Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

For reasons I’ll explain later, I’ve been digging around on youtube.com and other places for videos about art conservation . Today I found one of my all-time favorite videos about conservation.

It’s a video of Grant Romer of the George Eastman House talking about the famous Abraham Lincoln glass plate negative. I think there’s a lot to like about this video: it’s a great subject; the video is well produced (note that this “video” is made entirely from still images); and I think Grant Romer’s voice sounds a lot like William Carols Williams’. What’s not to like?

While it’s surprising that the renowned Lunder Conservation Center of the Smithsonian doesn’t appear to have any of their videos up on youtube.com or Google Video, they have some good ones embedded in the web page (see if you can spot one of the Issac Mizrahi aprons ). I recommend this excellent video of objects conservator Helen Ingalls talking about a treatment she completed on a marble sculpture of Tecumseh.

As a graduate of William Henry Harrison High School (go Raiders!), I’m well aware of the important place in American history that Tecumseh and his younger brother The Prophet hold so I was thrilled to see this treatment.

The third video is just part 1 of 5 videos of the 1999 restoration of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ important painting by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, The Immaculate Conception.

You can find the rest of the videos on the museum’s web page and also check out a massive amount of documentation that was done before, during, and after the treatment. The conservation work was completed by Joan Gorman, David Marquis and the rest of the folks at the Midwest Art Conservation Center.

I would be remiss not to point out that IMA has begun to create some content about art conservation within its website. You can go here to check out the youtubers that have been made and you can go here to learn about the Sebastiano Mainardi Conservation Project . Since there’s been some recent talk about creating more content about art conservation for the IMA’s web page, I’d like to ask you what you think:

What kinds of things would you like to see more of from the conservation department?

• Discussions of the techniques and materials of artworks?
• Discussions of the condition of artworks?
• Demonstrations of conservation projects & treatments?
• Or something else all together.

Let me know, will you?

• Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Art Conservation, Conservation, Conservation Projects, David Marquis, George Eastman House, Grant Romer, Helen Ingalls, ima, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Joan Gorman, Lunder Conservation Center, Midwest Art Conservation Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, painting conservation, Photograph Conservation, Richard McCoy, Sebastiano Mainardi, Tecumseh, The Prophet, William Carlos Williams
 

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under Conservation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.