Month: May 2011

Annual Meeting CHART!

We are pleased to inform AIC members that PSG and OSG officers, in collaboration with the AIC Office, have created a color-coded, hourly, cross-reference-capable daily schedule for this year’s annual AIC meeting. The PDF file can be found at this link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2891921/2011AICmeetingCHART.pdf

The link will open up the file directly. You can then save it to your computer, mobile device, or tablet (it would look great on an iPad!).

For best results, the chart should be printed on 11×17 paper. Don’t have 11×17 paper on hand? Have your printer tile it onto multiple pages and piece it together with tape. Tiling is often an option in your printer’s “Page Scaling” dropdown menu.

This schedule chart is not intended to replace the final program booklet distributed by AIC at the meeting, but simply to offer a graphic layout of events.  We hope you enjoy this great annual meeting tool!

 

A Shortcut to Philadelphia

By now you’ve registered for the annual meeting in Philadelphia, booked your hotel room at the Marriott Downtown, and bought your plane ticket to PHL. All that’s left to do is pack your suitcase, then you’re set to go. But what about when you get to Philadelphia? Does the thought of researching your trip seem daunting? Look no further, I did the research for you and came up with what I believe to be the most important tips for navigating Philly:

Transportation

By plane: The easiest way to get to the conference hotel from the airport is to take the Regional Rail train; it picks up in four different locations within the airport every 30 minutes between 5 am-midnight. You can buy your ticket from a conductor on the train for $7 to center city. That price includes your ride to 30th St. Station and a transfer to the Market-Frankford subway line, which will take you to the Market East Station, about a block east of the hotel.

By train: From 30th St. Station, you can either catch the subway to the hotel (see above) for a $4 fare, taxi for ~$10, or bus. For $2 one way, bus #44 picks up at the station, and stops at almost every block of Market St., including 12th St., just in front of the hotel.

By car: Having booked your hotel room, you probably already know the rate to park your car at the Marriott—$41 a day! You may consider renting a car—if you prefer to drive to Philadelphia—then drop it off when you get to town.

Otherwise, there are a few parking options outside the hotel, such as a parking garage. Parking garages appear on every other block in center city, and run from $19-$25 for 24 hrs. Street parking is available at $2/hr., but you will have to return to the kiosk every 1-2 hrs. to purchase another ticket.

If you have the energy, you can do a combination of garage parking during the day, for about $16, then street parking at night. Whatever you do, I recommend checking on your car at least once a day, just to make sure it’s safe and you haven’t started accumulating tickets…you never know with the Philadelphia Parking Authority!

Dining

At the hotel: There are two restaurants and a Starbucks in the hotel for your convenience, but the area is full of great restaurants, at a variety of price levels. Your best bet is the Reading Terminal Market, which offers a market to buy fresh produce and other groceries as well as over 30 vendors with every type of food imaginable. On weekdays, the market is open 8 am -6 pm, but many shops begin to close at 5.

For a taste of Philly’s finest, try these other restaurants nearby:

Comforts of Home

The conference is only 3-4 days, but it may be nice to know that there are some standard amenities around just in case.

Pharmacy: CVS, 1046 Market Street

Grocery store: Trader Joe’s, 2121 Market Street

Office supply: Staples, 1044 Market Street

Walking/jogging trail: Schuylkill (pronounced skoo-gull) River Trail, entrance steps on Market Street, west of 23rd Street

Scenic hiding place: Rittenhouse Square, Walnut Street between 18th and 19th

Vacation time

If you plan to come to town early, or stay on after the conference, be sure to take advantage of these special events happening in and around Philadelphia:

First Friday, June 3: Monthly open house for galleries in the Old City art district

Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show, June 3-5: Fine art will “circle the square” at this unique outdoor art show

Fireworks & Fountains, May 29: Longwood Gardens presents spectacular fireworks and fountains shows guaranteed to make your summer memorable

Wine & Jazz Festival, June 4: A weekend of great blues and good wine at Longwood Gardens

Miscellaneous information

Weather: 80s, possibly humid

Sales tax: 8%

Price of gas: ~$4 per gallon

If you’re interested in learning even more about Philadelphia, the visitphilly website contains everything you could possible want to know about tourist attractions, museum exhibitions, and more.

Have a wonderful trip, and I’ll see you in Philadelphia!

Preserving Aboriginal Art at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection

The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia has rehoused over 400 bark paintings using this innovative system developed by Associate Curator and AIC member Dominique Cocuzza.

Watch their 5 minute video Preserving Aboriginal Art at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection which oulines the project and takes the viewer through the assembly process with step-by-step instructions.  Then download the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Bark Handout for additional details.

