For more than two decades, J. Landis (Lanny) and Sharon have been instrumental in guiding the vision of the Denver Art Museum and have provided a longstanding commitment to major programs, special exhibitions, and important acquisitions to the permanent collection.
With their transformational $25 million gift, the largest financial gift in the museum’s history, to revitalize the North Building, they have elevated this institution to new heights.
The Denver Art Museum today announced bold plans to make significant improvements to the iconic North Building.
In 1971, the North Building opened, allowing the museum to display its collections under one roof for the first time. Superstar Italian architect Gio Ponti designed the exterior while Denver-based James Sudler Associates designed the gallery spaces and interior. It was a radical decision to build a seven-story, 210,000-square-foot tower—one of the first high-rise museums built in the country—in Denver.
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.
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.
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.
Meet King Caspar. This small polychrome wood sculpture dates to eighteenth-century Ecuador and is part of the renowned Stapleton Collection of Latin American Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum. King Caspar is one of a set of six polychrome sculptures in the Stapleton Collection that together represent the three Magi and their horses. It is currently undergoing conservation treatment.
Lyrical, structured, bold, colorful, whimsical, meticulous, commemorative, and even “crazy," the quilts currently on display in First Glance/Second Look: Quilts from the Denver Art Museum Collection cover a staggering amount of design territory. Enticing the viewer’s eye to the back of the gallery is a striking grid of red and black interspersed with a rainbow of other colors.
In part one of this series, we discussed assessing what needed to be done to conserve Big Sweep by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.