As someone who did not catch royal wedding fever last year, I was still shocked to learn that a Wikipedia article about Kate Middleton’s wedding dress was flagged for deletion. As Slate.com author Torie Bosch explains in her story, an entry about the significance of Middleton’s wedding dress was deemed inappropriate by many Wikipedia users. Some believed that “this is frankly trivial, and surely isn’t notable enough to be on Wikipedia,” while others complained that this was “exactly the sort of thing that made me all but quit as an active user on this project.”

Replica of Kate Middleton’s Royal Dress. Image by Milly Bridal Studio.

That’s an astonishing low number. Wikipedia states that they would like to increase the percentage of female editors to 25 percent. A leader in this effort and the current Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellow, Sarah Stierch, has organized a couple of “Wikipedia edit-a-thons” where women get together and create new articles about women in history using Smithsonian records.

As I read this article, I tried to think about my relationship with Wikipedia. I have never created or edited an article, yet I use Wikipedia daily. It never occurs to me to add to this great body of knowledge. As a member of the minority on Wikipedia, I feel like it is important to get involved in this process.

Now, let me try to bring this around to art conservation and the museum profession in general.

WikiProject Public Art. Logo designed by Michael Mikulay.

Though it’s documented that women do not contribute to Wikipedia, it’s hard to know how many female art conservators are contributing – I’m guessing maybe one or two, if any. Anecdotally, I know that most art conservators are female, and that the membership of American Institute for Conservation (AIC) is greater than 3,000, so this seems like a good base to look to for contributors.

I should also point out that AIC created its own wiki site  that has some good information in it, but the information in there is not easily found by search engines.

While the AIC Wiki could be useful, I’d like to suggest that art conservators start adding their knowledge directly to Wikipedia. I think we’ll all agree that it is much more reliable than it used to be.  Imagine if as a profession we added our knowledge to Wikipedia, how much we could help improve the readily-available information about caring for collections (and we’d be making a significant dent in the gender gap along the way)!

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Filed under: Conservation

IMA conservation interns Anisha Gupta and Katie Roth.

It’s been a record-setting summer, but not hot enough to stop me and fellow objects conservation intern Katie Roth from braving the heat to conserve several sculptures on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Our most challenging project has been Isidore Konti’s fountain, Nymph and Fawn. The fountain is placed at the top of the ravine garden on the historic Oldfields estate. It’s also surrounded by prickly and somewhat poisonous foliage (like poison ivy!). To start the project, Katie and I made our way with IMA conservator Richard McCoy out to the pond and formulated a game plan.

“Nymph & Fawn” by Isidore Konti (1917).

This treatment project was to re-apply a wax coating to the surface of the sculpture, with a goal of preventing further deterioration of the bronze and maintaining its historic appearance.

First things first, we washed the sculpture with Orvus soap and water to remove all the dirt and grime that builds up from the sculpture being outdoors. Nymph and Fawn was covered in cobwebs, bird guano, and plant debris.

“Nymph and Fawn” covered in cobwebs.

After sufficiently scrubbing and bathing the duo, we pulled out the propane tank, blowtorch, and wax that was specially made at the IMA for outdoor bronzes.  Then we set up our propane tank, hooked up the blowtorch, and started heating up the surface. The goal is to heat up the sculpture so that it reaches the melting point of wax. You know the surface is hot enough when it looks wet — this is because the heat is pulling out the moisture from within the sculpture and bringing it to the surface. The wax is then rubbed on the surface and begins to melt like butter. Once enough wax has been applied to an area, a brush is used to evenly coat the surface. Katie had a penchant for the torch, and I was more than happy to hand over the heat while I waxed and brushed.

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Filed under: Conservation

Last month I went to Paris. I didn’t go to do research at the Louvre, or to attend a special exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, I went to the POPArt Conference, an international symposium on the conservation of plastic materials.  The conference was the culmination of a European Union funded initiative, and like Contemporary Art: Who Cares?, it is another example of the way that European governments are supporting the conservation of contemporary cultural heritage in a way that the U.S. government does not.  The goal of POPArt was to improve the conservation of plastic objects in European museums and to establish recommended practices for exhibiting, cleaning, and restoring these artifacts .

Tara Donovan, "Untitled (Mylar)," 2010. Commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Frank Curtis Springer & Irving Moxley Springer Purchase Fund, Anonymous IV Art Fund, Deaccessioned Contemporary Art Fund. 2010.218A-D. Courtesy of the Pace Gallery.

