langley (a contemporary of the Wright Brothers)
and researching, documenting, and preserving a section of a Civil War Air Balloon
made from silk fabric used in women’s clothing but treated with some kind of coating. The project she is most looking forward to is
assisting with the stabilization and construction of a mannequin for a training
spacesuit worn by Yuri Gagarin.
We spent well over four hours at the Hazy center and still could have spent more time. There was so much to see and admire. My favorite artifacts was those in the Space area, as a kid I dreamed I would be an astronaut. Although that did not happen, I can admire the technological changes and look in awe at what those astronauts relied on.
We also got to visit the African American Museum due to extremely rainy weather while in the area. Again another tour of 3 to 4 hours and not enough time to see all.
If you are ever in the DC area check out every and all museums (if possible) and realize there is someone behind the scenes making your visit and the display of artifacts the best that it can be. They are preserving history for all of us.
