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In preparation for the Museum’s current exhibition, Brushed With Light, conservators in the Paper Conservation Department examined over ninety watercolors. It was great to work on familiar works as well as those never examined or exhibited before. A common condition problem we observed during examination was the presence of unstable paint layers. Watercolors consist of pigments ground in gum arabic, a water soluble gum usually from the acacia plant, which holds or binds the pigment particles together and allows the color to be brushed onto a paper support. There are numerous causes for the paint to become unstable and lift away from the paper, including an insufficient amount or deterioration of the gum binder which can cause cracking and if left untreated, can result in paint loss. Some artists painted their images thickly, squeezing paint right out of a tube to create raised areas of paint called impasto. These areas are vulnerable to loss due to expansion and contraction of the paper and to a lack of adhesion to the paper. Some artists occasionally mixed additional gum into their paint, or as a glaze on top to add saturation to areas of flat color. With age these areas can become brittle and tend to crack and loosen.

In this photograph, I am consolidating lifting and powdery paint on the watercolor, The Samuel Fleet Homestead by Frances Flora Palmer, from the 1850s. The watercolor depicts a house which once stood at the corner of Fulton and Gold streets in Brooklyn and was reproduced in an 1884 publication, History of Kings County and Brooklyn by Stiles.

The piece was previously attached to a stretcher and in the image above you can see it was darkened in the central area where it was once exposed to light. It had been treated extensively in the past, but recent examination under magnification revealed areas of lifting paint where the artist used additional gum binder to enrich shadows in the trees and foreground, and to add dimension to the horses and some of the figures.

To consolidate, or re-adhere the loose pigment particles and flakes, I applied an adhesive using this ultrasonic mister. Most of the time consolidation is done with an adhesive introduced with a very small brush under the microscope under one paint flake at a time. The advantage of the mister is that the adhesive—in this case a photo-grade gelatin in ethanol and deionized water—is formed into minute particles which are smaller than the pigment particles. Because of their size they are easily absorbed into the pigment without changing the appearance of the paint layer and can be applied to a larger area at one time. This is an incredibly successful and useful technique for stabilizing powdery paint and small, light paint flakes as with this watercolor. In this case I am carrying out the treatment on a suction table which creates a downward pull to further enhance the absorption of the consolidant into the paper.

In my next post, we’ll go under the microscope to see the before and after effects of consolidation with an ultrasonic mister on another watercolor in the exhibition.

Jook Leung from 360VR came in today to shoot a few panoramas of our Luce Visible Storage area. These should be on our website within a month and I’ll post an update here when they go live. Recently, Jook shot a VR of The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago and we are pretty excited to be able to show off these exhibitions in this dynamic way.

Shown here under construction in 2003 (left) and as it is today (right), Visible Storage, was the second and final phase of the Luce Center for American Art. The space was completed in 2005 and includes 5,000 square feet of visible storage area.

Hand-finished aluminum cabinets (shown here during construction and after completion) contain ceramics, pewter, glass, silver, Tiffany lamps, twentieth-century design objects, and nineteenth-century furniture with original upholstery, as well as a significant number of large- and small-scale bronze and marble sculptures.

Two large, glass-walled bays contain nearly six hundred paintings from the collection, all on oversized, rolling screens.

Using computer kiosks incorporated into the cases, visitors have access to portions of the Museum’s collections database. The database, which includes information on the roughly 2000 objects in the installation, can also be searched on our website.

Infinite Island opened nearly three weeks ago at the Brooklyn Museum, and thousands of people have already visited the exhibition. We’ve been getting great feedback - check out what visitors are saying.

Roughly half of the show’s participating artists are back in town for this evening’s Members’ reception, as well as to participate in various panels and discussions taking place at the Museum over the next few weeks. Festivities and events include, of course, our next Target First Saturday on October 6^th. That weekend will feature many programs and activities focusing on Infinite Island, so be sure to stop by!

Annalee Davis, one of our presenting artists, installs Just Beyond my Imagination at the Brooklyn Museum.

The artists’ return to Brooklyn also offered a great opportunity to organize an informal artists’ talk in the galleries tomorrow, Friday, September 21^st. Do you have a question about a work in Infinite Island? Would you like to meet your favorite artist in the exhibition? Beginning at 12:30 PM tomorrow, over a dozen Infinite Island artists will be on-hand in the galleries, ready to discuss their work and receive your questions and comments. One artist will present every half-hour through closing at 5:00 PM, and talks will occur simultaneously on both floors of the exhibition. When you arrive, you can find the final schedule for tomorrow’s talks in the Lobby, or ask for more information at our Visitor Service desk. We look forward to seeing you!

Remy Jungerman installs Sometimes Travelers Don’t Come Back… at the Brooklyn Museum. Hear Remy discuss this work tomorrow!

Contact tamara.schechter@brooklynmuseum.org with any questions about this event.

Artist Steve Ouditt installing his Infinite Island work, “Excerpts From the Propagandist’s Diary of L. Padre Grande,” 2007.