When people think about plastics, their minds don’t typically jump to museum collections.  But in reality museums are filled with plastic artifacts and artworks made with plastic components.  Artists and designers choose them for their working properties and aesthetic qualities that cannot be achieved with other materials.  Some works in the IMA’s collection that are made with plastics include Tara Donovan’s Untitled (Mylar), Valentine Typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass II and Perry King, and Rudi Gernreich’s wool and vinyl Dress.  These are just a few examples and our holdings are only growing as we are rapidly acquiring many new objects in our Design Arts, Textile and Fashion Arts, and Contemporary Art departments.

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Filed under: Conservation, Contemporary, Road Trip

As part of my work preparing for the reinstallation of the African galleries, I recently finished dusting the objects which are currently on view.  Removing accumulated dust from artworks is essential, and not just because it looks bad.  With time, dust can bond with, and encourage the deterioration of the surface of an artwork.

Dusting provided an opportunity to become acquainted with the wide range of surfaces that can be found on wooden sculpture from Africa. Given all the information one can get from these surfaces, this part of the project has been a visual and art historical education.

Under the dust, the surface observed can be one that the artist created.  Yoruba sculptor Lamidi O. Fakeye, for example, highlighted the wood itself by leaving the surface of his mounted horseman unpainted and unvarnished.

Detail of Mounted Horseman by Lamidi O. Fakeye, which features a bare wooden surface.

This is just one of a wide variety of possible surface finishes the artist could have chosen.  In contrast, this 20th century helmet mask for Bonu Amuen masker features a thick, slightly textured paint layer.

Detail of the painted surface of a 20th century helmet for Bonu Amuen masker.

The forehead of the Deangle mask is covered with layers of ritually applied materials.

For many works, however, the observed surface is the result of the combination of the artist’s activity and the use of the object after it was created.  Substances are often applied to painted wooden sculpture in Africa, however the material used and the reason for its application varies with the culture of origin of the piece.  Because of this variety, materials on the surface of African sculpture can provide information that is valuable for understanding the ways in which people have interacted with it.

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Filed under: African Art, Conservation

Sounds comforting, doesn’t it?  Pleasant, soft, warm, intimate, relaxing, playful…   We’d like to use the blog for a bit of pillow talk.  Care to join us?  Come on, we’ll keep your secrets!

Doris Day and Rock Hudson – perhaps the most glamorous of mid-century pillow talkers.

Well not exactly pillow talk, you know, that is, not talk over a pillow or in the midst of pillows or under the pillows.  Rather, let’s talk about pillows, which pillows, how many pillows, what color of pillows…  It’s about pillows in the Miller House conversation pit, and what to do about changing them for the season as winter relents.

The interiors of the Miller House have a lot of eye-catching elements, to be sure, but the biggest crowd pleaser has got to be the conversation pit, a 15-foot-square, 2 ½ -foot-deep exercise in below-floor-level decorative decadence.  It’s been touted as the very first conversation pit, but that’s a pretty difficult statement to verify.  There are certainly plenty of antecedents, as well as related interior features in houses of the ‘40s and ‘50s.  Houses of the Victorian and Arts and Crafts eras had inglenooks and similar areas of built-in seating.  And it’s not hard to find mid-century houses that featured floor level changes that also incorporated seating.  Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames created such designs for the Case Study Houses in California in the 1940s.  Whether the Miller House conversation pit is indeed the first is something of an exercise in architectural hair-splitting, but if anyone knows of an earlier pit of the same completely enclosed configuration, we’d love to hear about it.

Interior, Case Study House #9.

The “pit” in the Case Study House above shapes the spatial flow of the interior – down to the embrace of the fireplace and outward at the same level to the landscape beyond.   With interior designer Alexander Girard in the mix at the Miller House, the pit concept does something different.  Functionally, it achieves the goal of providing significant seating without the clusters of furniture that Saarinen so detested.  Being below the floor level, it provided nothing to impede the view to the west through the allée of honey locust trees.  By enclosing the pit on all four sides, with entry by means of a short flight of seemingly-floating padouk wood steps, Girard made the pit into a huge, discrete decorative object that balances the 50-foot storage wall and the marble-topped dining table.  It shouts for the viewer’s attention, rewards it with a lush display of textiles, and offers the novelty of looking down to something other than the floor.

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Filed under: Conservation, Miller House