11:23 a.m., Sept. 2, 2010----Joan Miró, Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso would be cheering them on.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

Graduate students in art conservation at the University of Delaware have painstakingly cared for works of art by many such renowned masters recently.

They also have treated and preserved portions of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 24.5-mile-long temporary artwork Running Fence, a 2,000-year-old Roman sarcophagus, an entire room from Damascus, Syria, installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a flag that waved as the New York regiment headed to the Civil War battlefield in 1861, and much more.

On Aug. 24 at Winterthur, the nine third-year students in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) detailed their past two years of experiences, including summer work projects and an 11-month advanced internship, in heartfelt oral presentations. The students showcased the object assessments and treatments they undertook using tools ranging from paintbrushes to X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and the lessons they learned under the guidance of professional conservators.

Jessica Arista's internships took her on a journey from ancient Crete to the Mayan culture with an important stop in Baltimore in between.

At Kaman-Kalehöyük, a Bronze Age archaeological site in Turkey, Arista learned to care for excavated finds that had been buried for thousands of years. Then, at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which has the third oldest art conservation laboratory in the United States, she used her skills to treat a Mycenaean ceramic jug decorated with the painting of a nautilus with its tentacles out. The jug had been contaminated with potentially damaging salts. Arista carefully removed the shellac and plaster fills from past repairs, soaked the jug to remove the salts, and then filled in previous losses in the jug's decoration using Japanese paper.

Also while at the Walters, Arista cleaned and treated a garland sarcophagus (so-named for the motif decorating its sides), made of marble and discovered near Rome in 1885, and prepared the 600-pound coffin for travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art for the upcoming “Treasures of Heaven” exhibition. The article Arista wrote about the project for the museum's magazine piqued the interest of a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. In the subsequent newspaper article, Arista's technique was compared to that of the pointillist painter Georges Seurat.

Not bad for a blossoming art conservator.

Arista said her internships reinforced why she went into art conservation.

“You are always learning -- with each new object, new people and each new place you go,” she said.

According to Debra Hess Norris, Henry Francis du Pont Chair of Fine Arts, chair of the Department of Art Conservation and WUDPAC director, all of the third-year students successfully completed the oral presentations and portfolios required for the master of science degree in art conservation. They will now go on to professional positions and fellowships at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Historic New England, the Museums of New Mexico, the Smithsonian Institution, a private practice in New York City, the Walters Art Museum and Winterthur.

Founded in 1974, WUDPAC is one of only four graduate programs in the United States that educates and trains art conservation professionals. For more information, visit the website.

Article by Tracey Bryant