Volume 12, Number 3, Sept 1990, pp.6-9

Regional News

Rocky Mountain Region

Jeanne Brako, Art Conservation Services, Denver, attended "Consolidation of Ethnographic Objects" at the Getty Conservation Institute in June. Heidi Rupp and Angela Lafferty are currently pre-program interns at the Western Center for the Conservation of Fine Arts, observing and assisting in the paintings department. Judith Southward will be leaving her position as director of conservation and registration at the Colorado Historical Society to attend Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario to pursue a masters degree in art conservation, objects speciality. Robert Inge has completed treatment on over 100 pieces from the archives of the Coca Cola Company, to be displayed at the Atlanta headquarters beginning August 1.

Regional Reporter:
Constance K. Mohrman
Western Center for the Conservation of Fine Arts
1225 Santa Fe Drive
Denver CO 80204 303/573-1973

Greater Los Angeles/Santa Barbara

Shelley Svoboda has completed her M.S. degree from the Winterthur-University of Delaware Art Conservation Program. She will spend another year in the paintings conservation lab at LACMA as an NEA intern--congratulations! The Conservation Center at LACMA welcomes Glenn Gates to a one year NEA internship in conservation research. Glenn came to the Center in April from Sarasota, Florida where he is working toward a B.A. degree from New College of the University of South Florida. From July to December 1990, Jane Bassett will work in LACMA'S objects conservation laboratory as a special Mellon fellow. Jane is on leave from the PRCC in Honolulu. Marcelle Andreasson, Assistant Paintings Conservator at LACMA, will spend six weeks this fall working at The Royal Museum of Art in Copenhagen. This exchange program, known as International Partnerships Among Museums, is directed by AAM and ICOM. In the spring of 1991, Ms. Lone Bogh, a paintings conservator from this Danish institution, will spend six weeks working at LACMA with the paintings conservation staff. Scott Heffley, from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, will be working as a guest conservator in the Paintings Conservation Department at the Getty Museum in August of 1990. He will be restoring Bronzino's "Portrait of a Young Man" from the Nelson-Atkins collection during his stay at the Getty.

Regional Reporters:
Catherine McLean
Conservation Center
5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036 213/857-6169

Glenn Wharton
549 Hot Springs Road
Santa Barbara, CA 93108 805/565-3639

Hawaii

Jane Bassett recently attended the Getty Conservation Institute's two week course on preventive conservation. Jane is presently on a five month leave of absence from PRCC while she works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Dale Kronkright has been coordinating collection care workshops for collection managers in small museums and historical societies throughout Hawaii. This is part of a larger PRCC effort to develop an active preservation program at every collection holding organization in Hawaii and has received support over the last three years from Hawaii's State Foundation on Culture and the Arts (SFCA). In another 3 years, with continued SFCA support, PRCC will have surveyed most of Hawaii's institutions. As a result of the surveys, PRCC already is busy doing basic staff and volunteer training workshops and advising on storage and exhibit upgrade projects. Larry Pace has been busy at PRCC since December 1989 as the new Senior Paintings Conservator. There was a significant backlog when he arrived, and it has continued to grow as he gets established here. In June, Larry gave 2 public lectures at Bishop Museum covering the topics "Alterations of Works of Art" and "Fakes and Forgeries." In August, he will be attending the Getty Conservation Institute workshop "New Methods in the Cleaning of Paintings." He is somehow managing to find a little time to work in between the pursuit of his major interests: training in aikido, getting a tan and playing on the beach.

Regional Reporter:
Jane Bassett
PRCC
Bishop Museum
P. 0. Box 19000-A
Honolulu, HI 96817 808/848-4113

