It's not quite "Antiques Roadshow," but Buffalo State College has its own version of the popular PBS series. The college's renowned Art Conservation Department held its annual art clinic Friday, during which a few dozen collectors brought in art, antiques and prized heirlooms in need of repair and restoration. A broken glass vase. An old silk banner. Blueprints of an 1840s church. Yellowing Currier & Ives prints.

Buffalo State's art conservation program is one of only three comprehensive, graduate-level programs in the United States, and some of the pieces brought into Friday's clinic provide its 20 graduate students with projects to help them master skills they'll need once they graduate and take jobs at galleries and museums.

"It's a wonderful painting that's worth giving attention to," said James Hamm, a professor of paintings conservation, peering down at an 1882 landscape painting of Silver Creek, which normally hangs in the village library. Sylvia Clarke, president of the library's fundraising group, brought it to the clinic. "What we need to do is investigate it a little further," he said. The painting appeared to have been restored in the past, Hamm told her. "Really?" Clarke said. "There's a lot of varnish that should come off the painting," Hamm told her. "This is a pretty big painting for us, so it will take a lot of work -- and a lot of time."

No appraisals of the items' value were offered. And not all of the objects and artwork brought in on Friday were chosen to be restored. The department faculty looks for a variety or pieces offering just the right degree of challenge for a student to complete over the course of an academic year.

"I'm looking for paintings that are historically interesting, and have problems that we don't already have," Hamm said during a break from the clinic appointments. "It could be simple problems or unusual problems, but I need them in order to teach the students how to deal with those problems." "We get all sorts of really, really interesting things," said Jonathan Thornton, professor of objects conservation. "Some of them are surprising in terms of their quality and significance." Thornton stood in a room on the second floor of Rockwell Hall surrounded by several graduate students and Steve Moyer of Rochester, who had brought with him five pieces, including a small glass vase from the French Art Nouveau movement.

They all stared down at the antique vase on a counter top. It was broken in two. "What is the technique used for this decoration?" asked one student. "Well, you tell me," Thornton said. "It's another layer of glass added on top," responded another student. "That's right," Thornton said. Thornton agreed to have his students restore the piece.

As with all the objects and artwork selected, the owner is charged a fee, which helps bring some money into the department, said Judy Walsh, professor of paper conservation. Walsh and her students looked at six Currier & Ives prints brought in by Larry Scott, of South Wales. "These are perfect projects for first-year students," Walsh said. "They need to be carefully washed in a way that preserves the watercolor." She told Scott it would cost $100 apiece, and warned him it could take more than a year for the restoration to be completed. "What do you think?" Walsh said. "Let's do it," said Scott, a professor of computer information systems at the college. A family member passed down the prints to Scott, and he was worried about the discoloration over time. "They've got a good reputation here," Scott said, "so I brought them in to see what they could do."

Restoring city statues: A monumental task
City to launch preservation effort to save beloved statues
By Brian Meyer
July 29, 2009

A bronze statue of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry is in danger of tipping over in Front Park. Bird droppings have caused serious corrosion on the monument to the U. S. naval hero. So many people have sat in Abraham Lincoln’s lap over the decades that all the rubbing and scratching have caused wear on the statue of Young Lincoln in Delaware Park’s Rose Garden. The statues of Presidents Grover Cleveland and Millard Fillmore outside City Hall are starting to corrode. Fourteen of the city’s most prominent outdoor monuments and five in City Hall are in dire need of attention. The Common Council has followed the recommendation of the Buffalo Arts Commission and fast-tracked approval of a $225,420 contract for the first phase of a long-term restoration project.

Buffalo is blessed with some impressive works of public art, said Thomas Herrera-Mishler, chief executive and president of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy. “But we’ve had 10 years of deferred maintenance, and this has taken a toll,” he said. The Commodore Perry monument in Front Park is among the more urgent priorities. Perry defeated the British naval fleet at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. “He’s about ready to fall over,” Herrera-Mishler warned.

Emerson Barr III, executive director of the arts commission, agreed, noting that cement is crumbling out of the interior, or the mold. Freezethaw cycles and redeposited material have lifted the statue off its ornate pink granite base. Other works that would be restored under the proposed contract include the statue of David in Delaware Park near the Scajaquada Expressway, Lincoln the Emancipator in the rear of the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, the bronze statue of Gen. Daniel Davidson Bidwell on Colonial Circle and the bust of John F. Kennedy in the City Hall lobby.

The $225,240 contract would be a down payment on a multiyear mission to repair and restore Buffalo’s public art, Barr and Herrera-Mishler said. In addition to the prominent statues and monuments that grace many city neighborhoods, dozens of portraits of former mayors — some dating to the 1840s — need urgent attention, Barr said. City Hall alone, he added, contains 74 works of art, many needing restoration. The last major restoration mission involving outside works of art was undertaken about a decade ago, city officials said. “There’s so much that needs to be done,” Barr said. “What we’re really doing with this [contract] is triage.”

