Dale Kronkright, head of conservation for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, inspects O’Keeffe’s oil on canvas painting Back of Marie’s No. 4 (painted in 1931) for damages and cracks Friday afternoon. Using infrared photography and digital software and pinpointing vibration as the main factor in damaged paintings Kronkright is in the final stages of development of a next-generation transportation crate for fine art.

Kronkright’s Alpha case at the Polytec testing facility in Dexter, Mich.

Dale Kronkright, head of conservation for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, inspects O’Keeffe’s oil on canvas painting Back of Marie’s No. 4 (painted in 1931) for damages and cracks Friday afternoon. Using infrared photography and digital software and pinpointing vibration as the main factor in damaged paintings Kronkright is in the final stages of development of a next-generation transportation crate for fine art.

Space age and farm age engineers have been teaming up with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to create a next-generation transportation crate for fine art as it travels the world.

Art is transported to places like New York, London, Cairo and Shanghai via old-school cushioned wood crates, said Dale Kronkright, the O’Keeffe Museum’s head of conservation.

That’s how Kronkright does it with the roughly 100 O’Keeffe works typically on the road. That’s how he did it on a tour to Europe with 80 O’Keeffe works in 2011.

“When I got the show back to here, I noticed about eight paintings were developing new cracks [in the paint] or existing cracks got bigger,” Kronkright said. “I was with them at every point of transport. I know none of them had been dropped or suffered a collision or had experienced temperature or humidity extremes. If they didn’t get mishandled, where did the cracks come from?”

Using infrared photography and digital software, Kronkright determined that vibrations were the culprit. The art industry ships art works protected against shock but not vibration, especially vibrations in trucks, he said.

“I knew we had to do something better,” Kronkright said. “Wood crates make vibrations worse. Strapping the art to the truck would be better.”

Kronkright’s Alpha case at the Polytec testing facility in Dexter, Mich.

Ten years and two patents later with a third patent pending, Kronkright might be within a year of having the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum art transport system ready for museum use to ship art to and from other museums — and potentially create a cottage industry.

Kronkright demonstrated the alpha model of the transport system in New York City in 2018 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., the corporate home of Walmart.

“There appears to be pretty good interest from museums around the world,” he said. The royalty potentials for the O’Keeffe Museum “are substantial, in the seven digits.”

Ten years ago, Kronkright was entirely focused on protecting the 3,000 O’Keeffe paintings in the museum’s custody.

“I would say we could have a working beta model in 12 months,” Kronkright said. “If it tests out, we will use those [crates] for our own collection.”

But he is well aware that other museums may come knocking. He wants to get ready for much higher demand than the number of transport systems the O’Keeffe Museum would need.

“We would have to partner with someone for the production,” he said. “We need manufacturing capacity.”

The museum has produced four alpha models of the box-within-a-box concept Kronkright developed with a team of retired vibration engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and John Deere agriculture machinery manufacturer.

Right now, Kronkright is lab-testing a beta model. A road test will follow with inconsequential art transported on trucks and planes. This will determine if vibrations of art works are successfully dampened.

Kronkright determined paintings are most vulnerable when vibrating between 10 and 50 hertz (cycles per second), noting humans start hearing vibrations at about 200 hertz. Kronkright also determined that paintings in trucks vibrate in “double drum mode,” meaning one half of a painting can vibrate at a different rate than the other half.

“Trucks vibrate at 10 to 60 hertz,” he said. “It literally could not be worse for paintings. Trucks vibrate at exactly the wrong range. Airplanes vibrate at 200 to 1,000 hertz.”

Kronkright’s ambition for a decade has been to create a transport container that could dampen vibrations to 5 hertz.

The research has led to the museum receiving a first patent to dampen the vibration in the picture frame, and just this month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a second patent for vibration damping in the transport container. A third patent is pending that deals with the vibrations in the corners that hold the painting in place.

What Kronkright has created is an 80-by-80-inch “super rigid” weatherproof outer container that is 35 inches deep, able to transport four to six paintings up to four feet in size. The art is secured in an inner box.

The inner box is fastened to the outer box with eight vibration isolators, which Kronkright describes as shock absorbers. These can be “tuned” to a desired hertz level, which Kronkright sees as 5 hertz.

Kronkright describes his day-to-day job thusly: “I try and keep things from falling apart and put them back together when they do. I study the physical and mechanical properties to understand what can damage art.”

He said big museums have many artists and many artworks to choose from if individual pieces get broken. He said the O’Keeffe is limited to one artist and 3,000 works.

“The board’s mission is anything you can do to prevent damage to our collection means our museum will be more successful into the future,” Kronkright said. “Here’s what I said to the board [11 years ago]: Every object in our collection has a vibration lifetime before it starts to break apart. If we can cut the vibrations in half, we can double its life.”

He said about $1 million has been spent to develop the transportation system.

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