In the News

	Buffalo Bill's Billboard Laura Schell pieced together an 1878 theatre treasure By: Jana Bommersbach 4/01/08 (excerpt)

For 124 years, the poster lay hidden behind a brick wall, its flimsy paper deteriorated “beyond brittle” but preserved enough that when a construction crew started tearing away the wall, the workers instantly realized this was something special. That was June 2002. Now, six years later, we can all admire a billboard of a play staged by Buffalo Bill Cody in March 1878 at the Allen Opera House in Jamestown, New York. The thanks for saving this valuable piece of history goes to a variety of groups and individuals… but the work of saving this treasure fell on the shoulders of a 39-year-old paper conservationist. Laura Schell (’97) still sounds excited when she talks about the biggest project she’s ever tackled, and sometimes even she has to marvel at how it all came together. “The day I arrived, it was raining, and the billboard was pro- tected behind a tarp,” she recalls. Gingerly, corners of the tarp were lifted so she could get her first look, and that peek was all she had. “I never saw the whole thing, I just saw little parts. It was a lot like a huge jigsaw puzzle without knowing what was missing —we didn’t have any box top to show us the whole picture.” Her work started with 17 boxes of fragments that had fallen off the wall and been lovingly collected by volun- teers—pieces so flimsy the wind could whip them away. Many pieces still clung to the wall, its old glue long ago deteriorated. Although it all sounds like a mess, Schell says, “You could tell we would get something great.” Read the entire article on the True West Magazine's website.
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Native past preserved for future By Joe Duggan / Lincoln Journal Star Sunday, May 11, 2008
	Assistant Conservator Rebecca Cashman (’07) works on a pair of moccasins from the Nebraska State Historical Society's Native artifacts collection at the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Omaha.
OMAHA — Two people, separated by decades, ponder the same moccasin. One, likely a woman, used glass beads to create a colorful mosaic that turned plain leather into something of value, something worth saving. Did she live 100 years ago? What did she witness of the unyielding assault on her people? Did she fear her skills, passed down through generations, would end with her? The moccasin offers no answers, only more questions for Rebecca Cashman (’07), an assistant conservator with the Nebraska State Historical Society. It rests on a table in the objects laboratory of the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Omaha. Nearby are the conservator’s tools: tweezers, needles, thread, tissue-thin paper and dropper bottles containing solvents and adhesives. For decades, the moccasin was stored on a basement shelf at the Museum of Nebraska History in Lincoln. Time and wear have unraveled a bit of sinew, freeing perhaps a couple of dozen beads hardly bigger than mustard seeds. Cashman tries to figure out how to put them back where the unknown artisan originally placed them. A maddening puzzle perhaps, but it fascinates her. Artifact conservation provides a nexus for Cashman’s training in history, chemistry and art. She is on a team working to conserve and catalog Nebraska’s collection of roughly 3,300 Native artifacts. The project, which started in January, will take two years and will cost close to half a million dollars.The project will not only preserve the artifacts, but also will provide expanded and safer storage of them. And that’s a responsibility the Historical Society believes goes to the heart of its mission, said Deborah Long, objects curator at the Ford Center. “These have to stay here forever,” she said. “We have to save them forever.”…
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Inside Art: Flowers for the Kimbell by Carol Vogel (excerpt) April 4, 2008
The Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, known internationally for its rich holdings, has never had a Dutch flower painting in its collection. Until now. In what many experts consider a long overdue purchase, it recently acquired “Vase of Flowers With a Curtain,” a 1615 painting by the Baroque artist Jacques de Gheyn II... Known to scholars only from black-and-white reproductions in books, the painting has been in the same family since 1924 and until recently hung in a house that Charles Beddington, the London dealer who sold it to the Kimbell, described only as “deep in the English countryside.”... Claire Barry (’81), the Kimbell’s chief conservator, will spend the next three to four months cleaning the still life. Because the painting is untouched, much of its detail is obscured under a yellowed, uneven varnish. “We’re proud of buying it in its uncleaned state,” Mr. Warner said. “We want to do the cleaning ourselves. It has a bit of a haunted-mansion look at the moment.” Click here for the full article on NewYorkTimes.com
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Buffalo State students help preserve city's cultural gems By Tom Buckham News Staff Reporter March 24, 2008 Right: Ann Alba, left, and Katrina Bartlett iron the wrinkled tacking margins of one of Phil Sims' paintings at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Photo Sharon Cantillon, Buffalo News.
One day between winter storms, three Buffalo State College graduate students filed across Elmwood Avenue to Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where they spent the morning on their knees in the marble-floored 1905 wing, stretching a 12x12-foot canvas. Not any canvas, but Phil Sims’ monochromatic painting “Marienbad,” part of the just-concluded exhibition “The Panza Collection: An Experience of Color and Light.” The students were from Buffalo State’s art conservation curriculum, one of the few academic programs of its type in the United States and — since 2002 — part of the museum studies department, which has fostered partnerships with the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, Buffalo Museum of Science, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum and Burchfield-Penney Art Center as well as Albright-Knox. In return for course credit, students can be found in those places almost every day, working as volunteers or interns to preserve the city’s cultural treasures. Click here to read more...
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	Conservation Minded November, 2007 Jessica Lyons, ABN Contributing Editor
Pablo Picasso’s celebrated painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” transformed the art world when it was unveiled 100 years ago. By the time The Museum of Modern Art acquired the piece in 1939, it was already considered a pivotal painting in the development of modern art. It had achieved immortality over the years, but it had also accumulated surface dirt and discoloration from wax and varnish used in previous treatments. …In the early 2000s, conservators began their work on the painting, and in December 2004, the restoration was complete—a blessing to MoMA’s permanent collection and to modern art in general. To read the entire article, click here...
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“Mocotaugan” Carving Knives by Jonathan Thornton Winter 2007/2008 Issue Inspired by the tool-making traditions of northeastern Native Americans and the people of the South Pacific, Thornton makes these crooked knife tools, called “mocotaugan,” and uses them for carving. The handles, finished with wipe-on polyurethane, are (from top) curly maple, apple, “lemon” wood degame, and apple. To make the fiddlehead-fern knife (bottom in photo), Thornton employed an Iroquois technique, casting a pewter inlay to hold the blade in the handle.	People on the Move Buffalo Edition December 21-27, 2007 Elizabeth Peña, director of the Art Conservation Program at Buffalo State College, and Susan Maguire, lecturer, Anthropology, have been named editor and associate editor of the Northeast Historical Archaeology, a journal of the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology. With Peña and Maguire’s term commencing in January 2008, the editorial office for the peer-reviewed journal moves from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, to Buffalo State College.
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	A More Precise Version of Your Chariot Awaits By Carol Vogel March 29, 2007 For close to a century, schoolchildren have been paraded by the Monteleone chariot, one of the Metropolitan Museum’s most prized objects. Teachers explained to them how in 1902 a farmer in a remote Italian village accidentally unearthed the remains of a tomb, which held the pieces of this 2,600-year-old Etruscan chariot. But the Met’s curators long suspected that the chariot might not have been correctly assembled in 1903, the year the museum bought and reconstructed it. To read more click here...

