The Middletown Springs Historical Society Museum Open House on Sunday, Oct. 5, 1-4 pm will feature a slide lecture by textile conservator Michele Pagan on the conservation process that she used in a ten-year-long project to restore the Vermont State Civil War flag collection.
The Open House includes tours of the Society’s Collection Storage areas and demonstrations of how artifacts are conserved, accessioned, stored and maintained. Refreshments will be served before Michele’s 2:00 pm presentation.
The Civil War flag collection, owned by the State of Vermont, has been exhibited in a glass display case in the State Capitol building in Montpelier for about a hundred years. Damage done over this period by light, humidity, insects and poor display practice was significant. Michele will be recounting the process of removing these flags from exhibit, their conservation treatment, and their transfer to a new storage facility at the Vermont Historical Society History Center in Barre.
Michele is a native Vermonter, who grew up in Bennington and Rutland. She began her career working at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, then successively worked for the U.S. Department of State, the Vermont Museum & Gallery Alliance (VMGA), the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and the Smithsonian's Museum of American History. She presently holds a Research Associate affiliation at the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute, researching the use of microfiber cloths for cleaning fragile artifact surfaces.
She is a textile conservator in private practice, working in both Washington, D.C. and Brookfield Vt., where she and her husband, John, have homes.
She first became acquainted with the Middletown Springs Historical Society in the mid-1990s, when she gave Vermont Museum & Gallery Alliance Collections Care workshops and trainings for volunteers from MSHS and other area historical societies .
The meeting is free and accessible to people with disabilities.
For more information, Call David Wright at 235-2376.
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