Hey, you get to hang out with me.

Draw back you say? Yes.  We spend so much time interacting online, we never actually meet the people that read this blog, watch our videos, follow the IMA’s main site, or follow our tweets.  There’s a disconnect of sorts and it’s something we struggle with constantly.  We produce digital content to enhance our visitors experiences with art, artists and exhibitions.  A lot of these people may never visit Indianapolis or the IMA.  But what about our local audience?  We care, we really do.

All museums care.  And some are doing a great job of bridging the disconnect between the online and physical relationships.  The ever impressive Wexner Center in Columbus, OH (my old stomping grounds) has been heavily involved in their local Social Media Cafe.  Brooklyn Museum has pioneered the new model for museum membership with their 1stfans idea – a socially networked membership that brings visitors in to the museum. And the Mattress Factory uses Twitter brilliantly to uninstitutionalize an institution.  Wex, BM & MF are heavily involved in new media projects and publishing online – but they too have addressed the same issue we’re contemplating – it would be great to meet some of you.  (If there are other museums addressing this, I would love to hear from you).

So if you’re free this evening, stop by the IMA.  You can meet some of the museum staff, listen to some music, grab a drink and if you really want, try out our new iPod Touch guide.

TAP into Sacred Spain

Did you think I wouldn’t end by mentioning some technology?

Bing.com – Over the weekend, Microsoft launched a new search product called Bing. Supposedly, Bing should excel at helping users with “making a purchase decision, trip planning, finding local businesses and researching health conditions.” It looks like Bing can help me the next time I need to find a neighborhood apothecary to sell me a secret syrup that will take care of the cough I picked up on vacation.

Brooklyn Museum Mobile Collection iPhone App – Well done Brooklyn! iPhone users, download this app to browse and search the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. It’s still a young lil’ app so help their developers out and leave feedback on their blog about your experience. As Daniel hinted, we’re working on one of our own.

The 101 Most Important Painters of All Time – One of my favorite parts about the Web 2.0 world has to be the all the lists. And while 101 painters are way too many for this ad man to keep handy on a cheat sheet, this page is a fun rundown of some of the names I should probably know. If you’re into lists, here’s a list of lists…

Monday Music – “Mother of All Funk Chords” by Kutiman. This is incredible. This is incredible.

The NEW On the Cusp

Back at the IMA, there’s lots going on, including an experiment with a motion activated bird cam in 100 Acres, our Art and Nature park.  We’ve been working with our Grounds and Horticulture staff for the past couple of months, trying to capture some of the wildlife on our campus.  In the upcoming year, we will see the construction of a visitor center and countless installations of site specific art.  We’ll be documenting all of this, as well as much of the natural environment.  Hopefully wildlife interacting with art.  In the meantime, enjoy the video below, which includes several shots, of – you guessed it, woodpeckers.

The Facebook/Twitter call to arms went surprisingly well and I got some ridiculous, funny, relevant and interesting suggestions.  Here are a few,  including…

• how about a commentary about Kanye West and his supposed status as an artist…
• how about “what is an online exhibition” we don’t talk about it but we should because physical ones are not always possible
• post ideas: what consistently surprises you at IMA / what’s your long-term plan / How have visitors responded / best project

So here are some of my responses.

how about a commentary about Kanye West and his supposed status as an artist…?

I’m not messing with Kanye.

how about “what is an online exhibition” we don’t talk about it but we should because physical ones are not always possible?

Online exhibitions are projects that make sense but aren’t often implemented.  The superb Vogel 50/50 program is an incredible concept and this site will become a great example of an online exhibition (it’s still under development by the National Gallery of Art) – but will beautifully pull together much of the 2,500 works of art from 50 States.  Tradtionally, the IMA focuses on physical installations of exhibitions.  New Media’s role in this is to provide interpretation online – working closely with curatorial, marketing, education and more.  Our focus is always on the story telling.   The curator is primarily focused on the actual installation.  But, there is room for more collaboration and new types of exhibitions to emerge, especially on the web.  Brooklyn Museum’s Click! should be a sign of things to come across the art museum field.  The possibilites at the IMA are endless, ranging from a traditional online exhibition of art not available in galleries, art too fragile too install, and other factors.  I’m most excited about the possibility of one day developing from scratch an online exhibition in complete collaboration with curator and artist.  We’ll see …but surely, the future of the online visitor/museum experience online will include more web-focused exhibition.  Right?