Buffalo cannot allow the region’s “shared cultural heritage” to deteriorate, said Elizabeth Pena, director of Buffalo State College’s art conservation department. The program is one of just three comprehensive, graduate-level programs in the United States that trains students primarily in conserving objects, paper and paintings. “For a medium-sized city, Buffalo has a lot of public art,” Pena said. “It’s penny wise and pound foolish to not take care of your art.” The works not only enhance quality of life and beautify the city, but also help to promote Buffalo as a tourism destination for people who are interested in art and architecture, she said.

The Council has approved a contract with Russell-Marti Conservation Services, a Missouri company with experience in city restoration projects. The company will work with Jonathan Thornton, an art conservation expert at Buffalo State who also has been involved in previous restoration efforts. Initially, some Council members said the city was being asked to approve a bid that was higher than some proposals submitted by competing companies that expressed an interest in the restoration work. Barr said the bids had some glaring differences. Some companies, for example, use lasers to clean statues and monuments, he said. While that has achieved good results in some regions, Barr claimed it still is considered an experimental procedure. He said the arts commission, after consulting with restoration experts, believes a “conservative” cleaning method is a more prudent approach. “If you make a mistake with some items, you can’t just go back and redo it,” he said.

The Buffalo-born director of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services returned home Tuesday, hailing Buffalo State College’s art conservation department before leading a conference on preserving the nation’s collections. Anne-Imelda M. Radice said the city, with its rich collection of art and architecture, and the country were well-served by the Buffalo State program, one of just three comprehensive, graduate-level programs in the United States training students primarily in the conservation of paper, painting and objects.

“We brought ‘Connecting to Collections’ to Buffalo because this is where the action is, this is where the training is going on,” Radice said at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, as she looked over volumes of rare photographs from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building and other historical items being restored by art conservation students. Later, Radice added, “This is really the city that has the best conservation-preservation department; it really is.”

More than 300 people from 45 countries are signed up for the two-day conference in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, making Buffalo the fifth host city to convene a discussion among professionals about how to sustain treasured collections for future generations. For Radice, her return to the city where she grew up — and where past proved to be prologue — was somewhat bittersweet. “Every Saturday growing up, we would go to one of the cultural institutions — either the Albright-Knox, the Historical Society or the Science Museum. And then in the afternoon we would go to the library, so that was a ritual. It was bookended by a wonderful lunch and ice cream. It was definitely carrot and stick, but it did make an impression,” Radice said. She said she would be thinking of her late parents when she takes the conference stage. “Trying not to break down on the stage because I am from Buffalo is really one of the big challenges I have over the next couple of days,” Radice said. “I wish my parents were here to see this today, because I would have said to my father, ‘You see, it’s all your fault.’ ”

Radice lived on Linwood Avenue and attended elementary school and high school at Nardin Academy before graduating and moving away in the summer of 1965. She has gone on to achieve a unique feat in her career: Radice was appointed acting head of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992, during a tumultuous period, and served as acting assistant chairwoman for the National Endowment for the Humanities before being confirmed to her current job atop the Institute of Museum and Library Services in March 2006. The institute is the primary source of federal support for 17,500 museums and 122,000 libraries.

“I actually think I’m the only person who has even worked at each organization, and it is a tremendous honor to be able to say I had leadership roles with them. It’s certainly not something I would have expected,” Radice said. Her educational degrees include a doctorate in art and architectural history from the University of North Carolina. Radice also has been the architectural historian and later curator of the U. S. Capitol, and has headed nonprofit organizations. “She’s a terrific human being and an extremely competent individual — she was appointed by a Republican president and reappointed by President Obama, which is an indication of how competent she is,” said former Rep. John J. LaFalce, who serves on the Historical Society’s board of directors.

Perfect blend of interests
Conservator uses her skills from workrooms of BMA to distant digs

By Nick Madigan | nick.madigan@baltsun.com
March 8, 2009

A bright winter sun streams into a room at the Baltimore Museum of Art, far removed from the public galleries. Her eyes dense with concentration, Angie Elliott picks up what looks like a long toothpick and winds a small clump of cotton around its point, an improvised Q-tip, and dips it into a bottle of ethanol. Bending over a table, Elliott uses the damp tool to gently swab the surface of an ornate 16th-century chamfron, a piece of steel armor with inlays of gold and silver, made to protect a horse's forehead and nose in battle.

The armor, in the museum's possession since 1945, has never been exhibited. It is the task of Elliott, as one of the BMA's two conservators of objects - as opposed to, say, paintings or drawings - to remove the accumulated corrosion and grime of the ages from the piece and restore it, as far as possible, to the glory of its prime, ready for public viewing with other Renaissance works later this year.

