Visual Art Safety
Mission Statement
This is the beginning of a new and better way of providing information to faculty, staff and students in the Arts. This page will be the start of an entire network of important health and safety information which will provide long, fruitful, healthy careers for all those gifted people who create the images which life more interesting, more fun, more meaningful.
Resources
Concentrations
Focus on Fixatives!
Workable and permanent fixatives are a bigtime hazard in this department. You will find them anywhere: drawing, graphic design, even photography! The professors are enforcing it and the students need alternatives. Here's the story:
First the why: Spray fixatives can contain about 2 percent resin or plastics suspended in 98 percent solvents, most of which are flammable and toxic. Use of these products indoors, in either the hallways or the classrooms, raise the possibility that the spray may be carried into the air conditioning system and spread throughout the Visual Arts complex. Compounding the danger to our health are the residual effects on the physical environment: hallways, sidewalks, and furniture.
Let's talk alternatives:
- Double stick tape attached to the print at the top backside of the art. This allows the art to hang freely on the mat board with no air pockets forming.
- There are archival adhesives that come in sheet form. The bonus point of these products are in their ability to reposition.
If you have to, try this:
- Locate a spray booth that exhausts to the outside. Contact the sculpture department for information on their spray booth.
- When spraying indoors, the best protection is a NIOSH-approved organic vapor respirator with a spray prefilter, as well as exhaust ventilation in the studio.
- Take the artwork outside and spray with your back to the wind, no sense getting a face full of fix. Leave the finished work outside until thoroughly dry and odors have dissapated.