It's Day One of the American Association of Museums Annual Meeting, and for the first time in its 106-year history, the conference has flung open its doors to the general public for select sessions.

Local collectors and museum professionals alike mingled at the George R. Brown Convention Center and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to discuss such issues as caring for collections, how families fit into museums and museum governance. CultureMap checked in on the seminars to get the museum 411.

For the "Committed to Collections" seminar, San Antonio's Witte Museum's collection manager Amy Fulkerson, Menil Collection curator Michelle White and and art conservator Jill Whitten weighed in on the delicate art of maintaing the materials that museums amass.

"Sometimes the routine physical documentation of a collection can be a work of art in and of itself," said Fulkerson as she proffered careful illustrations that had been sketched by the Witte's former collections manager, Cecilia Steinfeld. Similarly, White revealed the secret mini-Menil Collection — a one-twelfth scale model of the museum used by conservators and curators to manage the Menil's rotating exhibitions and permanent collection.

On a day-to-day basis, curating the collection at the Menil primarily involves deciding where to place particular artworks.

"We want to create a situation in which visitors always come across something new," said White of the continual rearranging of the works on the walls. "In the Surrealist vein, we want to present an unexpected encounter." Dominique de Menil compared this movement of artworks between gallery walls to actors on a stage.

"I think the very DNA of the Menil is about preserving the object," said White.

The conservation conversation doesn't always take place entirely behind closed doors. Meander around the Menil grounds, and you'll find clandestine windows offering views of conservation labs. There, Brad Epley immerses himself in the art of restoring the Menil's precious pieces. At the AAM seminar, White recounted how Epley rescued a crucial Barnett Newman painting, "The One," that had been so damaged, it was labeled as unworthy for public view. After an excruciating five-year process, Newman's monochromatic, minimalist masterwork was debuted in the Menil's above-ground galleries earlier this year.

It's important to note that not all collecting institutions exclusively care for works on canvas. Consider Prissy, the baby prairie dog that entered the Witte Museum's collection under the care of Fulkerson.

"When she first came to the museum, she hadn't adapted to solid food yet," said the collections manager. "Part of my job at the time was doing her morning and midday feeding. Prissy also needed a lot of socialization since she was in captivity, so during the day, I would help her run and play."

Unexpected challenges like Prissy are de rigueur collections caretakers. Jill Whitten of Houston's Whitten & Proctor Fine Art Conservation has had to repair tears in a painting rendered by a forklift, and used ultraviolet lights to reveal and restore painted-over portions of a canvas. While removing clouded varnish on a particular angelical coffer painting, Whitten and her colleagues noticed a damaged section where a female figure's nipple would have been located.

"We did a lot of work with the curators at the museum that owned the painting," she said. "After speaking with the scholars, we went ahead and put in the nipple."

The response to the public session was generally positive. Said Amy Freeman, a 19-year-old student at Baylor University from Brazoria County, "I'm just an undergraduate, but I'm privileged to do some manuscript research. I'm kind of interested in this field down the road, so I thought it would be helpful to come and scope it out. I learned a lot."

"It was interesting," agreed Stan Price, a local collector of Texas art. But he clarified, "It wasn't exactly what I was planning. I had the idea that it would be touching more on personal collections. This makes sense though, because it is a museum function."

Ideally, the Houston initiative of welcoming the local community into the museum conference will continue at future incarnations. "I think that there's always an appetite from the public about the behind-the-scenes aspect of the museum world and what we do," White told CultureMap.