In honor of the holiday season, please enjoy a blog devoted to creepy Claus encounters. You can even customize and send your own sketchy Santa greeting card.
The ancient Egyptians developed a sophisticated method to preserve a dead body for the afterlife: mummification. Follow the steps of the mummification process in this short animation about the Getty Museum’s Romano-Egyptian mummy Herakleides.
The CT scan feature on the To Live Forever exhibition website seems to have been quite popular (5,588 page views while the exhibition was open, with 23,473 for the landing page) so let’s celebrate with some bonus content. My name is Ed Bachta, and like a couple of the others in the MIS group here, I have a background in scientific visualization. This makes us well suited to work with such things as CT scans of mummies.
As you know all of the works in the To Live Forever show are from the Brooklyn Museum. What you may not know is that there was a lot of conservation work that went into putting together this exhibition. So, to find out more about what the BM conservators (and others) did to prepare these objects to travel to the IMA, I asked the three IMA objects conservation summer interns (Kendra Dacey, Andrea Mason, and Courtney Von Stein) to help me come up with some questions for Tina March, BM assistant conservator of objects. I really enjoyed reading Tina’s personal responses and think they help explain how museum exhibitions require a collaborative effort.
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
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.
As a riveting segment this summer, the IMA Blog will be featuring a Tuesday Photo of the Week, highlighting juicy tidbits of info including works of art, artists, news, events, or locations.