Vogel 50/50 site

what consistently surprises you at IMA / what’s your long-term plan / How have visitors responded / best project?

I most surprised that we keep coming up with ideas and that we have the freedom to implement them.

The long-term plan is to be brilliant at developing digital projects and content.  It’s hard to have a long-term plan in this field though, things change quickly and it’s a big mistake to assume that our visitors will buy into our plan.  Agility is essential.

The visitors that interact with us online have been overwhelmingly positive.  We want to interact more and hear from everyone – even if it’s not positive.

My top (3), favorite projects I’ve been lucky enought to work on at the IMA have to be – Roman Art from the Louvre Webisodes, Nature Holds My Camera: The Video Art of Sam Easterson, and ArtBabble.  Having said that, I could also easily create a Top-100 list.

Speaking of ArtBabble, check out the new section called Goodies, and have a little fun.

I’m signing off, but I would love to hear your input on anything in this post – online exhibitions, IMA projects, woodpeckers, ArtBabble Goodies, even Kanye.

Brooklyn Museum flat out swept the Best of the Web awards and their main website won the overall award.  A huge congratulations from all of us at the IMA for a well-deserved recognition. (Be sure to watch their virtual thank you.)  As if that weren’t enough, I totally missed the news that Brooklyn released an API for their collection.  Even better, someone has already created an iPhone app for them using it.  Open developer access to the IMA’s collection just got a huge bump in priority for me.

We had a great meetup with some of the tech staff of NYPL.  Their group is of a scale and quality that we are quite envious of.  We are greatly looking forward to future collaborations with them. (They’re an ArtBabble partner.)

In the presentation realm the IMA had a cloud computing talk, an evaluation of online video for museums, a solicitation for feedback for the Steve in Action IMLS grant, and an ArtBabble demo.  Other favorites from outside the IMA include alternate reality games, a galaxy of pop stars, and a massive update coming soon to ArtsConnectEd.

Our own Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO gave the opening keynote which you can watch in full on ArtBabble or at the bottom of this post.  It even inspired a great series on transparency for the Museums and the Web conference itself.

Thinking about that page led me to think more broadly about IMA’s main website.  Inside the museum, the IMA site is a major topic of conversation amongst the web team.  We’re in the planning stages for a web redesign of imamuseum.org.  This will include a better calendar system, better integration of digital content, a new collection page and lots more bells and whistles I can’t mention right now.  This process has really made me consider one word and one section: Interact.

IMA's Interact Section

What is Interact?  It’s togetherness, it’s action, it’s a mutual or reciprocal action, it’s technology.  Is it?

For the past 18 months, we have placed much of our new media content in a section called Interact.  You can access it directly from the home page and find yourself immediately faced with options like ArtBabble, Facebook, Tagging, iTunes U, Blog and Dashboard.  It’s one stop shopping for those of you interested in technology at the IMA.  But I’m not convinced that Interact is the correct word for this section, or even the right approach to offering this content. Here’s a quick scan of approaches other museums have applied:

Similar to IMA but putting the active in interactive, MoMA’s new site features Multimedia (check it out below.) The cool Walker Art Center has it’s own channel.  And the ever impressive Mattress Factory Art, playfully offers Friendship Version 2.0.

MoMA Multimedia

Front and center. Brooklyn Museum is simply, brooklynmuseum.org (you have at least 10 links on the home page devoted to technology and new/social media projects) and community-based interaction is weaved throughout the site (are you really surprised?):

Brooklyn Museum

Layered within the site, The Tate Modern, has its Tate Player, TateShots and The Great Tate Mod Blog (below).  The Getty Museum has a video gallery, is getting Twitter right and does lots of other tech related projects. There’s no specific section like MoMA and others, is not fully integrated like Brooklyn, but offers superb content.

The Great Tate Mod Blog

Interact: So what to call it and where to place it?  It’s a challenge we face in the coming months to bring you a new site that is interactive, engaging, educational and focused on art.  We can create a dedicated section for technology.  We  can integrate it in all areas of the new site.  Or we can place it in various sections of the site based on a navigation structure.

We’ll be looking at lots of sites online – like the one’s mentioned above, but I would LOVE to hear your input.  What approach do you think is best? What would you do?

