Entering its seventh year, the Bank of America Art Conservation Project has funded more than 100 projects in 29 countries, on six continents. In 2016, the Denver Art Museum was among 21 institutions to receive one of these prestigious grants. As a result of this generous support, the conservation and New World curatorial departments will be able to undertake the full scope of historical and technical research as well as the conservation treatment of a very important painting from the museum's Spanish Colonial collection.
Leonardo Drew recently gave a talk at the Denver Art Museum as part of the Logan Lecture Series. Known for creating large-scale sculptures and multi-media works on paper that explore his interest in the cyclical nature of creation, decay, and regeneration, Drew has created a unique style and technique. Drew employs a process that is physically and conceptually steeped in memory, history, and the passage of time.
Over the past 20 years, Vancouver, BC, photographer Danny Singer has explored the American and Canadian prairie from Alberta and Saskatchewan south to the plains of Texas, photographing the kinds of towns most travelers overlook in their rush to get from one place to the next.
You may have recently seen Scottish Angus Cow and Calf—the larger-than-life bronze sculptures by artist Dan Ostermiller—getting their annual summer bath. Above and beyond their cleaning with a specialized mild detergent, the Cow and Calf sculptures needed other treatments, including re-patination and waxing, due to the constant physical interaction they receive from the public.
Minnesota photographer Alec Soth’s pictures bring to light the quirkiness and humanity of people he encounters and the places where they live. From 2012–2014, Soth embarked on a series of state-by-state road trips to make a portrait of present-day America. His journey through each state that he visited was printed in a “dispatch” format that calls to mind a small town newspaper or travel guide.
The highly realistic sculpture Linda by Colorado artist John DeAndrea has been a visitor favorite at the Denver Art Museum since it became a part of the collection in 1984. Linda is also an important work of contemporary art in which DeAndrea made innovative use of a material that was fairly new to art at the time: plastic. This is why Linda is of such interest to us in the museum’s conservation department. This is a material that has not yet stood the test of time, and we watch Linda carefully to understand how the plastic is aging.
In preparation for Creative Crossroads: The Art of Tapestry (now closed), the museum’s staff have been working on a Spanish Colonial table cover in PreVIEW (a behind-the-scenes visible staging area in our textile art gallery).
Curators have examined it and explored its history, and textile art conservators have been testing and repairing the tapestry. Follow this series of blogs to track their progress.
"It takes time for the world to reveal itself to us." - Barbara Bosworth
Conservation treatment of King Caspar is almost finished. Having completed the structural portion of the treatment which included filling cracks, repairing broken elements, and stabilizing loose joints, I moved on to the aesthetic portion of the treatment. The goal of this part of the treatment was to unify the overall appearance by filling areas where the paint and/or gesso was lost to bring them to the same level as the surrounding surfaces.
My initial examination revealed that the sculpture of King Caspar was in poor condition. Many of the wooden joints were loose; some pieces were broken and missing. The paint and barniz chinesco surfaces were actively flaking and the sculpture was very grimy. In collaboration with curator Donna Pierce, I designed a treatment plan that will restore the structural stability of the sculpture so that it can be handled, studied, and displayed safely. We also decided to pursue aesthetic compensation so that it can be effectively understood as a devotional object.
One of the first steps of any conservation treatment is to closely examine the object, creating written and photographic records of its current state. Conservators do this using a variety of tools and methods. I started to examine King Caspar by looking closely under normal light. Then, I began to change the angle and intensity of light, eventually adding magnification (via a stereomicroscope). I also examined the sculpture under ultraviolet illumination to observe UV-induced fluorescence.
Thanks to a generous grant from the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, administered by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, the Denver Art Museum is conserving an eighteenth-century Ecuadorian statue that is part of the DAM's Stapleton Collection of Latin American Colonial Art.
Courtney Murray, the Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Objects Conservation at the Denver Art Museum, is documenting her conservation treatment in a four-part series you can find here.