The spring 2013 issue of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's Visiting Committee News is devoted to the activities of the museum's Conservation and Collections Management department. Projects highlighted in the newsletter include the technical study of 28 unique copper alloy artifacts undertaken by WUDPAC alumna and current MFA Boston postgraduate fellow LeeAnn Barnes Gordon.
A glazed ceramic bowl of Middle Eastern Islamic origin recently became a treatment project for WUDPAC Fellow Victoria Schussler. Made of fritware sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries, the bowl is almost four inches high, approximately seven inches in diameter, and decorated with a pattern of green, blue, and black geometric and floral arabesques. Broken in pieces and covered with discolored and failed restoration materials, the bowl was donated to the program’s study collection in 2002.
A decade ago, looters plundered thousands of important artifacts from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, from intricately carved cylinder seals for leaving one’s mark in wet clay, to exquisite ivory figures that once decorated the palaces of Assyrian kings and queens. Out of such loss, a unique partnership involving Iraqis and Americans has emerged to help protect Iraq’s heritage.
Ann Shaftel was a member of WUDPAC’s second graduating class and now works in private practice. In this Alumni Spotlight, Ann gives us a glimpse at her wide-ranging activities, including the in-situ treatment of sacred art at Tibetan monasteries and her efforts to educate global audiences about art crime at a 2013 INTERPOL Conference on Cultural Preservation.
In this blog post, WUDPAC Class of 2013 Fellow Morgan Hayes talks about her summer internship working with panel paintings in the Netherlands, including her structural work on a oversized 16th-century altarpiece from the collection of the Gouda Stedelijk Museum.
Made of steel, brass, wood, leather and the skin of a saltwater fish called the ray, highly prized swords and scabbards known as patags are seldom seen outside the landlocked borders of the Kingdom of Bhutan. This particular sword and scabbard, however, are in the Asian Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and recently became a treatment project for WUDPAC Fellow Marlene Yandrisevits.
A detailed review of the Vancouver Art Gallery's three-day cleaning workshop with UD Associate Professor and NSF grantee Richard Wolbers is now available on the web site for the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works.
“Common Threads: History of Fashion through a Woman’s Eyes”—an exhibition on display until June 28 in Old College’s West Gallery—incorporates the results of a two-year collaboration between faculty and students of the university's fashion and apparel studies, art history and art conservation departments.
In this blog post, WUDPAC Class of 2013 Fellow Crista Pack talks about her third-year internship position with the New Mexico conservation staff responsible for five museum collections and eight monuments, and discusses her work in a department filled with 26,000 paper butterflies.
