Daly Conservation

This Saturday I will be driving from Wilmington, Delaware to Galveston, Texas with my boyfriend Daniel Cull. It should be a great trip, we’ve been planning it for the past few months and planning the trip is what is getting me through the last few days of school.  We leave on Saturday, drive to Asheville, NC and spend Sunday visiting Biltmore.  We will continue along on Sunday evening, to stay with two of my good friends in the suburbs of Atlanta.  Then on Monday we will drive to Natchez, Mississippi.  I have loved visiting Natchez from when I was a child and I can tell you more about Plantation culture than probably any other culture in America. I am really excited to introduce Dan to Natchez, especially as he is British and it is similar and different from the culture he knows of historic homes.  In Natchez we will be staying in the 1888 Wensel House and visiting local homes.  We will tour Natchez on Tuesday, then on Wednesday begin the drive to Dallas, Texas - with a stop in Natchitoches, Louisiana to meet up (maybe for lunch?) with Jason Church and Jeff Guin at the NCPTT.  There is talk of a podcast interview, and there may be some blogging from the road, we will see.

I will be spending this summer as an intern at the Nasher Sculpture Center, I am really excited to work with John Campbell and to spend a summer in Texas.  Most of my classmates are going to internships in Europe, China, or other exotic locations, but Texas is my briar-patch and I am thrilled to return home.

After Dallas Dan and I will drive to Galveston, Texas to see my younger sister Jean Clare get married.  I am really happy for her and I am excited to meet up with my quilting girl-friends in Galveston.

I was honored to be a guest blogger for the IIC blog this past week.  I was blogging about the 3rd IIC Roundtable, The plus/minus dilemma.  It was a lively discussion and I greatly enjoyed hearing the speakers and hearing comments from the audience members later.  I have been searing on the Indianapolis Museum of Art ~IMA~ webpage and found they list their average daily energy consumption, and the live-time temperature and humidity graph for  their special exhibitions gallery.  I was impressed with their tranparency and honesty.  I think we can all learn a lot from the IMA.

I just got back from a preventive conservation field trip to the 2010 Smithsonian Mountmaking Forum with more respect and admiration for what mountmakers accomplish quietly behind the scenes in museums. As a pre-program intern at the National Museum of the American Indian I had the opportunity to work with the mountmaker Shelly Uhlir.   It is great that the NMAI has a mountmaker in their conservation department, I think it really makes a difference.

The 2008 the first Mountmaking Forum was held at the Getty and from what I heard it was great for mountmakers to get together a talk about the unique challenges of their work.  The problem solving involved with holding fragile works of art securely but without incurring damage requires a great deal of thought and imagination.  I think it is something that could never be taught the way art conservation is taught in grad school, the knowledge of welding and becoming comfortable with the materials you work only comes with hands-on experience.

I really enjoyed the conference, it had around 200 participants, from 7 countries, and it was a professional, casual atmosphere.  The first day there were talks and all the question and answer sessions were kept until after 4 or 6 talks so all speakers were on stage together which led to some interesting panel type of discussions.  If you are dying to know what was said, these sessions are available to watch in online videos. I learned a lot and I realized the limitations of my own education and vocation, I am a conservator and not a mountmaker, but I hope my being at the conference showed my interest and genuine admiration for the work of mountmakers.