NEW AIC Blog to launch with AIC’s 39th Annual Meeting

We hope you have found the posts filed here on this platform interesting and a good way to keep abreast of AIC news and conservation in the media. In an effort to spur more dialogue and participation we will be moving the AIC blog to a new platform. We hope that you will check out www.Conservators-Converse.org , sign up for the RSS feed there and comment on a post. It is easy to do. We will have bloggers covering the talks at the upcoming AIC’s 39th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Look for their posts soon.

The Watts Towers, Sturdy Survivors

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal revisits the Watts Towers.  We learned last summer that LACMA has a contract to oversee the conservation of the iconic Watts Towers, but this article by Arnie Cooper starts at the beginning, introducing the Towers’ eccentric artist, Simon Rodia, and speaks with conservation scientist Frank Preusser to uncover details about the construction and ornamentation.  The following is an excerpt:

Rodia worked with no plans or drawings and certainly no permits. He didn’t use nails, bolts or even a simple drill. In the 1957 documentary “The Towers,” made by William Hale, Rodia can be seen bending a piece of steel on the nearby railway tracks. According to Mr. Preusser, Rodia used “everything” to build the structure, including water pipes, chicken wire and welded mesh. “He’d put steel bars together, add some wire mesh and tie it to the structure, put cement around it and then add the ornaments.”

Amazingly, though, the towers are structurally sound, as proved during a much-publicized load-bearing test in 1959. A winch truck exerted a 10,000-pound pull on the tower—to no avail. The structures even withstood the 1987 Whittier and 1994 Northridge earthquakes, with only a slight tilting of one tower noticeable.

“Considering its age and the way it was constructed and the materials used, it’s in remarkably good condition,” says Mr. Preusser, who first got involved with the project back in 1984.

Not that the towers don’t need some work. This involves, says Mr. Preusser, “not only restoring Rodia’s original artwork, but also addressing the three major past restorations.”

Rodia used mostly found or “borrowed” objects as structural elements. The shiny green bottoms of 7-Up bottles figure prominently here. And since Rodia was a tile cutter and setter, visitors will note several specimens from the Malibu Tile company, as well as numbered tiles that had once been catalog material. They’ll also encounter china fragments of every possible shape and color, sea shells, cooking utensils, mirror pieces and larger forms like mortar “gardens,” “the ship” and hearts fashioned out of concrete. There’s even a wall made of slag and frit, the raw materials for making glass.

Ms. Anderson draws our attention to the tower floor, which features lacy designs courtesy of the backs of wrought-iron chairs. Thanks to Rodia’s experience with cement, such impressions extended to the walls, one of which includes imprints of Rodia’s simple tools: a set of wire clippers and various hammers, all artfully assembled amid hose-nozzle “flowers” and the artist’s initials.

“Some of these impressions are still pristine,” says Mr. Preusser, pointing to a wall displaying the pattern left by a straw mat. “This is why we’re saying the state of conservation is still remarkable. Rodia knew how to make a good cement.”

 

 

Check back soon for blog posts from AIC’s 39th Annual Meeting

Over 50 AIC members have generously volunteered their time and energy to blog about talks, workshops and tours from the 39th Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Conservation.  We hope that these posts will allow colleagues near and far who are unable to attend the conference a chance to learn a bit about the papers, understand the context in which they were given and taste the flavor of the meeting.

AIC members have repeatedly asked for a platform in which they can discuss issues and topics in common – beyond the divisions of our specializations.  The new AIC blog is just one of the new tools we are rolling out to facilitate these conversations – hence the blog title – Conservators Converse.  We hope that the migration to this new, more user-friendly WordPress platform will also encourage discussion on the posts.  It is easy to comment and we look forward to hearing from you.

AIC’s 39th Annual Meeting – [Session name e.g. General Session], [Date e.g.- June 2], [Talk/event title], [Primary author]

This is a test post for the upcoming annual meeting.  Please follow the general format above for the title which will facilitate searching for posts.  Also, remember to check off the Annual Meeting category as well as any relevant specialty group categories in the list on the right hand menu.  Don’t worry if you forget something – you can always go back in and edit your post to make changes!

Happy blogging,

Rachael Arenstein, AIC e-Editor

On the Road to Conservation: A Pre-Program Road Trip – Part II

Clockwise from top left: JessiKat on the Buffalo campus, Niagara Falls, the Liberty Bell, JessiKat back home, JessiKat outside UPenn's museum, Katherine with Buffalo's mascot. Center: Reading Market in Philadelphia.

