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Friday, February 15, 2013

Those of us who volunteer to assist in disaster response are, obviously, not in it for the money. Private conservators are not getting paid while volunteering. Many of us are away from family and friends, work hard and go to bed exhausted during recovery efforts. So what is in it for us?

For me, as for many of us, it is the giving back to our community, assisting in saving our culture, and the joy of helping someone preserve a little bit of his/her history. The piece below is a perfect example. I captured the title “For Matthew, May 14-May 15, 1976″ commemorating the birth of the artist’s son.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

All the work on the artwork damaged by Hurrican Sandy is done by volunteers. It’s a great opportunity for an intern to learn about assessing and cleaning paintings while on the job with a volunteer conservator. Today we had a student volunteer who is studying to become a paintings conservator. She assisted the volunteer conservator, had the opportunity to meet with two artists and work on several different pieces of art. Here she is assisting with vacuuming a canvas. You can already see the difference where they have cleaned.

Sometimes the best person to clean artwork is the artist because he/she knows the piece very intimately. The artist knows what materials were used to create the work and what the original looked like. For instance, the charcoal pieces that I was working with were smeared. Since I don’t know what the original looked like, I am the not the best person to clean the artwork — the artist is. I taught an artist’s assistant how to clean artwork on paper. She knows his work intimately and can consult with the artist as needed.

The paintings conservator worked with an another artist today and taught her how to vacuum clean her works on canvas. I also showed her how to clean the canvas wood stretchers. Since the wood stretchers are made of soft, porous wood, the frames will eventually need to be replaced. In the meantime, some of the mold has been cleaned off, reducing health risks.

There is no way that we can clean all the artwork in the time we have at the CRC. By training others on basic cleaning, we increase our “cleaning power.” Plus the work can continue once the CRC is closed.

L’Année philologique covers a wide array of subjects, including Greek and Latin literature and linguistics—which includes early Christian texts and patristics—Greek and Roman history, art, archaeology, philosophy, religion, mythology, music, science, and scholarly subspecialties such as numismatics, papyrology and epigraphy.

Please send additional comments to Chris Africa.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

We had a very busy day at the Cultural Recovery Center in Brooklyn. The volunteer paintings conservator examined a couple of paintings that an artist brought in during the morning, just before noon she removed an artwork from a frame and examined the piece for mold and damage, in the afternoon she examined art on canvas and tested for mold.

The volunteer object conservator spent most of the day cleaning a wooden object with a vacuum cleaner, brush and soot sponge.

An artist’s daughter-in-law spent several hours vacuuming his artwork on canvas.

I spent the day assisting the paintings conservator photodocumenting each piece that she examined and spent a couple hours inspecting art on paper for mold.

Twentieth Century Religious Thought will be a multivolume, cross-searchable online collection that brings together the seminal works and archival materials related to key worldwide religious thinkers from the early 1900s until the turn of the 21st century.
It will cover the major strains and new directions in religious questioning that have often altered the very framework of given traditions. In addition to studying scholars’ ideas separately, researchers will be able to explore broader schools of thought to examine how different theories, denominations, faiths, and political and cultural groups have intersected, differed, and influenced one another. Central topics in Volume I will include Protestantism, Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Lutheranism, liberation theology, systematic theology, dialectical theology, and theocentric theology.

Please send additional comments to Rachel Carreon.

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