#6. IMA's Six Degrees of Separation

LACMA did it, everyone on Facebook is doing it, and now the IMA is turning it up a notch with blog “tagging”. Here it is…what you all have been waiting for…25 Random Things about the IMA. 

The Rules (according to Facebook, of course): Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged in your post.

1. General admission to the IMA is FREE!
2. Percival de Luce’s oil on canvas painting, An Anxious Mother, was the Museum’s first acquisition.
3. One person in all of Samoa visited our Web site in 2008. That person looked at five pages and stayed for just over two minutes.
4. Last year, 2,671 visited our site with an iPhone and 36 visited via a PlayStation 3.
5. One person visited the IMA Web site with a 1 bit screen resolution. How is that even possible?
6. Six Degrees of Separation: IMA staff member and blogger Anne Laker is cousins with the America’s Top Model Winner Adrianne Curry, who is married to Christopher Knight (aka Peter Brady), who once guest starred on That ’70s Show with Debra Jo Rupp (Mrs. Forman), who played Phoebe’s sister in-law on Friends, which starred Jennifer Aniston, who played a love interest of Kevin Bacon in the 1997 romantic comedy, Picture Perfect. Whew!
7. There are approximately 164 fluorescent lights mounted to the wall in the IMA’s Pulliam Great Hall. The lights are part of a three-story fluorescent light installation by Robert Irwin entitled Light and Space III, which was specifically designed for the museum’s main 60-foot atrium.
8. The largest painting in the IMA’s collection is Rosy Cardita by Larry Zox, measuring 69” 252”.
9. The smallest painting in the IMA collection is Portrait of Paul Peckham by Lewis Peckham. It measures 1 in. x 1 ¾ in.
10. Nancy Reagan and fashion designer Bill Blass (an Indiana native), donated a red silk, chiffon and taffeta evening dress worn by the former first lady to the Museum’s Textile and Fashion Arts Collection.
11. There was actually a vending machine in the building that sold art – Gallery of the Machine by Matt Eickhoff and Artur Silva. (The vending machine is making its way back to Artur’s studio at the Harrison Center for the Arts for some repairs.)
12. The IMA’s collection includes Vincent Van Gogh’s Landscape at Saint-Remy, which was painted during the final year of the artist’s life.
13. The IMA recently acquired the landmark Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana. Designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2000, it is considered one of the country’s most highly-regarded examples of mid-century Modernist residences.
14. The IMA has its own in-house Nugget Factory which conceptualizes, films, produces and delivers high quality art video for ArtBabble.org.
15. The 52 acres of the IMA campus currently open to the public comprised the town of Woodstock in the early 20th century.
16. Encompassing 152 acres of gardens and grounds, the IMA is among the 10 largest encyclopedic art museums in the United States.
17. Last year, 508 IMA volunteers donated more than 26,000 hours of their time.
18. According to the Dashboard, the IMA’s Horticulture staff planted 30,443 new plants on the IMA grounds in 2008.
19. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is one of the most popular days for the IMA. In 2007, we welcomed 4,500 visitors on MLK day.
20. Within two years of beginning an engineering-based, detailed approach to reducing its energy consumption, the IMA’s average monthly demand for electricity and natural gas was reduced by about 40 percent. The energy conservations also reduced the IMA’s greenhouse gas emissions (CO2) by more than 6,700 tons.
21. The IMA’s Stout Reference Library has more than 100,000 items of information on visual arts including books, periodicals, museum publications, auction catalogs and individual artist files.
22. As one of the 10 oldest general art museums in the country, the Indianapolis Museum of Art was founded during American history’s most remarkable movement in creating museum institutions, starting in the 1870s when New York and Boston established their museums.
23. The Toby was built using 23,642 pounds of recycled material.
24. In 2010, the IMA will open 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, which will be one of the largest contemporary museum art parks in the country. The Park will feature artworks commissioned from both emerging and veteran artists, who will create temporary and permanent works in response to the site’s varied geography.
25. The Indianapolis Museum of Art offers FREE general admission! Oh, wait…did I already mention that?

Wikipedia Loves Art

So here’s the scoop, directly from Wikipedia’s page: “Wikipedia Loves Art, the name being a play off Valentine’s Day, is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009. Although there are planned events at each location, you can go on your own at any time during the month.”

