Volume 19, Number 1 .... January 1997

Regional News

John Griswold, Column Editor

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

Karen Zukor and Heida Shoemaker, paper conservators in private practice in Oakland, treated a collection of historic American currency at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. The collection consists of rare notes dating back to the earliest currency printed in the U.S. and includes Confederate money as well. Under video surveillance and with a personal supervisor/guard for each, they prepared the rare paper notes for permanent display. Because of the severe restrictions set up by the Feds, all treatments had to be carried out in a locked room in the bank under the watchful eyes of their guards. No photodocumentation was allowed, breaks were taken in tandem, and tool lists had to be submitted well in advance in order for scalpels to be allowed in.

After four years of working in partnership, Karen Zukor and Anita Noennig find that their future paths are going in different directions. Anita is currently finishing projects at the Filbert Street studio and is involved in preparing materials for display in a history museum at the Niebaum Coppola Winery on the estate of Francis Coppola. She will be mounting zoetrope strips and stereo views, awards for wines and awards for movies among other interesting materials. In the new year, Anita will be working in San Francisco in the studio of Carrie Ann Calay with Carrie Ann and Julia Thompson.

Elisabeth Cornu has helped with exhibition conservation and mounting of very large sculptures in two traveling exhibitions in San Francisco: marbles from the Pergamon Museum, and large and small sculptures from the Dallas-based Nasher Collection. She also recently participated in a preventive conservation symposium in St. Retersburg, Russia, at the end of October 1996. The symposium was sponsored by the Soros Foundation and was for Russian museum directors and conservators. Elisabeth's contribution was on the role of conservators in traveling exhibitions.

Lesley Bone has just returned from New Orleans, Louisiana, where she helped set up the Faberge Exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Lesley is the national conservator for this traveling exhibition. She is now working with an exhibition in San Francisco of Precolumbian ceramics from the Museo Arqueologico Rafael Larco Herrera in Lima, Peru.

Jane Williams is now working as a contract conservator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Objects Lab and has established a private practice in objects conservation in San Francisco. Clare Bradley-Smith is a post-graduate conservation intern in the Objects Lab. She has completed conservation training in decorative arts and sculptures at the Guildhall Program in London.

Friederike Zimmern, from Stuttgart, Germany, recently completed a two month internship in the paper conservation lab at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Carolyn Murphy, a Getty Fellow from Sydney, Australia, just began a one-year internship in the lab.

Stefanie Griswold, a third year intern from the Art Conservation Program at Buffalo State College, is working with Madeleine Fang at the Phoebe Hearst Museum at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bob Futernick reports that on September 30, 1996 the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco launched their new web site at www.thinker.org. Along with information about events and education at the Palace of the Legion of Honor and the M. H. de Young Museum, the site is host to the largest searchable database of images in the world. More than 60,000 artworks are represented and accessible by searching categories such as artist's name, title, media, geographic region and by words related to image content. The imagebase currently represents all of the museums' works on paper, European paintings, ceramics and European glass, and there is a commitment over the next several years to make the rest of the museums' 120,000 objects accessible via the internet. Since the launch, over 200,000 people have conducted nearly 2,000,000 searches. More than 4,000,000 art images have been viewed by people from 60 countries.

In November, John Burke spent 10 days in Jamaica on a UNESCO conservation training mission, where he supervised equipment installations at the national conservation laboratories in Port Royal and Kingston, and conducted training workshops for regional museum personnel. Part of the final exam for the course was an on site conservation survey at the Bob Marley Museum. The project was the culmination of the UNESCO Cultural Heritage II program, begun in 1986 with the participation of Elisabeth Cornu, and with later visits in 1994 by other international consultants, including John Burke and Rosa Lowinger. After this, his third trip to the island, John still hasn't been to a Jamaican beach.

In October, John, along with Sally Shelton and Pam Bruder from the San Diego Natural History Museum, gave a presentation on collections preservation to the annual meeting of the Museum Trustees Association at the Oakland Museum.

John and Snowy are the proud parents of a beautiful baby boy, Shan (Shan means kind and capable in Chinese), who arrived at a healthy nine pounds on July 29.

James Bernstein and Debra Evans recently taught "Inpainting Works of Art on Paper" at the Campbell Center for Historic Preservation. Participants for the "Jim and Debbie" show included fellow WAAC Conservators Theresa Andrews, Victoria Blyth-Hill and Julie Goldman.

This fall, Jim completed an NIC CAP study for the San Jose Museum of Art. His assessment looked at collections care, storage, exhibitions, security and related Museum facilities and operations.

Jim was recently at the Carnegie Museum of Art working with conservators Will Real and Ellen Baxter; and at the Cincinnati Art Museum, working with conservators Stephen Bonadies, Fred Wallace and Cecil Mearl. The focus of each project was a major 20th Century painting in the permanent collection with special condition and conservation needs. While in Pittsburgh, Jim Bernstein and John Bissell made an after-dark appearance as arty alter-egos "Vincent van Gogh" and "René Magritte" for the Halloween Costume Ball held at the Carnegie Museum.

