Category: Undergraduate Students
Student Blog: Cleveland Museum of Art
June 04, 2025 Written by Christy Ching
Greetings from the 53rd AIC Annual Meeting! By the time this is published, I will be back in Ohio at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) where I am spending my third-year internship. During my internship, I've had the pleasure of working with and learning from Objects Conservators, Beth Edelstein and Colleen Snyder, as well as Textiles Conservator, Robin Hanson. I've also really enjoyed working with Laura Resch, Preventive Conservator at the CMA, and Anamaria Cuevas, the pre-program Nord Network Fellow.
The CMA was founded in 1913 "for the benefit of all the people forever," a message that reverberates in its free admissions policy for the general public and its numerous programming and events engaging the greater Cleveland community and beyond. The museum houses an encyclopedic collection of over 66,500 objects representing over 6,000 years of history— from Pre-dynastic Egyptian ceramics to works such as Simone Leigh's Las Meninas (2019). Furthermore, they have an excellent Education collection that members of the public can directly interact with and learn from.
My time at the CMA has kept me very busy in the best way possible. I've engaged in various activities including preparing textiles and jewelry for the Arts of the Maghreb exhibition and conducting many incoming and outgoing loan examinations, including those for Tibetan vessels traveling to Hong Kong, a place I hold very dear to my heart. The internship also provided opportunities to aid in and learn about working with visiting couriers and contemporary artists through the deinstallation of Korean Couture and the installation of the current special exhibition Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (May 24th-September 7th, 2025). Outside of exhibition work, I've also participated in many preventive activities such as creating an anoxia chamber for an African throne, setting up for Oddy Testing of mount making fabrics, and vacuuming 17th century Belgium tapestries hanging in the Armor Court.
In my nine months at the CMA so far, I've treated objects of various materials and cultural contexts including a French 18th century silver tureen designed by Juste-Auréle Meissonnier and a late Qing Dynasty ceremonial helmet featuring silver gilded brass, gilded feathers, glass beads, silk, fur, and kingfisher feathers. I've also had the privilege of stabilizing the enamels on a 14th century, likely Sienese, basse-taille enameled Belt for a Lady's Dress. It is constructed from a woven textile band overlaid with a silver wire mesh and adorned with 88 quatrefoil basse-taille enamels that feature portraits and anthropomorphic mythical creatures. There aren't many surviving examples of these belts with the level of completeness and extravagance as observed in the CMA belt. Because the belt is usually on permanent display and rarely comes off view, I really was in the right time and place to study the belt up close! In the time leading up to the belt's reinstallation, I had the opportunity to engage with a diverse group of visitors, artists, and scholars drawn to the Objects Lab by their interest in the belt’s history and its reproduction. We also welcomed local jewelry artists to lead a workshop on chain-making techniques and study the construction of the silver mesh. This period of time also allowed me to examine the materials more closely and share my findings through a conservation statement on the CMA's website.
Though my time at the CMA is coming to an end in a few months, there's still much to look forward to including outdoor sculpture maintenance, thermoluminescence (TL) dating, and laser cleaning! Working at the CMA has been a truly rewarding and joyful experience, and I’m deeply grateful to my current supervisors for making this internship so enriching and impactful.
- Christy Ching, Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation Class of 2025
