AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

In October 2023, conservators from Jablonski Building Conservation (JBC) performed a uniquely challenging paint stabilization treatment to preserve prisoner graffiti on thickly layered, severely distorted architectural paint applied to the brick and plaster walls of the Burlington County Prison Museum in Mt. Holly, New Jersey. The prison was completed around 1811 and was in continual use until 1965, with cell walls covered in 50-100+ layers of accumulated whitewash, distemper, and oil paints. Temperature and humidity fluctuations, water infiltration, changes in use, and structural repairs have culminated in the loss, deterioration, and distortion of much of the site’s intriguing and extensive prisoner graffiti on the dense paint finishes.

Guidance and research on flattening is widely available for other media such as paper, painted artworks, and decorative arts, but is almost nonexistent for architectural paint – particularly in a vernacular and arrested decay setting such as at the Burlington County Prison Museum. So, to improve legibility and increase surface area for securing paint fragments to the walls, JBC drew on techniques used in paper, paintings, and objects conservation by using heat, humidity and pressure to relax the most severely curled paint fragments. This unconventional treatment approach devised by JBC for the Burlington County Prison Museum exemplifies the value of leveraging techniques and knowledge from other disciplines, while amplifying the unique challenges of performing conservation treatments on architectural finishes in an uncontrolled environment.   

This presentation will elaborate on JBC’s approach, techniques, challenges, and results of the paint and graffiti preservation campaign at Burlington County Prison Museum and invite a broader discussion across disciplines about existing research, techniques, and case studies that could help inform similar architectural finishes conservation projects and research in the future.