Straight from the horses mouth. All you need is -

• A good understanding of the official rules and listing of themes we/Wikipedia needs documented. You can find that list HERE.
• You’ll also need to sign-up, but that part is easy. It’s your chance to contribute something worthwile, show your photographic eye and experience our art galleries = warm and free.
• Transportation to the IMA, a digital camera, pencil/notepad and a Flickr account.

It’s also Indiana’s opportunity to help out Wikipedia with better art content, go head-to-head against some of the leading museums throughout the world and, perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier, your opportunity to win an iPod touch, blog t-shirt and more.

Questions?  Feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me at newmedia@imamuseum.org.  Let’s do this thing!

And speaking of the 125th Gala, we uploaded images from this incredible event to our Flickr account.  Have fun.

Some of you know that I sit directly across from the my brilliant colleague Despi.  The other day we were discussing the amount of social networking sites we find ourselves updating and following (and we’re not sure why).  Aside from our IMA specific efforts, we’re personally on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and now thanks to Richard and the recent mass museum frenzy  – Twitter.

I really want to talk about Twitter today.  In the past couple of weeks I’ve heard Twitter mentioned more than anything around the IMA – “When is the IMA going to start twittering?”.  My answer is always this – we’re not going to copy another museum here – it needs to be original (we’ll get to that shortly).  To be perfectly honest, I’m not sold on Twitter.  I wonder if it has peaked as a social networking tool?  For instance, the always innovative Brooklyn Museum has been laying down the tweet, going on two years!  What do you think?

Here are some of the IMA Twitter ideas, so far  -

• Maxwell Anderson, The Melvin and Bren Simon Director and CEO twittering (he’s way too busy)
• A work of art twittering (undergoing conservation, installation and then staring at visitors)
• The Nugget Factory twittering (would be lots of fun, but might get yanked)
• A general IMA update Twitter
• 100 Acres Twitter

That’s it for now.  Have an opinion on Twitter?  Have an IMA Twitter idea?  I’ll buy lunch for whoever leaves the best comment (Richard excluded from lunch, but definitely not commenting).

BM conservator Lisa Bruno and registrar Deana Setzke were here for nearly 2 weeks to oversee the installation all of the artworks into the exhibition cases. As a way to remember all of the hard work that went into the installation of this show, IMA registration department staffer Jesse Speight made a card that I think wonderfully demonstrates all of the things that went into putting this show up.

The Later Canon, 2008, 8 7/8” x 11-3/4″, RoseArt Washable Markers, BiC ‘Wite-Out’ Correction Pen, Pencil,
Sharpie Permanent Marker (black) on File Folder

How long did it take you to prepare all of the artworks for the To Live Forever Exhibition?

We started to work on the first object, Coffin of the Lady of the House Weretwahset (37.47a-b), in the Fall of 2006, and were finishing up treatment on the very last object a week before it all left the building! While we have been working on these objects for a little over a year and a half, we have been working on many other projects as well. This includes exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum as well as preparing BM objects for loans to other museums.

There are a lot of different kinds of artworks in this show — from gold to papyrus to stone to ceramic. Did you work on all of these different kinds of artworks or did you have help from other conservators? Or are you a magician able to do all things in your conservation studio?

Many people have worked on this show. Most of the 121 artworks were treated by the objects conservation staff, headed by Lisa Bruno, and include Jakki Godfrey, myself, and intern Emy Kim (I abandoned the lab for 5 months in the middle of it all to go on maternity leave!). The papyrus piece, The Book of the Dead of Neferrenpet (35.1448a-d) was treated by the paper conservation department headed by Toni Owen, and include Rachel Danzing and intern Caitlin Jenkins. The treatment of Elaborately Painted Shroud of Neferhotep (75.114) was a collaboration between paper, objects and paintings conservation.

The Conservation Department of the Brooklyn Museum (Left to Right, Richard, Carolyn, Tina, Jakki, Lisa, Caitlen, Toni, Rachel, Elaine)

Our paintings conservators include Ken Moser (who is also the head of the entire conservation department), Carolyn Tomkiewicz, Richard Kowall and intern Katie Patton. In addition, we had some outside conservators help us with a few treatments. Hiroko Kariya, who has worked with BM conservation off and on over the past 12 years, spearheaded the treatment of the Coffin of the Lady of the House Weretwahset, getting help along the way from our staff as well as from private conservator Catherine Williams. A textile conservator, Kathy Francis, was brought in to help with the textile components of Mummy of Demetrios (11.600a-b) and one of the Mummified Dogs (37.1984E). And those are just the conservators!

