First Couple Weeks Part II

A big part of my job is going to be working with a collection of illustrations by an artist named Paul Goble. He's a Brit who writes and illustrates books about Plains Indians. He is unbelievably precise, he does these tiny details that just don't seem like they could be done by hand. We have his whole body of work and the Gobles are one of the three main collections we are known for. The others are Harvey Dunn and Oscar Howe. I have to survey all of them in detail and create a condition report. I have to look really close, that explains the CSI look.

First Couple of Weeks Part I

So about two weeks ago I started my summer internship and I thought I might write a little about it as I go along. Some of this is going to be history/museum nerd type stuff that appeals to a pretty small audience. Hopefully it won't be too educational. This summer project has to do with conserving a part of the museum's works on paper collection. You might ask, what does that mean? Well, it is everything from paintings to photos to sketches and some other rather unique things that qualify as art somehow. The first day and a half was spent packing up an exhibit to be replaced by a new exhibit. This was a collection of really big, complex pieces of roku ceramics; I believe roku is Japanese for heavy, fragile and expensive. Amazingly I broke nothing, the head of collections, not so much. After this it was on to the real work, the works on paper. Basically it is me, another intern and the curator of collections going through the collection, checking them out and deciding what if anything we need to do to repair or prevent damage and make sure it is stored correctly. More or less, new homes for old art. The very first thing I worked with was a stack of plain old lined notebook paper with some random watercolor brushmarks; like you'd get cleaning a brush is what they looked like to me. They were just in a stack in a folder. I built a custom box and put sheets of super secret magic paper between the sheets and made notes online of what I'd done. luckily, I didn't find out until afterwards that each one of those little brushcleaners is worth $10,000.00. Yep, they gave me 80 grand worth of art to start with. I also made a super deluxe box for a mixed media piece, that is what's going on in the pictures.