Building Challenges and Sustainable Successes with The George Eastman Museum

In this episode, Lindsey speaks with Deb and Emily from the George Eastman Museum about the various ways they’ve approached their collections’ storage and exhibition spaces through evolving sustainable paradigms. These choices involved more labor especially at the beginning but they found that the payoffs continued to be beneficial over many years.

Buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of total global direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions. Those from the cultural heritage sector may even contribute significantly more due to the rigid parameters required to maintain and preserve fragile media. These buildings are the first layer of protection for the collections’ against natural annual fluctuations and the more intense climate-based disasters that impact our communities.

Deb focuses on the immense challenge that is the storage and energy consumption for maintaining safe temperature and humidity for fragile photographic media. Instead of continuing to struggle with a persistently failing HVAC, the Museum decided it was worth embarking on a renovation that ultimately solved more than one issue and allowed them to expand their holdings.

Emily talks about the small but impactful changes made by the conservation lab staff and exhibitions teams to save time, money, energy, and ultimately benefit the long term preservation of the photographic and paper-based collections. She specifically highlights the challenge of the historic property where the collection is often exhibited and how it creates parameters for what choices can be made.

For a similar discussion see S1 E11 Building Building Relationships with Adrienne Bell.

Resources:

1. https://www.eastman.org
2. https://www.eastman.org/restoration-construction
3. https://www.eastman.org/conservation
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlPrvusXOI4
5. https://www.eastman.org/george-eastman-museum-receives-340615-grant-national-endowment-humanities
6. https://www.stantec.com/en/markets/buildings
7. https://connectingtocollections.org/exhibiting_photographs/
8. https://www.frankenthalerclimateinitiative.org/2024-implementation/george-eastman-museum
9. https://www.frankenthalerclimateinitiative.org/2025-implementation/eastman