Elliott, 30, looks immeasurably content, her job of just two months the welcome culmination of an intense apprenticeship not only in the workshops of academia - Birmingham Southern College in her native Alabama, where she double-majored in sculpture and art history; and Buffalo State College in New York, where she received a master's degree in art conservation - but also in arduous archaeological excavations. It was in the search for remnants of the ancient Turkish city of Gordion, once capital of the Phrygian kingdom, that Elliott found her calling.

On her table at the BMA, a diverse set of objects awaits her attention alongside the horse's armor: a boxwood Madonna and Child, carved in Germany in the early 15th century; an unknown artist's ceramic plate from the 16th or 17th century; two contemporary masks, one from Mali and the second from Papua New Guinea and made of cane, palms, feathers and pigment; a flying angel holding a crown and scepter, its date and creator unknown; and a glass-and-bronze table lamp made by the French art nouveau glassmaker Emile Gallé.

We asked Elliott about her interest in conservation and her latest project.

You liked art as a kid? I was sort of the strange one in my family, the one who liked art and wanted to go to museums, and got into that whole thing. We sometimes traveled to Atlanta to see shows at the High Museum, mostly with friends. As an undergrad I specialized in sculpture and art history, and I was really interested in archaeology, but I didn't know how to pull it all together into something I wanted to do. I didn't know if I wanted to be a sculptor and I didn't think I wanted to be a curator. I knew I didn't want to be an archaeologist full time, but I went on a dig when I was an undergrad, in Turkey. I loved it. We uncovered some amazing mosaics that I was really enthralled with. I couldn't get over them. We didn't have a conservator on the dig, even though in Turkey you do usually have conservators to help when things are excavated because there's a big environmental shift from something that's wet and in the ground, in the temperature and the humidity, and it really changes when you take it out of the ground, and things really start to deteriorate. So I was really curious about what happens to an object once it comes out of the ground. I went back to Alabama and started to do research on how you deal with a mosaic when it comes out of the ground, how do you preserve it. So that's how I found out about conservators and conservation and how they work hand in hand with archaeologists on sites to conserve, to really preserve objects as they come out of the ground.

So that led you to museums - less strenuous than working on archaeological sites? I still work on digs, though. I don't know if I'll be able to go this year but I usually try to go for a few weeks every year. Funding is really tight right now.

You keep learning, basically, if you go out onto the digs themselves. It's hands-on. Yes, it's very hands-on. And I also write grants and bring students there. It's not part of my museum work at all. That's all separate from what I do here.

Tell me about the horse's armor. This is the interesting story behind this one. We were all thinking it was a child's breastplate, but it's actually the top piece for a horse's head. When I first looked at it, I thought it was all gold. It's steel, a technique called damascene, where they would apply wires or foil onto grooves in the metal, and if you look at it up close you can see that's gold. They've cut very shallow grooves and hammered wire or thick foil onto it and it just stays there. It was all inlaid, what we call a false inlay. There's silver, gold and foil all over this. I saw these other areas that looked like a lot of different metals. A lot of the gold had the corrosion of the steel that had grown over it so it was difficult to see what was there. It was dark gray. You couldn't see the gold. The cleaning revealed that whole area. It didn't look as ornate as it does now, because so much of it was tarnished and corroded. For this one, it's been really effective to use the abrasiveness of the cotton, and that with the ethanol has been removing the corrosion. It's like tarnish on silver.

A piece like this, a lot of it involves basic cleaning, as opposed to restoration? In this piece, in particular, yes. It can really range depending what you're working on, on your ultimate goal. Sometimes it's cleaning, sometimes it's restoration, sometimes it's just making sure that you're preserving it. So these pieces are going through some conservation to make sure they're presentable and that they're OK to be displayed.

Your standard for OK might be different from someone else's. It depends on the object. If you're looking at metal, you want to make sure that something is not corroding in a way that's dangerous, you know, that it's stable, that it's not going to continue to deteriorate. If you were working on something and a piece of it was missing, you would have a choice to replace the piece or leave it as it is.

What would usually dictate that choice? It's a decision I don't make on my own. I would talk to the curator about it and we would decide if it's necessary. Sometimes, it's distracting if something's missing - you don't really see the rest of the object. If something large is gone, your eye goes straight to it. So sometimes you'll do an aesthetic restoration to help people see what's really there. If it's something that's purely decorative, you might go all the way and make it blend in. If it's archaeological, because it's used for research as well, you might not go that far. It might just be a partial restoration that you can see to help complete what was there.

Generally, if a work of art is on display, and has been restored or a piece has been replaced, would it say that on the label? Usually not, but it's done in such a way that someone will be able to tell. We're not trying to fake anyone later on about what we have. There are techniques that conservators could use to figure out what's there. And everything that we do is heavily documented, from photos to written reports. We want it to be very obvious that it's there. And one of the other main things is that whatever we do needs to be reversible and needs to be done with materials that don't age or deteriorate, something that's stable over time.

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.

Native past preserved for future
By Joe Duggan / Lincoln Journal Star
Sunday, May 11, 2008

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.”…

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

Buffalo State students help preserve city's cultural gems

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.