Arizona & New Mexico

In early June, Bettina Raphael and Claire Munzenrider, along with Museum of New Mexico archaeologist Eric Blineman, traveled to a site near Roswell, NM where they removed a four foot section of an Anasazi kiva mural depicting a serpent. The wall section has been transported to the Lab of Anthropology at the Museum of New Mexico where further testing and conservation will be carried out in consultation with Connie Silvers. Immediately following her trip to the field to recover a prehistoric mural section (see prior news entry), Bettina Raphael became the proud adoptive mother of a beautiful infant girl, Lilliana Matisse Raphael! Mother and baby Lilly are blissfully enjoying a 3 month maternity leave. Landis Smith has been overseeing the conservation of Southwest prehistoric, historic and contemporary pottery for a major exhibit which will open at the Museum of New Mexico's Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in August. Gloria Fraser Giffords, Paintings Conservator, worked with the mentor program at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco in June. She will be speaking at the Houston Museum of Art and the San Antonio Museum of Art on retablos in October. She and Assistant Conservator Carmen Erikson will be attending the IIC Brussels meetings. Nancy Odegaard of the Arizona State Museum in Tucson participated in the Getty Course on Consolidation of Painted Ethnographic Objects in June, and she was an invited observer in the National Park Service-Getty Course on Conservation for Field Archaeologists in March. She is managing a comprehensive Museum Emergency Preparedness Plan and a computerized conservation reporting system that is linked to the museum's larger collections database. In addition, she is coordinating several grant funded projects this fall: IMS surveys for the ASM photographs, archives and library, NSF archaeological textile stabilization, NEH conservation for a permanent ethnology exhibit, and NSF ethnographic storage. Debbie Hess Norris, Sharlane Grant and Vicki Cassman will be consulting at the museum this fall. Jim Roberts of the NPS-WACC Conservation Lab in Tucson will be presenting 2 papers at the ICOM Dresden meetings. He organized a 1 week course on Preventive Conservation in June for the National Park Service. Additional instructors in the course included Barbara Roberts, Nancy Odegaard and Jeannie Harold. Jeannie Harold is the new Assistant Conservator at the lab. She apprenticed under Toby Raphael at the Harper's Ferry Center. Laraine Daly Jones, of the Arizona Historical Society, was recently elected President of the Museum Association of Arizona. She arranged a 4 week Textile Conservation Course taught by Nanette Skov. She is currently working on two large preservation projects funded by NHRPC and IMS. Vicki Cassman, a private textile conservator based in Tempe, has returned from a busy year in Chile and in Delaware, teaching the Textile Conservation unit at the Winterthur Art Conservation Training Program. She will return to Chile for 2 weeks in September at the invitation of the Encuentro Regional de Conservation de Textiles Pre Colombios. This international conference is sponsored by UNESCO/PUND/Getty. Sharlane Grant, book conservator at Arizona State University, is completing the stabilization of 560 landscape architecture drawings from the University of Iowa in her recently- expanded lab. Her new assistant for bindings is Beverly Schlee, who comes from the University of Alabama.

Regional Reporters:
Landis Smith
Museum of New Mexico
208 Gonzales Road
Santa Fe, NM 87504 505/989-9379

Gloria Fraser Giffords
2859 N. Soldier Trail
Tucson, AZ 85 749 602/749-4070

Guest Reporter:
Nancy Odegaard
Arizona State Museum
University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721

Texas

Steven Pine has assumed the position of Furniture Conservator at the Bayou Bend Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Jill Whitten, a second year student in the Buffalo State College conservation graduate program, and Maite Leal, currently working in private practice in northern Italy, both completed summer work projects at Perry Huston and Associates. Jill's project focused on the treatment of modern paintings, and Maite's project focused on the treatment of paintings and painted objects. Maria Antonieta Palma, a conservator at the National Library of Chile in Santiago, is working as an intern for 9 months in the book conservation section of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. She will be returning to Chile in December. Kathleen Kiefer is volunteering as a pre-training program intern in the Conservation Lab at the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery. Mary Baughmann, Craig Jensen, Larry Landis, Karen Pavelka, and Mark Rutledge were all featured speakers on various preservation issues at the May meting of the Southwest Society of Archivists in Austin. Sue Murphy and James Stroud presented a joint paper entitled "Ink and Paper from the Conservator's Perspective" at the Annual Symposium of the Association of Forensic Document Examiners in San Antonio in May. James Stroud also discussed the role of the conservation profession in the establishment of a national agenda for the preservation of books and documents in their original formats at the Rare Book and Manuscript section of the American Library Association's pre-conference in Minneapolis in June. In July, he discussed preservation and conservation issues at the Central American Archivists annual meeting, entitled "V Jornadas para el Desarrolo Archivisticos" in San Jose, Costa Rica. Carol Mancu-Ungaro received a 1989-90 John J. McCoy Fellowship for Art administered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The fellowship enabled her to study contemporary art in Germany and meet with conservators of contemporary art in Cologne and Dusseldorf during the month of June. Sue Murphy attended the UKIC conference, "Appearance, Opinion, Change: Evaluating the Look of Paintings" in London on June 29th and 30th. Sally Shelton attended the July summer school course entitled "Materials for Conservation" taught by Velson Horie at the Institute of Archeology in London. Karen Pavelka is presenting her paper, "The Establishment of a Treatment Archive as an Extension of the Documentation of Conservation Treatments" at the conference on book and paper conservation in Budapest this September. The paper has also been accepted for publication in The Restaurator.

