When there's even a light breeze, Jean d’Aire and Andrieu d’Andres get soaked by the Rainbirds.
Two of Auguste Rodin’s six Burghers of Calais, the bronze figures stand particularly close to in-ground irrigation nozzles in Memorial Court. When the wind in the Quad shifts and whips the spray around, the two gentlemen get an extra rinse.
“Look at the back of this guy,” Asa Mittman says, pointing to a mostly shiny calf. “The trouble is that the sprinkler’s mineral deposits don’t really come off unless you heat and re-form the protective wax.”
As head of the three-member outdoor sculpture maintenance crew, Mittman is a master of nonionic detergents and chelating solutions. A graduate student in art history, he has been cleaning and helping to protect the University’s collection of more than 100 outdoor artworks for three years. Mittman keeps an eye out for damage to stainless-steel pieces like Alexander Calder’s The Falcon, which is a frequent “hole” for frisbee-golf tournaments. And he knows when someone has tried to crab-walk up the inside of Richard Serra’s concave Call Me Ishmael: “It’s made of Cor-Ten steel, which may look impervious but is really extremely delicate and takes impressions very easily. It will hold a foot stripe for years, until the corrosion process slowly takes over.”
As Mittman and fellow PhD student Hsuan Tsen toweled off the Burghers on a recent morning and wrapped them in blankets to guard against airborne abrasives from nearby construction work, passersby kept stopping to ask questions. The pair handed out campus maps of outdoor sculptures and kept up a running commentary about the various paste waxes and coatings they use to repel moisture, insects, pollen, dirt and oil from visitors’ hands.
While errant frisbees leave plastic smudges in their wake, iron lawnmower blades and weed whackers can “seed” stainless-steel sculptures, permitting rust to take hold. So along with the hoses, solvents and ladders packed in their orange electric cart, the students also carry clippers to do on-the-spot preventive trimming when they see grass sprouting up.
“Our students understand the problems from close up, and they also come to have particular favorites,” says Susan Roberts-Manganelli, manager of collections, exhibitions and conservation at the Cantor Arts Center and supervisor of the maintenance crew. She recalls the year of the gypsy-moth infestation in the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden next to Roble Hall, when she and crew members used tweezers to pick buckets of caterpillars out of carved eye sockets and mouths. “A student who lived in Roble would go out each night and pull the worms off ‘her’ sculptures,” Roberts-Manganelli says. “That was a real labor of love.”
