Category: Conservation in the News

Over the past few months The New York Times has published a number of articles and short notices about conservation projects:

A Hidden Treasure Struggles in Los Angeles (February 1): The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has taken over responsibility for Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers from the City of Los Angeles which can no longer afford to maintain the work. A preliminary estimate of the cost of needed restoration work is $5 million.

Restoration is Planned for Historical Murals (February 23): A set of murals depicting events in African-American history owned by Talladega College in Alabama will be cleaned and restretched at the High Museum(Atlanta) before they are exhibited in Atlanta and Indianapolis.

A Plan to Restore a Destroyed Buddha (March 1): After studying fragments of the statues for eighteen months, scientists at Munich’s Technical University have concluded that the smaller of the Bamiyan Buddhas (which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001) could be reconstructed at the site from its 1,400 fragments .

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that a masterpiece in the basement goes unnoticed for more than half a century. It is a wonder, however, when a neglected nothing, a dirty ragamuffin of a painting, is suddenly noticed amid a quarter-million stored confreres – is pulled out, looked at, looked at more closely, and finally recognized for what it really is beneath the soot, the grime, the clouded varnish: a treasure.

This is precisely what happened with George Inness’ 1851 landscape Twilight on the Campagna, acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945, [and was put in storage soon after, and forgotten until 2005.]…

Conservator Judy Dion managed the cleaning, and what emerged stunned all involved…Beneath the varnish, the canvas was covered by a thick layer of what is called bleached shellac, probably applied by Inness himself; while the shellac was discolored in some spots, the surface of the painting was extremely well preserved – somewhat unusual for Inness’ work – which allowed his rendering of light to shine…

Read the full article in the digital Philadelphia Inquirer.

From the Bangkok Post:

Flying in and out of Bangkok regularly over the past two years is textile conservator Julia Brennan. US-based Brennan is no newcomer to Thailand, having grown up in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai at the time Her Majesty the Queen was establishing the Support Foundation and reviving the nearly lost textile traditions.

Julia Brennan has taught textile conservation in Asia for the past decade. She helped establish the National Textile Museum, under the royal patronage of HM Ashi Sangay Wangchuk in Bhutan. Over a period of eight years she helped train the first generation of Bhutanese textile conservators.

However, working in Thailand as a professional conservator, to preserve Thai cultural treasures was a long held dream that has now come true. In Thailand, she has been working on a number of textile projects, mainly as a consultant training a group of textile conservators, helping to set up a new textile conservation laboratory, and helping to establish the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, organised under the Support Foundation and Her Majesty’s the Queen’s Personal Affairs Division Office. The museum is expected to open in August.

Another project, which she has just completed, is the conservation of the ceremonial robe presented by King Chulalongkorn to Phraya Cholayuth Yothin, otherwise known as Vice Admiral Andreas du Plessis de Richelieu, a Danish navy officer who became the first and only foreigner to take command of the Royal Thai Navy at the beginning of the 20th century…

Joyce Hill Stoner was awarded the 2011 College Art Association/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Her many contributions to the field of conservation include her advocacy for collaboration with living artists as well as being a pioneer for art conservation programs at academic institutions.

Amber Kerr-Allison made the video which can be watched on YouTube.

Read the announcement on the Heritage Preservation website.

Museums Aotearoa, the professional organization for New Zealand museums and related professionals, has started to post status updates from various area cultural repositories about their status since the February 22, 2011 earthquake near Christchurch.

The February 2011 6.3 magnitude earthquake is considered an aftershock of the September 2010 7.1 magnitude earthquake, centered about 20 miles away and also damaged cultural buildings. The region has experienced periodic seismic activity since then, with at least seven aftershocks with magnitudes over 4.

Read the Canterbury Earthquake Museum Update blog on the Museums Aotearoa website.

Museums Aotearoa also has a Facebook page that is actively being updated.

AIC has offered the assistance of the Collections Emergency Response Team.

Only a handful of high-tech tools have been created specifically for art conservation. Most of the tools conservators use, ranging from syringes and enzyme gels to X-ray imaging and lasers and beyond, have been adopted from other industries.

An example of this adoption and creative modification is the use of a Computer Numeric Control industrial cutting tool (CNC) to remove concrete from a previous treatment from the back of a Byzantine mosaic.

Read the article in the Yale Daily News.

The Yale University Art Gallery conservation department is hard at work restoring pieces of the collection for a 2012 reinstallation in the renovated wings of the gallery, but conservators say there are some art works that have damage that simply cannot be reversed because of the ways in which they were constructed.

Read the full article about the struggle with inherent vice in the Yale Daily News.

High Alert for Mideast Museums by Stan Sesser appeared in the Wall Street Journal on February 5, 2011.

AIC calls for Egyptian authorities to guard cultural heritage

Read the Press Release HERE.

The American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works and its Foundation are concerned about the safety of the citizens of Egypt during this period of civil unrest. The courage of those private citizens and local authorities who have helped to protect Egypt’s cultural heritage to date is commendable. Yet, loss and damage to cultural property has occurred in both museums and at archaeological sites. We urge Egyptian authorities to put plans in effect immediately to systematically protect their country’s irreplaceable cultural heritage from looting and damage during this critical period.

“The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is in the middle of an ambitious $180 million upgrade. But because its namesake left explicit instructions that nothing be altered after her death, the changes underway have raised some questions….

The transition is really two projects – the restoration of the Gardner’s historic Venetian palace, and the construction of a new, strikingly different addition just 50 feet away. But a certain yin and yang is at play here between the old and the contemporary, according to project director James Labeck.”

Read how the Gardner’s conservators are straddling the line in this article on the WBUR.org