Halfway Point

I can't believe I'm writing this—our Getty internship is more than halfway complete. We were warned during the first week that we would feel this way by Week 5, but I think we're all still shocked at how quickly the time has passed.

And it's no wonder! We've had very busy schedules for the past few weeks. In addition to the trip to Culver City and the Getty Arts Summit I blogged about, we also went to a Surrealism lecture at the Getty Research Institute and a Genji Symposium here at Scripps. We met conservators Aneta Zebala and Hisaji Sekichi. And a couple weeks ago, we spent a day in LA with Samella Lewis and Alison Saar. One of my projects this summer has been to reasearch pieces in the Scripps College Samella Lewis Collection and write about them, so meeting Samella and Alison was especially exciting for me. Alison told us about the projects she's been working on lately and her experiences with public art projects. She was wonderfully down-to-earth and kind.

And talking to Samella Lewis was kind of surreal. Have you ever read so much about someone's life and work that you started to feel like you knew them? That's how I was beginning to feel about Samella Lewis. But it turns out there was a lot of information about her that I simply couldn't have learned from my research. There are so many intimate details that get left out of academic articles and museum catalogues and even transcribed interviews. It's really impossible to know someone without actually looking them in the face and hearing what they have to say come straight from their own mouth. Samella had lots of personal anecdotes about her life to share with us. She regaled us with stories from her time spent in Bayou Tesch, Louisiana, which is a place that has inspired several of her pieces. (A few of which are in our Permanent Collection.) It was really a treat to here her talk about her work.

And today we painted tiles at First Street Gallery. I think McKenzie is going to post about that soon, so I'll let her tell you about it. When we aren't busy traveling around and meeting exciting, new people, I've been working on planning the fall exhibit for the Clark Humanities Museum at Scripps. It's going to be a show that features several pieces from our Permanent Collection. I just finished my preliminary checklist and proposal today, but I'll post more information about the exhibit soon!

St. Michael Update!

In my last post, I mentioned that St. Michael's gilding would be finished in the next several days. And indeed it was; after nine long months of careful work, all of the remaining gold has been secured. And how it shimmers!

The next step is structural conservation. Tiffany, Donna, and I have already removed about a dozen metal handmade and machine-made nails from different areas of the sculpture. This step is incredibly important because St. Michael is carved from wood. Wood has a life of its own, breathing and moving with changes in climate. If anything is embedded in the wood that does not move in sync, cracks will result - and that is precisely what has happened to St. Michael. In the centuries since his creation, nails have been inserted to stabilize him, and in fact they have done just the opposite. Once most of the metal inserts are removed, we'll start in on consolidating fragments and breakage points. After that, the fragments can be reattached and St. Mike will be whole!

On Tuesday morning, we began the process of deciding what colors we'll need for the planned infills for areas of gilding and paint loss. Donna showed Tiffany and me how to add different pigments to a small amount of vinyl spackling to demonstrate each particular hue. Once the samples dry, we'll decide the different combinations necessary for matching the infill as closely as possible to the surrounding material. With the infills, from a distance the piece will appear as a complete and finished sculpture; as you get closer, it will be clear what has been conserved. This approach stays true to the original intent of the artist and takes into consideration the long, rich life of the piece.

On a last note, the sculpture's owner, Duffy Hecht, visited Scripps to see St. Michael on Tuesday. He has not seen the piece since it was in very bad shape, and this was a chance to show him how much work has been done. Furthermore, Duffy and Donna engaged everyone in a conversation about the future of the piece, i.e., where it will be located and how it will be displayed. It's so exciting to think that St. Michael will once again be (almost) whole and as impressive as ever!

Getty Arts Summit

Yesterday Tiffany, Milan and I went to the Arts Summit. The Arts Summit is a professional development event at the Getty. All of the multicultural undergraduate interns came together to mingle with each other and meet industry professionals. It was an all day event, and it was jam-packed with activities and interesting people.

We got private tours of some of the Getty's exhibits. Our group got a tour of the new gallery of Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture and Decorative Arts. One of the highlights of the exhibit is a 17th century German cabinet. There's a virtual tour of the cabinet that you can view online or at the museum as you look at the cabinet in person. Maybe I'm just being a nerd, but I was pretty excited about the virtual tour! Tiffany thought it was cool, too. You should check it out.

The programming involved a long lunch break, so we got to hang out with some of the other interns. I talked to some other recent graduates. We exchanged job-finding tips, which made me feel strangely grown-up. Haha!

The main events at the Arts Summit were the career sessions. We each chose five sessions from a list of sixteen. Each session had its own theme and one or two presenters to talk with the interns in groups of nine. The presenters were all people who have carved out a special niche for themselves in the art world. Some work at museums, others run their own nonprofits or galleries. All of them are super-successful. I went to a lot of the career sessions regarding educational programming, and it gave me some food for thought. I've started researching careers in that area.

All in all it was a really fun day! Milan, Tiffany and I bonded. (As all the other interns can tell you by now, I'm always up for some quality bonding!) We also took some fun pictures. The one below is the three of us posing in front of Elisabeth Frink's Running Man. The pose was Milan's idea. It's cute, yea?