Regional Reporter:
Mark van Gelder
Conservation Dept.
Huntington Art Gallery
University of Texas
23rd & San Jacinto
Austin TX 78712 512/471-9294

Pacific Northwest

Gail Joice, Associate Director for Museum Services at the Seattle Art Museum, is pleased to announce the completion of a major duct-cleaning project at the museum, funded through a city special project budget. The ducts were completely vacuumed for the first time in 50 years, and massive amounts of accumulated particulate matter were removed. Sample-collecting glass slides were placed in the galleries several weeks before the cleaning. Particulate matter on these slides will be analyzed and compared to material collected on slides placed in the galleries after cleaning. The duct vacuuming is part of a comprehensive environmental improvement effort initiated after a General Conservation Survey. Jack Lucas has completed conservation treatment of two large (4' x 22') paintings by NW impressionist C.S. Price, housed in the Pendleton Public Library. They were removed from the walls where they had been adhered with white lead, cleaned, tacking strips added, placed on new stretchers and returned to Pendleton. The entire project took approximately one year. Sonja Sopher, Paintings Conservator at the Oregon Art Institute, has completed a CAP survey for the University of Oregon Museum in Eugene. Jack Thompson recently completed a preventive conservation workshop at GCI. He has also filmed a Spanish-language videotape, Papel Marmoleado, with his intern Lil Mena, for ISTOR Productions. His studio was visited by the Ecuadoran conservator Nelly Peralta de Moreno, in Oregon for a World Affairs Council meeting. They discussed training possibilities and exchanges between the two countries. Jack has also produced a training video for Peter Mecklenberg of Museum Services Corp. on use of their fold and edge casting machine. Lori van Handel worked on outdoor sculptures during the summer for Fine Arts Conservation (Linda Merk). She begins the painting conservation training program at Queens's University in Kingston, Ontario, in September.

Regional Reporter:
Patricia Tuttle-Leavengood
Art Conservation Services
215 2nd Avenue So.
Seattle, WA 98104 206/587-3725

San Francisco Bay Area

Michael O'Malley of Queens University training program is at SFMOMA for a summer internship, June through August. Neil Cockerline of SFMOMA has been promoted from assistant conservator to associate conservator. Administrative assistant Pamela Siciliano-Lucido has left SFMOMA to return to Guam with her husband Jay and her new baby daughter Ariana. Paula DeCristofaro, formerly of the National Gallery in Washington, will join SFMOMA staff in September as assistant conservator. NEA intern Dee Ardrey and senior conservator Will Shank are studying the SFMOMA Clyfford Still collection in anticipation of an upcoming international retrospective of Still's work. Margaret (Meg) Geiss-Mooney is pleased to announce the arrival of her two new "assistants," Laura Elise and Elizabeth Erica, on April 7, 1990. She anticipates expanding into large scale tapestry conservation in about ten years. In Berkeley, Mark Harpainter, private conservator specializing in furniture, has been working on 10 early 18th century Italian silver-gilt and painted chairs. The treatment chiefly involves regilding, toning and inpainting. The chairs are privately owned and are in daily use. Peter Thuring, a gilder in private practice from southern England, will joined in August to assist in this project.

Regional Reporter: Therese O'Gorman Oakland Museum History Dept. 1000 Oak Street Oakland, CA94607 415/273-3806

Guest Reporter:
Will Shank
San Francisco, California

San Diego

Will Chandler of Graham-Chandler Inc., art preservation consultants, has joined a conservation team 1that will restore the Rancho Guajome, a 20-room abode built in 1853 by rancher Cave J. Couts. The Rancho is to eventually be developed as a San Diego County Museum. The team for this extensive conservation project is headed by restoration architect Milford Wayne Donaldson and includes electrical, mechanical & structural engineers as well as archaeologists and historic landscape architects. Malcolm Warner, Prints and Drawings Curator at the San Diego Museum of Art, hosted the inaugural meeting of the San Diego Prints and Drawing Club in June. Judging by the large turnout of collectors and Malcolm's enthusiastic leadership, the club promises to be an important part of the city's art community. Monica Jaworski, private paintings conservator, traveled to Switzerland to work with Christoph von Imhoff on the conservation of paintings by Varlin. She will return to Europe in Sept. to attend the 1990 IIC Congress in Brussels & to work with von Imhoff. The Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC) has three new staff members. Cecile Mear has joined the three conservators in the paper studio as assistant paper Conservator. Deborah Ireland has taken over the job of Business Administrator. The position of assistant preparator has been filled by Christamaria Keith. Janos Novak, frame technician at BACC, attended "The Conservation of Picture Frames," a one week class taught by Jonathan Thornton at the Intermuseum Conservation Association Laboratory in Oberlin. Alfredo Antognini, Paintings Conservator at BACC, visited his native city of Buenos Aires for an exhibition of his oil paintings. Sheila Pullen, a student at the Queen's University MAC Graduate Program, served a summer internship in the paintings studio at BACC. Two BACC conservators participated in a series of art conservation lectures held at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum. Marc Harnly delivered a presentation on conservation of photographic materials. Betsy Court lectured on paintings conservation; she also plans to attend the 1990 IIC Congress in Brussels.

Regional Reporter:
Marc Harnly
BAAC
P.O. Box 3755
San Diego, CA 92103 619/236-9702