The Journeys and Experiences of Eight Women in Hands-On Preservation Careers
July 1, 2019
Preservation magazine (NTHP), Summer 2019
Ariana Makau
Oakland, California
The oldest glass pieces Ariana Makau has ever handled were circa-1144 roundels from the Basilica of Saint-Denis in France, as a graduate student in stained glass conservation. Since then, she has conserved historic windows at iconic places such as San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. In 2003, she founded Nzilani Glass Conservation, specializing in glass conservation, restoration, and assessment surveys.
I was about 6 years old when I got my first toolkit. It wasn’t pink, and it wasn’t plastic, but it was to scale. And it all worked. From a very young age, I learned what tools did and how to take care of them and how they could build beautiful things. I was always raised to think there weren’t barriers and that I could do whatever I wanted to do.
There was one project where, after a year and a half of meetings, I made a presentation to the board, and they said, “You have a lot of accomplishments, and you’ve done good work, but you look a little young.” I said, “Let’s not talk about what I look like. Let’s talk about what I can do.” I’m a professional. The clients with whom I work don’t seem to have an issue; it’s the quality of the work we present and not the body that it comes in.
Before starting Nzilani I worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I could have continued working in museums, but I love working on scaffolding and seeing a building change because of my contributions. I love the experience of putting in a bunch of windows, and then putting in the final panel, and it changes the sound of the whole building. In museums, you’re working on amazing pieces from the 14th or 15th centuries, but they’re out of their context. The relationship of the windows to the building is something that really resonates with me.
I go to my daughters’ classrooms and to community groups and talk about what I do. It’s about sustaining our cultural heritage, and sometimes that cultural heritage lives in a building’s windows. The more people who know about it, the better.
—as told to Lauren Walser
Read the full publication here.