What happens after an exhibition opens? Even after the works of art are displayed in the galleries, activity behind the scenes at the Museum does not stop. In the case of museum educators and educational programmers like me, our work really begins after an exhibition opens, but starts many months before. To prepare for Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, I have been working closely with curator Tumelo Mosaka to decide what kinds of public programs related would offer innovative perspectives and interesting experiences for our visitors. After months of preparation, our inaugural public program for Infinite Island will take place this Saturday, September 22nd at 2 p.m.

Visualizing Caribbean Art and Culture in the Twenty-first Century includes five dynamic speakers who come from a variety of backgrounds and areas of expertise: Aisha Khan, Associate Professor of Anthropology at NYU and Director of Undergraduate Studies; Infinite Island catalog essayist Annie Paul, Associate Editor of the journal Small Axe and Head of Publications at Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Research at University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica; and Infinite Island artists Jean-Ulrick Dèsert, Deborah Jack and Steve Ouditt (pictured above). Tumelo Mosaka will moderate the event.

This is the first in a series of three panels and it should be exciting to hear the discussion of contemporary Caribbean art and culture with these artists and scholars. If you attend, let us know your thoughts.

Update 9/26/07: Photos posted to our Flickr account.

Armed with the “wish list” and approximate budget I described in my previous entries, the team of curators and trustees who were interested in finding a suitable object to acquire in honor of Amy Poster went out into the market. Every field of art has a slightly different market, so here’s a brief run-down of what it looks like for Asian art (I’m mostly talking about antiquities here, although the market for contemporary Asian art is remarkably similar).

First, there are auction houses, mostly holding sales in New York, London, and Hong Kong, although there are some regional houses in Europe and other American cities that also get good things. These are pretty straight-forward selling venues, with prices made public and almost everything trading hands out in the open. One doesn’t need to be in the “in crowd” to buy at an auction, but there are some vaguely secretive elements, such as the reserve (or minimum acceptable price) for any given object and the fact that many buyers choose to bid by phone or through agents, so you don’t always know who’s buying what.

Museums often have trouble buying at auction because lots of people have to sign off on a museum purchase ahead of time and of course when you head into an auction you don’t know what the final price will be. Auction houses publish catalogs listing the objects in an upcoming sale about a month in advance, and then those objects are on display for about a week before the sale. That’s barely enough time for most curators to secure the permission they need before buying something. Savvy curators will often arrange to preview select objects from a sale long before the catalog is available. Really savvy curators will take a conservator along with them to see a potential purchase so he or she can assess its condition and look for tell-tale signs of reconstruction or forgery. Of course, if the auction is in a distant city, then going to see things in person is either costly or impossible. Sometimes, curators will ask someone they trust to check out the object for them, but that’s frankly a little nerve-wracking.

On those somewhat rare occasions when a museum pursues an object through auction, they often send an outside agent (maybe a dealer, maybe just a friend) to do the bidding. There are several reasons why they might want to do this, but the main concern is that if everyone sees a curator bidding on something, they might think “it must be a really good object because a museum wants it; maybe I should bid on it, too” and of course one doesn’t want too much competition. But whoever is doing the bidding on the museum’s behalf, they have been given strict instructions about the absolutely highest amount they can bid. I have lost objects by one bid because of these limits, but of course they’re necessary so the museum stays within its budget.

The other major source for Asian art is the many galleries and private dealers who are located all over the world, with particular concentrations in New York and London. Galleries have regular business hours when you can walk in for a casual browse. Private dealers are open by appointment only and are often located in less obvious places, like apartments. A particularly handy way for a novice to get to know these businesses is the pair of Asian art fairs that take place in New York in March, because the fairs attract dealers from all over the world. But there are plenty of galleries that are not represented at the fairs, so discovering them (and figuring out which ones are trustworthy) is often a matter of word of mouth.

Buying from a dealer or gallery can be much less stressful for curators because there is no set deadline for purchase and because one can negotiate and then set a price before presenting the potential acquisition to the administration for approval. It’s often possible to bring an object from a dealer into the Museum for in-depth examination by the curator and conservators prior to purchasing it, which is another luxury that auction houses cannot offer. Museums are famous for moving at a glacial pace in almost everything they do, and making acquisitions is no exception, but I do try to be considerate by pushing the decision process along: dealers have bills to pay like everyone else.

Whether you visit a gallery or a private dealer, there is a good chance that what you see when you visit is only a fraction of what they have in their inventory. And this is one of the major ways that these businesses differ from auction houses: dealers will often save special objects for their best clients. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen a fabulous object in a collector’s home and wondered “where did they find THAT?” only to be told that they got it recently from a well-known dealer who never showed it to anyone else.

The bad news for curators is that most of us can’t afford to be regular or top-dollar customers, so we are often shown things after they’ve been passed by private collectors. The good news for curators is that dealers like to see their objects go to museums. And this is another way that a wish list can help a curator. If you tell a dealer that your museum is looking for a really nice Chinese Buddhist sculpture, then there’s a much better chance that they will contact you as soon as they have one. Sometimes they even contact you before they have it, saying “I think I can get a collector to part with this, if you think the Museum might be interested.” And this is where dealers can be your greatest allies when searching for an acquisition: they have seen more objects than any of us, and they’ve made careful note of where those objects were, how much they sold for, and how willing the current owners might be to sell.

It turns out that we found our Shiva through just such assistance from a dealer, but more on that front later…