Progress on the Conservation of St. Mike

For those of you who are not familiar with Scripps' St. Michael, he is a painted and gilded wooden sculpture. He was carved c. 145o, and was part of the façade decoration for an Italian church. Under the guidance of L.A. conservator Donna Williams, I have been conserving our 560-year-old friend for the past nine months.

My work on St. Michael has mostly consisted of gilding consolidation, a process by which I flatten and adhere flaking, cracked gilding back onto the wooden base of the sculpture. The gilding on the body has been entirely consolidated, and thanks to a couple of productive weeks and the helping hands of my fellow intern Tiffany Yau, the wing gilding should be finished within the next several days!

Another integral part of the conservation process is testing. Many people, when picturing an art conservator in action, see them standing before an artwork in a studio, utensil in hand, working diligently away on the piece. Most do not see a scientist sitting before computer screens in the basement of a physics building. But while the hands-on work (called “bench work” among professionals) is inarguably the main part of the conservation process, scientific testing forms the backbone of the field. It provides the conservator with important knowledge about the piece, without which sound bench work would be impossible.

The testing on St. Michael has been exciting and diverse. In April, the RCWG staff, Donna, JSD Prof. Anna Wenzel, and myself took him to Pomona Valley Medical Center for a CAT scan! You will be able to read about the scan and its results in the Fall 2010 Scripps Magazine. In May, I was trained on the scanning electron microscope (SEM) at the Pomona Department of Physics. The SEM examines the topography of a sample with a high-powered electron beam. I took micrographs of fiber samples, and by comparing them to images from the MFA Boston’s Conservation & Art Material Encyclopedia Online (CAMEO), I identified two different fibers present on the piece: linen and hemp. Fifteenth-century painters commonly used these materials to prepare painted surfaces. In the case of St. Michael, the fabric was wrapped around joints and other areas. The wrapping was then covered with gesso, a primer much like plaster.

I have also begun using Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (EDS), a technique that is used in tandem with the SEM. This allows me to detect which elements are on the surface of a paint sample. Since different elements make up different pigments, and those pigments were discovered and used at different points in history, I will hopefully be able to approximate the date of any repaints of the blue garments on St. Michael. Although I have already begun testing with EDS, there are no certain conclusions to be drawn at this time. Updates will follow soon!

Culver City

This is our second week interning here at the gallery, and I thought today would be the perfect time for my very first blog entry. One of the perks of this internship is that we all get the opportunity to talk to people who have made careers for themselves in the Art World. Today we went to Culver City to meet with several successful entrepreneurs.

First we met Cliff Benjamin and Erin Kermanikian. They own a gallery called Western Project. It's on La Cienega, and they are showcasing an exhibit by Arne Stevenson at the moment. Here's a link to the website in case you're interested. Cliff and Erin talked to us about feeling out the social climate in the Art World. They also told us how important it can be to have a greater vision motivating you when you come up against hard times. They were really cool people.

Next we met Patricia Hamilton. On Mondays Mary, the Director of the Williamson Gallery, discusses art articles with all of us interns. Sometimes we pick the articles, and sometimes she does. This week we actually discussed an article about Patricia Hamilton. She's had a remarkable career. She worked at the Whitney Museum right after college, and then decided to open up her own gallery in New York. She was only twenty-five years old at the time! Patricia is definitely one of the most entertaining and successful people I've ever met. I was too shy to ask her all of the questions I wanted to, but it was great just hearing her talk about her life. Seriously! She's fascinating.

Mary and Patricia took us to see some galleries. One of them was Taylor De Cordoba. Heather Taylor, a Scripps alumna who graduated in '02, co-owns the gallery. She talked to us about the importance of internships. They're great opportunities to learn and network and get valuable work experience. Talking to Heather was great because she's a recent graduate, but she's also had a lot of success. So many of the job options I have been considering require more education and/or experience than I have right now. I've been stressing out about the fact that I may have to end up at a dead end job after I finish my Getty internship this summer just so that I can earn enough money to live on. Seeing Heather manage her own gallery was proof that it is possible to make a living doing something that I will actually enjoy at a young age. It's just a matter of networking and being motivated.

We also went to lunch with Mary's son and daughter Matt and Amanda MacNaughton. They've started their own public relations business. You can check it out here. They're yet another example of young entrepreneurs who have found success doing something they really enjoy. And they were fun to talk to as well. They had great energy. You could tell just by listening to them talk that they really loved their work.

That was true of everyone we met today. Even though all of these people have found success doing different things, they all seemed to have a common trait: Patricia calls it chutzpa. That's a Yiddish word that basically means having the guts to do something when others might see it as too bold or unnecessarily daring. I'm working on finding my own chutzpa. It's tough, though. I clam up around new people pretty easily, and I've never been much of a risk taker.

Okay, time to sign out. This has been fun! It's therapeutic to write without worrying too much about structure or grammatical errors. I'll write again soon.