Fun art conservation resources (that are also informative and reliable), part 3.
This news segment just came out about a group of twenty dioramas depicting African-American history and achievements made for the 1940 Negro Exposition in the Legacy Museum collection of Tuskegee University, a historically black university in Alabama. The dioramas were in absolutely rough shape so there was a program spearheaded by museum director Dr. Jontyle Robinson to recruit college students of color with art and/or science backgrounds to get crash courses in conservation to work along with professional conservators to restore them. A friend of mine worked on the “Reconstruction After the War” diorama. For more information, here are two blog posts written by interns who worked on this project.
This video is a short summary of the treatment carried out by objects conservator Dawn Wallace at the National Museum of American History on the Wizard of Oz ruby slippers worn during the filming of the movie. There’s also an interview with Wallace that explains a little more about why the conservation process was so expensive and time-consuming as well as the special display case made for them for preventative conservation care.
This one is interesting to me because I have a slight obsession with cast bronze, not because it’s a particularly good example of a video that explains the reasons behind conservation treatment decisions. Victoria and Albert Museum conservator Diana Heath treated a set of 16th century cast bronze sculptures, made by an Italian sculptor for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s tomb. I really wish she had gone into more detail about the history of the four sculptures and the fascinating story of their theft and reappearance. They were never finished because Wolsey was charged with treason before his tomb could be completed and Henry VIII requisitioned them for his own tomb, which also came to nothing in the end (I’d like to think of it as a small bit of karmic justice). If the angels were ever completed, they likely would have been polished and gilded. So neither the mottled green nor the deep brown of typical Renaissance bronzes would have been the intended original surface finish. Hilary Mantel wrote a piece all about them for Art Quarterly and it’s driving me crazy that I can only find an excerpt online.
Also, it would have been nice to hear Heath explain why she chose to do certain things, like use oil paint instead of acrylics for inpainting her epoxy putty fills, as oils tend not to age as elegantly as acrylics. Also, I am so curious to know why she refers to the original surface as polished copper- makes me wonder if the alloy has very minimal tin. But anyway, there are some great shots of the conservation process and of these very cool sculptures with a very cool history being x-rayed.
