By Carol Chmelynski
8/3/04 - It must have felt like striking oil twice - on two different homesteads - for the Philadelphia school system's chief executive, Paul Vallas, and his chief of staff Natalye Paquin.
Both worked for the Chicago school system when a wealth of art treasures worth some $20 million was discovered in school hallways and in storage throughout the district, and now a similar windfall has been found in Philadelphia's cash-strapped public schools.
Meanwhile, similar efforts to unearth valuable artworks are under way in other cities, including Los Angeles, Boston, and Pittsburgh.
In Philadelphia, 1,200 original works of art have been discovered in the basements, boiler rooms, closets, hallways, offices, and classrooms of the city's 264 public schools.
Among the artworks are paintings, sketches, sculptures, murals, tapestries, and ancient artifacts, including more than 100 pieces considered to be of museum quality. Many were produced in the 1900s.
District spokesperson Fernando Gallard says the value of the works has not been assessed, but media reports estimate the collection could be worth as much as $30 million.
"It's fantastic," Gallard says. "It's great for the district; it's great for the students. Hopefully, we'll be able to preserve it and use it as part of an art curriculum - that's the goal."
The findings include two portraits, both of school principals, by the American realist Thomas Eakins and the African-American modernist Henry Ossawa Tanner. Among the other treasures are watercolors by Paul Remy and landscape and wilderness scenes by Pennsylvania impressionists Edward Redfield, Walter Emerson Baum, and Henry Snell.
"To find a half-million-dollar portrait [by Eakins] propped next to a boiler is pretty remarkable," art consultant Kathleen Bernhardt-Hidvegi told the Los Angeles Times. She led a team that spent six months searching for artworks in Philadelphia schools.
"Rarely is such a vast collection of artwork, one that includes so many pieces by important American artists . . . found in a network of buildings within a single public institution," states a report by Bernhardt-Hidvegi's firm, Corporate Art Source. "If only 10 percent of the works are historically significant or of very high quality, then those pieces alone are enough to make this one of the most remarkable discoveries of artwork in recent history."
Many of the works were gifts from graduating classes or were collected by principals over the years. When walls were painted or buildings reconstructed, some of the paintings were packed away in storage and forgotten for decades.
"At this point, we are in the process of putting together a committee that will help us find out what we can do with this collection," Gallard says. District officials need to figure out which pieces can be restored and what to do with the pieces it can't afford to repair.
Some of the artworks are still in schools. Damaged pieces were removed, as were pieces that needed to be relocated because they could be harmed by the sun or stolen, he says.
Many of the pieces are severely damaged - they've been exposed to dirt and water, have holes, and lost paint - from being in dank basements and dusty storage rooms for so many years, but they can all be restored, Gallard says.
It cost $3 million to $4 million to restore the artwork in Chicago public schools, Paquin says. Philadelphia has much more art, so its restoration project will be larger.
"In Chicago, the essence of the collection was murals, which are different from restoring paintings, so comparisons really can't be made, but the cost will be sizable," she says.
Gallard says an arts advisory council, made up of art professionals in the region, has been charged with coming up with ideas to help pay for the restoration. Possible ideas for generating revenue include publishing a book, producing cards or a calendar featuring the artworks, leasing the pieces to a museum, creating a traveling show, and opening a gallery and charging admission.
"The School Reform Commission (SRC) will have the final say of what's to be done with this collection," Gallard says. Paquin says she has not heard of any "interest or desire to sell any piece of the collection," but SRC Chair James Nevels says the commission has not ruled out selling some of the pieces.
In Los Angeles, school district officials recently completed a four-year inventory of the art and artifact collection, says Richard Burrows, director of arts education.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has about 85,000 art objects, including 35,000 photographs, paintings, murals, historical artifacts, architectural features, and rare books estimated to be worth $30 million to $40 million, he says.
The city's Cultural Affairs Department hasn't completed a formal appraisal yet, so "any estimates that we have are based on comparisons to similar collections," says Leslie Fischer, the school district's art consultant.
The district plans to use the art collection for instructional purposes, she says, and also plans to reach out to the city's arts community and share resources and information with art historians and museum professionals.
"We have information that's of use to people studying the history of education, the history of Los Angeles, and the history of California," Fischer says.
One of the first things the district will do is scan and digitize the objects and display them on its website, so they can be used as a resource tool for students, teachers, and the public, Burrows adds.
In Boston, the mayor's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs earlier this year began inventorying all the art inside and outside of city-owned buildings, including the public schools, says Sarah Hutt, director of public art for the city of Boston.
"It's a very daunting task," she says. "There's so much art," and the last time an inventory was done, in the 1980s, computers weren't used. So far, six schools have been examined, and 700 pieces recorded.
In Pittsburgh, a project to bring the art inventory up to date was sparked by the district's plan to close 10 schools and consolidate others, says Cornelia Davis, the district's program officer for arts and humanities.
Every year since 1916, the Pittsburgh Association of Artists presented gifts to schools, she says. "We are finding some pieces that have been put aside in dark corners, and we're just delighted."
"I wish I could tell you how much the collection is worth," she says, "but at this point I could only guess several million dollars."