To Protect and to Preserve

During the Jan. 17 earthquake, art collections all over the Southland trembled, and many fell. But not those belonging to designer Joseph Terrell, whose Los Angeles firm, Alcasar Terrell Environmental Design Group, specializes in assembling, displaying and seismically preserving artwork for museums, commercial institutions and private homes. To date, he has 142 art installations to his credit.

The idea of protecting artwork brings to mind unsightly brackets and heavy-duty wires, but the best secured-art installations use a variety of custom mounts, adhesives and monofilaments, all nearly invisible, Terrell says. His own Hancock Park atelier, filled with personal collections of Native American and contemporary art, illustrates how.

Paintings by Josh Stabalito and Lujan Ray in the living and dining rooms are cleat-mounted. This involves two 45-degree, bevel-cut wood bars, one piece mounted into a wall stud, the other affixed to the back of a painting. When the painting is hung, the bars slip inside one another and lock together. Mexican and South American retablos on the fireplace are attached to the mantel with Quake Hold!, a white waxy material that comes in small sheets. Pea-size balls of the nontoxic adhesive are placed on the bottom of an object that is then pressed and slightly swiveled into place. “It’s an easy way to keep things from walking off the edge,” says Terrell, who uses the material on lightweight objects such as the 20th-Century Tlinglit and Haida totems atop a bedroom entertainment cabinet.

A specially fabricated beveled shelf is mounted into a wall stud to support the 18th-Century French hurdy-gurdy next to the fireplace; Quake Hold! fastens the instrument to its wrought-iron display base. In the master bedroom, prehistoric Anasazi ceramic bowls wear small felt pads that prevent them from sliding off and scratching nesting tables. And in daughter Miro’s bedroom, a turn-of-the-century tonsu chest is wired to drywall screws to keep the chest and its contents--prehistoric and Pueblo ceramics, Yokuts and Miwok baskets and art books--from tumbling down.

Not everything has been immobilized, however. Navajo rugs are left to lean or tumble of their own accord. A turn-of-the-century Bolivian crucifix hangs from a yellow shoestring wrapped around a drywall screw, so it swings but doesn’t fall. And a Manuel Jimenez wooden toy, called “The Boxers,” remains free-standing. As Terrell explains: “I like to play with it.”