I also want to point out what a great job AIC and IIC have been doing with their blogs to let members know about conferences and current news. Check out the AIC blog and read all of the recent posts about the Annual Meeting. While there’s no substitute for actually going to a meeting, the amount of information the members of AIC are sharing through the blog is impressive. Read the rest of this entry »
For the opening of the new Ancient Art of the Mediterranean gallery, I completed a couple of conservation treatments on objects that haven’t been on view in a long, long time. One of the objects is this Canosan vase which is from the 3rd or 2nd century B.C.E. Here’s a video of the IMA’s Director and CEO talking about the vessel and the new gallery he curated:
Before this more than 2,000 year old artwork came into my Objects and Variable Art conservation lab, it was safely stored in two separate boxes—one box contained the ceramic vessel, the other contained the 9 pieces that were detached from it. There’s a photograph in the historical files dating to the early part of the 20th century showing how the vase was assembled when it was acquired in 1928.
My job was to carefully re-assemble these pieces and fill the missing areas to make the joints appear more seamless. Finally, I inpainted my fills to make them less visible (if you get up really close to the case, you can see my work).
Aaron Steele, the IMA’s Digital Assets Specialist & Associate Photographer, photographed this object before and after my conservation treatment up in his photo studio. Have a look:
Artworks that are displayed outdoors face different risks than those that are kept inside. The pigeon, for example, is a dangerous bird to bronze sculptures; the acids in guano can actually corrode a bronze patina in a fairly short time. Another risk public artworks face is that we simply stop caring. When we stop noticing the artworks that surround us, their significance and cultural context is lost.
(via Flickr user travelbex)
Enter Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA) which we created as part of our Fall IUPUI Museum Studies class (you might remember our student, Elizabeth Basile, blogged about her personal experience with the project back in December). The logic of this project is to put information about public artworks into Wikipedia so that people won’t forget or stop caring about them. Yes, there’s a lot of guano in Wikipedia, but with its millions of viewers a day and openness to participation, it’s a vital resource for the cultural sector.
Before we started WSPA, there were only a handful of articles in Wikipedia about public art in Indianapolis—not so good for a city that brags about having more monuments than any city other than Washington, DC. Through our efforts, there are now 57 articles (and more each week) about local public artworks on Wikipedia. Since we started WSPA, our articles have been viewed more than 66,000 times. Now we are thinking big about how WSPA can truly become a global project and how to get more people to make articles about public art in their own town.
Recently, we’ve had a lot of help from Lori Byrd Phillips (an IUPUI Museum Studies graduate student) and Sarah Stierch (a soon-to-be George Washington University Graduate student, who runs her own blog, Sarah – Your Favorite Museum Intern. Together, we’ve begun developing “The Process” to help Wikipedians and public art advocates translate information contained in public databases into Wikipedia articles. For example, did you know that volunteers working through Heritage Preservation’s Save Outdoor Sculpture! surveyed Indianapolis in 1992-1994 and found 205 sculptures? Information about all of them is available online through the Smithsonian’s public database.
Thanks to Magnus for making the application that allowed us to make this chart
But a lot has happened in Indy’s world of public art since the early 1990s. That’s why actually going out and visiting the artworks is important—to verify the information contained in the Smithsonian’s database, to make note of any changes, and to use the tools of 2010 to research and share information about those changes. In addition to finding artworks surveyed by the SOS! folks, you can research new artworks that have been installed across the city. We’re grateful to have our laptops, cell phones, and Web-based tools that have allowed us to create these cool things:
Here’s the Flickr map that we are using to plot the location of the more than 500 images we’ve taken of public art in Indianapolis. By mapping them in Flickr we also resolve their GPS coordinates.
Here’s the Google map that we’re using to plot the original 205 SOS! entries from the Smithsonian database. While the Flickr map is a lot easier to use, we are also experimenting with Google Maps because its satellite maps are so much better. Read the rest of this entry »
Head on over to art:21‘s blog and check out IMA’s very own Maxwell L. Anderson as he continues the conversation on museums and deaccessioning. You can read his post here.