 

This entry by Katherine Langdon is the second part of a two-part blog post. Read the first entry by Jessica Ford below (posted 1/12/2011). Both Katherine and Jessica are pre-program interns working with Richard McCoy at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
I’m Katherine Langdon, pre-program intern in conservation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and prospective conservation graduate student, and today I am continuing the story begun previously by my fellow intern, Jessica Ford. If you didn’t catch her blog entry you should begin there.
After our delightful and fast-paced visit to Winterthur for the WUDPAC Portfolio Day we spent the night in nearby Philadelphia. Philly turned out to be an ideal way-station for our travels, not only as a central hub of the east coast, but also as a bustling capital of culture and American history.

Our Thursday began early with a drive to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where we had an appointment with Head Conservator Lynn Grant. As I have a background in archaeology, I was especially keen to see how conservation was approached at an archaeologically-focused museum. Lynn was very generous with her time and expertise, answering our slew of questions. We started with a tour of the collections in storage, where nearly a million objects are protected long-term – in fact the collection is so large that only about 3% of their artifacts can be on display at any one time. All of this is in the care of the two (soon to be three) full-time conservators and their assorted interns. The museum, housed in a historic building on the university campus, recently began renovations on much of the service area, so although the conservation staff currently operate in a makeshift lab, they anticipate having great new facilities in the near future.

Thrilled with the thorough visit, we thanked Lynn and stepped out into the very rainy city for an afternoon of exploration. This was Jessica’s first visit to Philly, so I made sure we hit all the major sites, beginning with lunch at the Reading Terminal Market. The rest of the afternoon we wandered through historic Philadelphia, finally visiting the Liberty Bell Center, which contains one small and uplifting exhibit, and touring Independence Hall, which is currently undergoing its own massive conservation project.

As you read yesterday, we spent the following day in New York City before catching a late bus to Washington, D.C. I headed for the National Mall, where I visited for the first time the D.C. branch of the National Museum of the American Indian, built in 2004. I loved the unique design of the building itself and its flowing exhibits, and I was pleased to see that the exhibits included a wide range of cultures and time periods, including some breathtaking contemporary pieces of art. That evening Jessica, Duncan, and I reunited in time to attend a gallery opening downtown where some of Jessica’s artwork was on display.

After spending Sunday driving to upstate New York, we headed to Buffalo State College to get to know the campus and to meet with second-year art conservation student Christine Puza. As we approached the school, two copper peaks towering over the campus caught our attention. A bit of research revealed that the building was part of the former Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane (known now as the Buffalo Psychiatric Center or the Richardson Olmsted Complex), designed by H.H. Richardson in 1870 and now out of use. The state of New York has committed to a restoration of the complex, which could someday perhaps provide great research and conservation projects for the neighboring school.

The friendly Buffalo State campus gave its art conservation program a more collegiate atmosphere than the independent departments of NYU and Delaware. I was surprised that the three programs could have such different, yet equally pleasing, settings and characters. At Buffalo, the Art Conservation Department is proudly housed in Rockwell Hall, the main campus building, near the music department. (The school clearly has its priorities in good order.)

Christine met us here and gave us an in-depth tour of the various labs, where she told us about the coursework underway and shared her own projects. As we entered one room filled with students’ original artwork she explained that the Buffalo program emphasizes the simultaneous development of hand skills and intimate knowledge of historical artistic techniques, taught by having the students replicate traditional methods of manufacture, such as painting with egg tempera. First-year students even design their own projects to focus on crafts of personal interest (smithing or flintknapping, e.g.).

The artworks used for conservation training are brought in from outside sources. People or museums can bring in their items for evaluation and treatment, with the understanding that it might be a few years before a student chooses it for a personal project. Christine was excited to show us her current paper conservation project, the removal of a poor backing from a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai. In the objects lab she pulled out a damaged wooden box she was working on and told us that the second year students enjoy the opportunity to go “shopping” for such projects in the storage facilities of the next-door Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

After a delicious lunch with Christine at the Indian buffet near campus, we realized that the perfect autumn weather would be best spent on a visit to Niagara Falls, only a twenty-minute drive away. There the crowds were sparse and the trees were just unveiling their seasonal chromatic brilliance. Refreshed by this natural masterpiece, we began our long drive home to Indianapolis.

On the Road to Conservation: A Pre-Program Road Trip – Part I

This post by Jessica Ford is the first in a two part blog entry. Please check back for the second post by Katherine Langdon. Both Jessica and Katherine are pre-program interns working with Richard McCoy at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

It’s been almost two months since Katherine and I embarked on our epic journey to visit conservation graduate schools: one that tested our navigational skills, our endurance, and our conservation aspirations. Having returned to the IMA in one piece with a strengthened determination towards our goals, I can say that the adventure was certainly a success.

