Preservation Projects
The Preservation initiative supports the documentation, conservation, and responsible continuity of culturally significant artworks, archives, records, buildings, sites, publications, and forms of material knowledge.
Preservation is understood as an active process requiring documentation, interpretation, technical care, access planning, and clearly assigned responsibility. Protecting a material object without preserving its authorship, provenance, context, or conditions of production may leave only a partial historical record.
Projects may involve archival assessment, cataloguing, conservation planning, digitization, oral history, emergency documentation, publication, collection stabilization, site research, or the development of long-term custodial arrangements.
Areas of Preservation
The Foundation may participate in projects involving:
Artist and organizational archives
Vulnerable working materials and production records
Photographic and audiovisual collections
Publications, printed matter, and cultural ephemera
Significant artworks or coherent bodies of work
Public artworks and monuments
Historic sites connected to artistic or cultural production
Traditional techniques, fabrication knowledge, and material processes
Digitally created records requiring migration or stable deposit
Collections lacking adequate description, provenance, or custodial planning
Projects are evaluated according to significance, urgency, evidentiary value, feasibility, public benefit, and the availability of an appropriate long-term custodian.
Preservation Planning
Preservation begins with assessment. Before undertaking or supporting a project, the Foundation seeks to understand the material’s ownership, physical condition, rights status, documentation, cultural context, existing risks, and anticipated future use.
A preservation plan may identify priorities for stabilization, cataloguing, conservation, digitization, storage, access, publication, or transfer. Not every project requires acquisition by the Foundation. In many cases, the most responsible outcome may be to strengthen the capacity of the existing owner or identify another institution better positioned to provide permanent care.
Documentation created through a preservation project may include inventories, condition reports, provenance records, oral histories, technical specifications, conservation files, photography, digital surrogates, and recommendations for future stewardship.
Project Support & Future Grantmaking
Preservation projects may be supported through institutional partnerships, restricted gifts, project grants, sponsorship, donated professional services, or collaborative funding arrangements. Contributions may support assessment, conservation, digitization, documentation, storage, publication, interpretation, or the establishment of a long-term care reserve.
The Foundation may in the future administer project grants or regrant funds received for a defined preservation purpose. No open preservation grant program is currently active. Any future funding opportunity will be governed by published eligibility requirements, an independent or appropriately constituted review process, conflict-of-interest safeguards, written grant agreements, reporting obligations, and procedures for documenting the use of charitable funds.
The Foundation does not accept responsibility for a collection, site, monument, or conservation project without a written agreement defining ownership, authority, scope, costs, rights, access conditions, and long-term custodial responsibility.
Preservation project inquiries:
foundation@erikbrunettifoundation.org