Introduction: Collection Care Initiatives
Elaine D. Gustafson, Curator of Collections and Head of Facilities, Weatherspoon Art Museum
Founded in 1941, the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro boasts holdings of nearly 7,000 works of modern and contemporary art that address innumerable topical and historical issues that connect to and engage diverse audiences. Although the care of the collection has always been a focal point for museum staff, not all the objects are in exhibition-ready condition, complicating our mission to tell inclusive and expansive stories of American art. Indeed, it soon became apparent when organizing Making Room: Familiar Art, New Stories that discrepancies between representation in the collection and visibility in the galleries were arising due to the physical condition of some artworks. For example, the museum owns an iconic light-based sculpture titled Clavero (1968) (see fig. 4.4 in Choi’s essay below), by the innovative, community-engaged artist Tom Lloyd, that has been exhibited only twice since its acquisition in 1981 (most recently in 1988). By way of comparison, Dan Flavin’s Untitled (to Frank Stella) (1966), acquired by the Weatherspoon in 1992, has been included in twelve installations (most recently in 2018). We found that Clavero’s wiring had degraded over time and many of its lightbulbs no longer functioned. The sculpture needed specialized electronic repairs before it could be put on display and thus spent over a year at a conservation lab in New York. Connie Choi’s ensuing essay details its conservation and Lloyd’s significance in the history of American art.
Likewise, a painting by Peter Bradley, another artist who had been overlooked in the canon of American art but is now receiving renewed interest, was conserved for inclusion in the exhibition. Bradley curated the first racially integrated exhibition of abstract art in the United States—The De Luxe Show—in 1971 in Houston, Texas. His exhibition, held in a defunct movie theater, succeeded in bringing art that normally would have been shown in a museum setting directly to people who might otherwise never have experienced it. His abstract painting, Shamp 4 (1976) (fig. 4.1), entered the Weatherspoon’s collection soon after its completion but had never been on view due to several black, wound-like fissures that had appeared over time in its top layer of paint. These splits most likely occurred because the artist applied a different, more quickly drying paint over underlying “uncured” paint. In 2022, in preparation for Making Room, conservator Ruth Cox addressed the incompatibility of the two paint types and diminished the visual fissures so that the work could at last be shared publicly.
Cox also treated the recently purchased painting by Roger Shimomura, Dress Rehearsal (2012) (fig. 4.2), to remove indentations and dirt smudges from its surface, thereby eliminating any visual distractions from the compelling story it recounts.
Lastly, the museum’s preparators remounted and reframed Elizabeth Talford Scott’s fiber artwork Knots and Snakes (1982) (fig. 4.3) to better preserve it for the long term.
This conservation work, of course, demonstrates that the Weatherspoon cares—the overarching theme of Making Room: Familiar Art, New Stories. It cares for and about its collection. It cares about expanding visibility and representation in its holdings as well as broadening the dominant narratives of American art. And it cares about displaying artworks that reflect and engage a multitude of visitors. The curatorial team will continue to mine and assess the physical condition of the collection as it organizes exhibitions that provide as diverse a platform for community engagement as possible.
Tom Lloyd, Clavero
Connie H. Choi, Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem
Between 1965 and 1968, a period of intense civil rights and art world activism, Tom Lloyd (1929–1996) created complex electronically programmed sculptures like Clavero (fig. 4.4) that demonstrated his commitment to both abstraction and Black communities. Deriving from his abiding interest in light and technology, the works that Lloyd produced during this four-year period mark an important moment of artistic experimentation for both the artist himself and the art world at large, one that has gone largely unacknowledged in the nearly six decades since. With their forms and flashing lights based on the geometries and sights of the city as seen in street signs and theatre marquees, Lloyd’s sculptures celebrate the richness of the contemporary moment and his largely Black neighborhood of Jamaica in Queens, New York. While his works were exhibited in the 1960s alongside those of artists such as Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin, Lloyd never achieved the same level of success as his white peers and passed away three decades later without an estate to carry on his legacy. Although information about Lloyd’s artistic practice remains scarce, the recent conservation of Clavero has contributed to a slowly growing body of knowledge, ensuring that the contributions of this underrecognized artist become an integral chapter in the story of art made in the United States.