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Heirlooms are rescued in Buffalo State Art Clinic October 9, 2007 By Paula Voell, News Staff Reporter Clutching cardboard boxes and plastic bags, those who show up at the annual Art Clinic harbor one hope – that they go home empty-handed. That would mean the treasured – though somehow damaged – object they’d brought in would now be in careful and caring hands at the Buffalo State College Art Conservation Program. If all went well, it would be returned to them in a year or more, perhaps not “good as new” but stabilized, cleaned up, de-stained, patched, painted. In a word – conserved. Teachers and the 30 students in the program, one of only three in this country, might examine the object with radiographic and digital imaging technology, maybe put paintings into a humidity box to relax the paint, subject paper items to tests and observe them over light boxes. And then they’d devise a conservation strategy. It could mean applying specialized adhesives, solvents, waxes and paints, while also applying their considerable scientific and artistic knowledge to preservation. To read the entire article, click here...
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	Auspicious Vision Edward Wales Root’s American Collection in Utica Fall 2007, By Sara Bisi ('08) Since my show, I’ve been busy matting my early things,” wrote Buffalo Painter Charles Burchfield to his friend and patron Edward Wales Root in March, 1934. “As you remember, I had them on those wretched gray mounts, and they never looked well.” … Near the end of his life, Root spent seven years as art consultant at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art (MWPAI), and upon his death, bequeathed 227 artworks by 80 20th-century American artists to the Utica museum. To honor the 50th anniversary of Root’s gift, the MWPAI has mounted “Auspicious Vision: Edward Root and American Modernism,” an exhibition showcasing all of the paintings and works on paper in the collection... To read more, click here...