This fall two advanced fellows in conservation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art moved on to the next chapter of their brilliant careers. Narelle Jarry left SFMOMA to work with Victoria Blyth-Hill at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Ria German is working with the paintings conservators at the Art Institute of Chicago. Former Kress Fellow Paloma Garcia-Anoveros gave birth to daughter Claudia on the 30th of October. The staff at SFMOMA wish all of their former fellows well.

Brad Epley, a paintings conservation student from the training program at Buffalo State College, is spending his twenty-day option in the paintings conservation studio at SFMOMA as part of his third-year internship at the Fine Arts Mus. of San Francisco.

SFMOMA Chief Conservator Will Shank travelled with the museum's exhibition, Willem De Kooning, the Late Paintings, to the "other MoMA in New York in January.

Molly Lambert has opened a private practice in architectural conservation in San Francisco although, like most site oriented conservators, her practice is not limited to any geographic region. If you're in the Haight-Ashbury district, take a short walk down Ashbury, away from the hub-bub of the Haight, across the Panhandle, and you'll find her studio at 1921 Hayes.

The Newsletter thanks Ria German for her work as regional reporter and welcomes Paloma Garcia-Anoveros as our new reporter for the bay area.

OKLAHOMA

The Gilcrease Museum Conservation Department is beginning proceedings for publishing a booklet on numbering objects titled "The Numbering of Objects for Museums, Historical Houses, and Private Collections." The booklet includes five sections: how to use the booklet; guidelines for numbering objects; specific objects/recommended marking procedures; related information to numbering objects; and catalogs used throughout the booklet for supplies. The booklet will be available by summer 1997.

The Oklahoma Conservation Congress met in Stillwater, Oklahoma to discuss fire prevention in libraries and archives. Demonstrations were held on the use of fire extinguishers and a tour of the library was conducted.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST

After a successful few weeks working at Pictograph Cave, Montana, in August, J. Claire Dean cleaned up several vandalized petroglyph sites (including one for the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakima Indian Nation). Currently, she is working on a treatment plan for the final phase of work at Pictograph Cave. Before heading home to the UK for the holidays, she will be doing field work in Arkansas and northern Arizona.

A new archive is opening in Seattle, The Drachen Foundation. The collection is comprised of information about kites and kite building. Sarah Melching has been a contributing consultant for their new building and general collections management. Over the past year, Sarah has also been a member of the Seattle Arts Commission Accessioning and Deacces-sioning Panel, dealing with a variety of public art collection objects and related issues.

Jack Thompson has been elected as Treasurer of the Friends of Dard Hunter, and has published the following items under The Caber Press imprint: URUSHI: The Technology of Japanese Lacquer, by John J. Quin (1896) (a reprint); and Manuscript Inks: Materials and Modes of Production, by Jack C. Thompson, which includes a lot of original research about iron gall inks, the transcription of a 1596 text on ink making with a technical glossary and bibliography by Jack, and a section on Asian ink sticks by Claes Lindblad (a Swedish scribe/illuminator).

Jamie Hascall has been hired as a full time mountmaker by the University of Washington Burke Museum for the duration of the new permanent exhibits project, due to open in late '97. He has also been working on a set of sealed, gel equipped, display cases for protection of two Alaskan Baidarka models to be displayed in Kodiak, Alaska.

GREATER LOS ANGELES AND SANTA BARBARA

Lacking a Central California Region, we have included this notice here: Antoinette Dwan, formerly of the Baltimore Museum and the Smithsonian, has established a private practice in paper conservation in Clovis, where her husband Gene Cooley is stationed as one of California's five State Botanists. Her projects to date have included work in Los Angeles and Death Valley as well as nearby Fresno. As former Bay Areans the family, including children Forrest and Camille, are happy to be back on the West Coast.

Last September and October, John Twilley presented two scientific papers on stone deterioration problems co-authored with WAAC members Patricia Leavengood and Dr. Frank Preusser. The first, "Isamu Noguchi's 'Black Sun': Investigation of a Cracking Phenomenon" (Leavengood, P., Twilley, J., and Van Halm, T., 8th International Congress on Deterioration and Conservation of Stone, Proceedings, Vol 1. Josef Riederer, ed., Berlin, 1996, pp.239-251) included a three dimensional thermal stress model generated by engineer Thomas Van Halm based upon thermal measurements collected over an entire year by local volunteers.

The second paper "Siliceous Shale Deterioration in the Facade of the Royal Presidio Chapel, Monterey, California" (Twilley, J. and Preusser, F., 5th International Conference on Non-Destructive Testing, Microanalytical Methods and Environmental Evaluation for Study and Conservation of Works of Art, Proc., Budapest, 1996, pp. 631-646), concerned the scientific study conducted during the conservation planning phase for the oldest, continuously occupied, ecclesiastical building in the western U.S.

The printed proceedings of the 1994, 8th World Ceramics Congress in Florence are finally available. They include Twilley's paper "Technical Investigations of an Early 15th Century Chinese Cloisonne Offering Stand" (The Ceramics Cultural Heritage, Monographs in Materials and Society, 2, Techna Srl, Faenza, 1995, pp. 161-173) which reports the first comprehensive scientific investigation of the early Ming fabrication process to go beyond a compositional investigation of the enamels alone.