Many other departments worked together to create this show – the curators, registrars, mountmakers, packers, art handlers, conservation scientists, carpenters, painters, and the list goes on.

What kinds of things did you do to prepare all of the artworks for this exhibition?

When any object is requested for display, we start by carefully examining it to understand its current condition, and to determine what treatment it might need to travel and go on display. We keep extensive records of every object that comes through the lab; and we document its condition through a written report and photographs before, during, and after treatment. We adhere to the code of ethics as outlined by The American Institute for Conservation. It’s fascinating when an object with a long history of conservation comes through the lab. For some of these objects we have treatment records going back to 1918.

In terms of what we actually do when we treat an object: far and away, our main focus is on insuring structural stability for objects going on such an extensive tour. We want to make sure the objects are structurally stable enough (meaning they will not break or be damaged) to withstand travel to and installation in so many museums. In order to stabilize objects we may adhere previously broken pieces together with a stable and reversible adhesive, or consolidate flaking paint – again, with a stable adhesive. Integral to the stability of an object is how they are handled, travel and are displayed.

We work with a mount maker to create mounts or supports that an object may travel on and are displayed with. For example, when you walk through the exhibit, look at the two dog mummies. They are attached to padded boards, and held in place with metal mounts that secure the mummies to the board. Or, look at the ceramic Female Figure, (07.447.502). If you look closely, you’ll see a metal mount, painted to look like part of the object, which is holding the figure safely in place. Once you start to look, you’ll see mounts everywhere! We worked with several mountmakers for this exhibition, including David Geiger, Chris Bamford, Tracie Sachs and Larry Bamburg.

We also work with special art packers to make crates with appropriate materials to minimize any vibration while the object travels. All of these factors play into the structural stability of an object.

After all of the structural stability concerns have been addressed, we focus on the aesthetics of an object (making it look nice). This often means we will clean an object. How we clean an object depends on what material it’s made from. Obviously, we wouldn’t clean a ceramic and a mummy in the same way. The cleaning process (and stabilization process) is only undertaken after extensive examination and documentation of an object and discussion with the curator. After cleaning, we would discuss with the curator the extent of compensation if certain parts were missing.

Which artwork did you spend the most time working on?

The Coffin of the Lady of the House Weretwahset (37.47a-b) took the most work. While the bottom section of the coffin had been on display at the museum before, the lid probably hasn’t been on view for a hundred years. It needed both stabilization and cleaning. I won’t go into the details of the treatment but here are a few before and after treatment pictures – you can see what a dramatic difference conservation made.

Left: Lid of the Coffin of the Lady of the House Weretwahset, 37.47, before treatment Right: after treatment

Can you talk about conservation’s role in determining how these artworks are displayed? For example, did you advise on the mounts that will be used to support the artworks while on view or did you help determine things like the light levels at which the objects can be lit?

For every object that goes on display, conservation will weigh in on almost every aspect, working with curators, registrars, designers, and mountmakers. We recommend types of mounts, light levels, environmental requirements (temperature and humidity), safety requirements (type of vitrine, if the case needs to be alarmed, or platform can be used, to name just a few), handling and installation requirements (including case design and materials), packing requirements as well as how long an item can be displayed. If an object will travel to another museum, we work with the registrars to review facilities information of every venue to make sure our requirements can be met.

How did you get all the artworks from the Brooklyn Museum to the IMA?

Artwork can travel by many means of transportation, from special air-ride trucks that minimize vibration, to airplanes – both cargo and passenger – to ship. While I can’t go into the details for how the objects traveled to the IMA, I will tell you that a courier was near the art at all times. This person made sure they arrived at the IMA safe and sound.

What’s it like for an artwork to travel halfway across the country?

Scary! No, not really. There is so much preparation for a show like this, and a huge team of excellent professionals working together to ensure that these objects travel safely. It’s fantastic that people all across the US will have an opportunity to see and learn about these amazing objects.

What’s your favorite artwork in the show and why?