Lloyd began working with Alan Sussman,1 an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), around 1965. The 1960s saw many major collaborations of this sort between artists and engineers, most notably via Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization founded in 1966 by the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and the engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer. While E.A.T.’s significance to the arts has long been established, the fruitful partnership between Lloyd and Sussman, who bonded over their shared enthusiasm for light technology and the beauty of everyday materials, has only recently begun to be understood. Their meeting was fortuitous, as Lloyd had been interested in creating works using light but did not have the engineering knowledge to execute his ideas. He conceived the forms of the sculptures and designed the light programs, while Sussman and his RCA colleagues constructed the bodies and configured the internal mechanicals. Lloyd and Sussman’s collaboration on the electronically programmed sculptures—and the involvement of staff at RCA in their construction—represents a significant and overlooked contribution to the field of light art and a rare-for-the-time friendship between a Black artist and a white engineer.
The remarkable partnership between Lloyd and Sussman, which produced dozens of works in a relatively short time span, demonstrates how unusual yet generative the relationship between artist, engineer, and engineering research laboratory can be. One benefit of investing in conservation, and the research that comes from it, is a greater understanding of the time, logistics, and experimentation that goes into producing art. The conservation process for Lloyd’s works, like the one undertaken by the Weatherspoon with Clavero, has revealed the elaborate and technologically advanced thinking behind their creation. In demystifying how these sculptures were constructed and emphasizing their singularity, conservation helps broaden the canon of art history to encompass Black artistic innovation and creativity.
Lloyd’s sculptures were additionally unique for their time because they did not readily fit into the narrow existing definition of “Black art,” which generally assumed a figurative, representational style that clearly identified the artist as Black.2 With their geometric shapes, flashing lights, and incorporation of mass-produced materials such as incandescent Christmas light bulbs and Buick back-up light lenses, these works defied easy categorization and interpretation. Lloyd, however, insisted on the relationship of his sculptures to the Black communities to which he was so devoted, feeling that Black viewers brought an innate understanding to their experience of his works. Lloyd’s dedication to Black audiences, and especially those in Jamaica, Queens, would result in his founding of the community-centered Store Front Museum in 1971 to provide access to the arts and other cultural opportunities for people of all ages. His electronically programmed sculptures (made just a few years before this), then, can also be framed according to the ways Lloyd emphasized participation and engagement. In particular, one contemporaneous body of electronically programmed work, believed no longer extant, allowed visitors to interact with each sculpture to determine its program of lights. While these works, made around the same time as Clavero, have not been located, they suggest Lloyd’s overall commitment to both participatory practices and Black audiences, adding another dimension to the artist’s forward-thinking practice.
Given his commitment to those communities, which have historically lacked pathways to the arts, Lloyd’s interest in the mass-produced and easily accessible is particularly noteworthy. His works offer a compelling study of the 1960s, encapsulating the moment by utilizing the technologies and products of the time. Time-based media works such as Clavero, however, are inherently unstable, especially as their technology becomes obsolete and the production of certain materials ceases. While Lloyd used items that were once readily available, many of the original parts that comprise his sculptures can now only be sourced from the secondary market—not from the companies that originally produced them—creating a scarcity of materials with which to replace lost or damaged components. Through the research that results from conservation efforts, then, museums, scholars, and the general public can better understand how to ensure the continued activation of time-based media works without jeopardizing the artist’s intent or compromising the integrity of the objects. Lloyd’s sculptures play an important part in expanding understanding of the field of time-based media in the mid-20th century.
Clavero is one of the last electronically programmed sculptures that Lloyd made, and its complexity in comparison to such earlier works as Narokan (1965), in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, is noticeable in both its size and its internal mechanicals (fig. 4.5).
The gradual increase in scale and technological experimentation over the four years these works were produced speaks to Lloyd’s deep commitment to pushing his practice and, whether intentional or not, furthering the possibilities of light within art. No other known Black artist of his generation worked with light to the degree and level of technical mastery that he did. The conservation of Clavero ensures that knowledge of Lloyd’s groundbreaking practice will be preserved for future generations, continuing the commitment to access and audiences embodied in the works.