Considering our daunting plan to visit all three East Coast graduate conservation programs (University of Delaware – Winterthur, NYU-IFA Conservation Center, and Buffalo State) in seven days, teamwork was a must

Image Caption: Clockwise from top left: Our host house in Pittsburgh, Winterthur's campus, Katherine at the Conservation Center, Jessica in Times Square, home away from home - the car, Winterthur's entrance sign.

from the moment we loaded up my trusty Honda Fit with a week’s worth of personal belongings, snacks, and study material.

Our first stop was to visit the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation’s (WUDPAC) annual Portfolio Day. Although we only got a taste of the breathtaking campus, we were assured that Winterthur was a fantastic place to be by Katherine’s book 1000 Places to See Before You Die. Two eager faces in the crowd of about 70 prospective students, Katherine and I were happy to have a chance to walk and talk for a moment with Professor of Material Culture and Adjunct Paintings Conservator Joyce Hill Stoner and converse in-depth with first-year student Crista Pack.

Second-year student Steven O’Banion gave our group an impressive and detailed review of his recent conservation opportunities. His presentation was followed by a whirlwind tour of the entire department. Pictures and more details of the event can be found on WUDPAC’s website.

From there we drove to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where we took lodging for a couple of nights (more on this stop in Part 2 of our story). Early on a dark Friday morning we set out again, this time by train to New York, New York. Katherine had never been to the Big Apple, and I had been once and loved it. Needless to say we were both quite excited for this excursion. The only challenge was smashing as much as possible into one day.

First, we hit the Conservation Center’s 50th Anniversary Celebration Open House. Located just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Met, the building is in the tall, narrow, town-house style that one would expect uptown, which resulted in the different labs being neatly stacked on top of each other all the way up to the penthouse paintings lab. It was there that we met 3rd year student Kristin Robinson, who talked to us about the school and her experiences. The program in NYC is distinctly different from the other conservation grad programs in that the degree is actually a MA in Art History with an Advanced Certificate in Conservation. A strong interest in art history is part of what drew me to conservation in the first place, so I appreciate the emphasis. Kristin showed us a small, medieval icon that she was currently working on, which highlighted another benefit of the program – its proximity to the IFA’s prestigious art history program (right across the street). A Latin verse on the painting was illegible, but Kristin was able to find help from the Art History Department’s specialized faculty in puzzling together the correct phrase before restoring it.

In addition to the IFA, the number of important museums located nearby makes the location mind-blowing with respect to resources, art historically and otherwise. Some of the conservation curriculum takes place in the labs of the Met, MoMA, etc., and the network of connections built in this environment surely helps many students obtain 4th-year and post-graduate internships from these institutions as well. Plus, anyone who survives in NYC for three to four years automatically gains a fair amount of street cred.

After our visit to from the Conservation Center we headed to the MET, where objects conservator Beth Edelstein showed us where the conservation magic happens: a subterranean labyrinth of labs full of art objects – musical instruments, jewelry boxes, Islamic wall panels – and no less than 40 professionals to work on them. At one point, Katherine nearly had a heart attack when she spotted a very convincing replica of the Mask of Agamemnon. After Beth’s tour ended, our self-guided tour of the galleries began. After a couple of hours the rest of New York beckoned, and we filled the remainder of our afternoon and much of the night with the sights, sounds, and food of Midtown.

Saturday we were in Washington DC, where Katherine and I split up to cover as much museum ground as possible. While she investigated the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, My husband Duncan and I trekked to the Museum of Unnatural History at a nearby Renaissance Faire.

This tale is only halfway done! Check back tomorrow to learn about the rest of our adventures from Katherine’s perspective including our time in Philadelphia, more about D.C., and our visit to the conservation program in Buffalo, New York.

In Haiti: Rescuing Art Amid the Rubble

So, one afternoon, in the rubble-strewn courtyard of Ste. Trinité, I asked architect Magdalena Carmelita Douby, the project’s registrar, about local attitudes towards our somewhat unusual rescue effort. Her answer came without hesitation: ‘We have lost everything except our culture,’ she said calmly. ‘We have to protect what is left.

This poignant quote is from “In Haiti: Rescuing Art Amid the Rubble”

 

Read more about AIC Members Rosa Lowinger and Viviana Dominguez who were deployed to Haiti to assess the murals at The Cathedral of Sainte Trinité. Read about their trip in Lowinger’s article for the Gallerina blog at the wnyc.org/culture website.