I love them all. When you conserve an object, even if you don’t really like it at first, you end up spending so much time with it and learning its secrets, that you end up liking them all in the end. If I really had to choose, my favorite piece would be the Coffin of the Lady of the House Weretwahset (37.47a-b). It needed a lot of treatment, so we spent a lot of time getting to know her. What was really neat is that the coffin was reused in antiquity [go here (for a video that discusses this]. On the side of the coffin, you can see where the previous occupants name was scratched out and the name of the second occupant was written in. I know that the curator, Ed Bleiberg, went into this in much more detail in the catalog. I also love the shallow saucer (09.889.29) because it’s so simple and such a fundamental shape. They used these shallow bowls 5000 years ago and we’re still using shallow bowls today. Finally, I love the footcase of a mummy (73.89). I find it fascinating that even in death the Egyptians are stomping on their enemies (look on the underside of the footcase)!

I noticed one of the artworks in the show is a gaming board. I believe the game that is played on there is called Senet. Have you ever played Senet (of course, not with the museum piece!)?

I have not – but it sounds like fun! [You can go here to play an on-line version of Senet]

Since this show is called To Live Forever, and demonstrates some of the ways Egyptians dealt with the idea of the afterlife, did you find yourself considering your own mortality when working on this show?

Not really – I was too busy for that! When working with such ancient objects I always think about the people who made them. I think about every day things like what they may have looked like – what they had for lunch the day they were making that particular object – what they were chatting about with the other people in the workshop. I think about all the hands the objects passed through until now – ending up in my hands. I especially love handling an object, like a tool or a piece of ceramic, where you can feel the finger impressions of the maker. I think about the mummies in this show, like Demetrios, and what an amazing journey he has been on. Thousands of years old – living in Egypt in a time when no one there even knew the Americas existed, and here he is, in Brooklyn, NY. He’s even been in Brooklyn longer than most of us have been alive. Now he’s going to travel all over the US.

One piece in the show is the now-famous mummy, Demetrios, that the Brooklyn Museum had CT scanned. Can you tell us anything in particular we should look for when we see this piece?

You should take some time to look at that beautiful portrait, and the gilded parts on the body. I love that his feet were drawn on the linens and gilded.

I’m not really sure how productive I would be in -40 degree weather (really, who wants to sleep in a snow filled bedroom or use a frozen porta-potty, but it’s been cool to read how these conservators recently completed treatments on an historic iron-alloy match box and a sewing box, reams of paper and a screw packet, to name just a few things.  Their adventures in this dark and frozen world are always worth a read and besides where else are you going to hear about people riding around in Haaglands and Piston Bullies?   I wonder what kind of license you need to drive one of those things.

Besides imagining myself working in a snow-filled tundra, I’ve been digging around on the internet for other blogs about art conservation.  Not surprisingly I can find only one blog devoted to conservation in Antarctica, but what did find out is that there are a lot more blogs related to book and paper conservation than any other specialty in my profession.  I enjoy the irony of this: that the people that are responsible for preserving the thing that the internet seems to be eliminating are the ones that seem the most interested and comfortable using it.

Take for example blogs by Jeff Peachey, Holly Robertson, and Beth Heller.  Jeff Peachey always has something interesting to share about working as a book conservator: from talking about type-setting tools to posting about one of the larger topics currently being discussed in my profession: certification.  Holly Robertson’s blog Do I really want to touch that with my hand? provides a behind-the-scenes look into a book conservator’s work at the University of Virginia Library.  And Beth Heller’s blog Beth Heller Conservation covers a lot of territory (who knew she had something from her collection traveling to space?)

In addition to blogs about book and paper conservation, there are a few blogs out there about archaeological digs.  The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology Dig Diaries (hosted by the University of Michigan), is a blog where you can find out what conservators Suzanne Davis and Claudia Chemello are doing at the site in Tel Kedesh Israel.  Besides reading the weekly updates and seeing the field pictures, I’m a big fan of the Find of the Week.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention who I believe is the first person to blog about an art conservation project: The Brooklyn Museum’s Lisa Bruno first post back in 2006 was about a large-scale treatment of a replica of the Statue of Liberty.  Since then, the BM has posted all sorts of conservation-related material: from the installation of a “Period Room”, to John Steele’s own “Dig Diaries”,  to an in-depth discussion of the conservation of an Egyptian mummy that’s currently on view here at the IMA as part of the To Live Forever exhibition.

I don’t claim to have uncovered all of the blogs out there about art conservation.  Have you seen any that are interesting?  If so, will you leave me a comment with a link so I can check it out?