Earlier this year he had the opportunity to present this research at a seminar at the Hermitage and, thereafter, to examine the cloisonne collection, one of the world's finest, in the company of the curator.

Dr. Marco Leona has joined LACMA for a one year Mellon Fellowship in Conservation Research. Marco earned his Ph.D in crystallography from the University of Pavia, Italy, and pursued post-doctoral research at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before coming to LACMA last July. Marco has been assisting Senior Research Scientist John Twilley in ongoing analytical work in the research lab.

John Hirx transferred from Objects Conservation to Conservation Research at LACMA last September, to begin a one-year fellowship funded by a special research grant. John is working with Dr. Pieter Meyers and John Twilley, primarily on a study of ancient gold and silver.

Jean Neeman returned to LACMA last September for a temporary full-time position as special technician, working primarily in Objects Conservation. Marie Svoboda joined LACMA Objects Conservation last October as a Mellon Fellow for a one year position. Her first project is the restoration of a Cambodian Vishnu stone sculpture, which was damaged in the 1994 Northridge quake.

Natale Majkut, pre-program student intern, recently completed a 3 1/2 month stay in LACMA Textiles Conservation. Natale assisted Catherine McLean and Cara Varnell in the preparation of textiles for "Fabric of Enchantment: Batik from the North Coast of Java from the Inger McCabe Elliott Collection". She also helped in a project to assemble storage containers for wedding dresses which were recently featured in an exhibition at the museum.

After two and a half years at LACMA working in the Paper Conservation lab, Lisa Foreman has returned to private practice in Los Angeles. She can be reached at: 5767 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, CA 90036; phone (213) 933-8008.

Janine Wardius joined LACMA paintings conservation last October for a one-year Mellon Fellowship. Janine worked previously at the Southhampton City Art Gallery in the U.K. and had a private practice in Milwaukee before coming to Los Angeles. Her first major project has been the restoration of a 17th C. portrait by Sébastien Bourdon, which was given to the museum last year by Miklos Rozsa.

Dr. Terry Schaeffer has begun work on a six month contract between LACMA and the Getty Conservation Institute. She will search the photochemical literature for data relevant to the effects of photographic light sources on artists' archival materials and summarize her findings for the conservation community.

On the Path to Void: Buddhist Art of the Tibetan Realm has just been released by Marg Publications, Bombay, India. This is the first publication to provide an overview of the magnificent art and architecture of Tibet. Edited by Dr. P. Pal with a forward by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the publication consists of three sections: Architectural Monuments, Sculpture, and Painting and Fabric Images. Victoria Blyth-Hill, Senior Art Conservator at LACMA, contributed to the chapter on "The Conservation of Thangkas" and Dr. Chandra L. Reedy, Ph.D Program Coordinator in the Art Conservation Department at the University of Delaware, wrote the chapter.

Victoria presented a one hour slide lecture, "Tibetan Bronzes: Technical Observa tions", in September to the newly formed Indian and South East Asian Art Council. Her subject was "The Conservation and Display of Thangka Paintings" using treatment examples from LACMA's collection.

Narelle Jarry, graduate of the University of Canberra, Australia, began as a one year Mellon Fellow in the Paper Conservation Lab at LACMA, working with Victoria Blyth-Hill. Narelle has spent the last two years as a Getty Fellow in Paper Conservation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art working with Jill Sterrett Beaudin. She presented a paper at the AIC Norfolk Meeting on "Computer Imaging Technology: The Process of Identification".

Linda Clougherty, intern at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, spent the month of June in Dhali, Cyprus registering and rehousing potshards excavated at ancient Idalion under the direction of Dr. Pamela Gaber and Meg Morden; she also developed a site-specific computer registry program. She spent a subsequent 5 weeks in Chepen, Peru running a field lab for the excavation of tombs of the late Moche period.

Paul Pihl, Seattle resident just finishing up a 6-month internship at the Fowler, has accepted a one-year position in the art conservation firm of Wharton, Griswold and Associates in Santa Barbara. Jo Hill was recently photographed and interviewed for a book on women scientists. The target market of the book will be high school women -- the authors will be offering a pictorial essay of each scientist to encourage the young women to seek out alternative careers.

Andrej Lohnert, together with appraiser Richard Guest and artist Sueo Serisawa, participated in a free consultation clinic in San Jacinto. Over two hundred paintings and prints, belonging to ninety-two collectors were verbally appraised and their possible conservation needs were addressed. The clinic took place September 21, 1996.

Susanne Friend, Dr. Duane Chartier and Melissa Santala of ConservArt Associates spent three weeks in August installing the last of fifteen monumental panels comprising the Wilson Hurley "Visions of the West" triptychs at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, OK. Susanne and Duane attended the black tie gala inauguration for the paintings last November. ConservArt returns in January 1997 to varnish the last panel and will maintain a studio in Oklahoma City for future projects.

ConservArt is continuing a project begun in July at the Peace Theological Seminary, a 1920's Mediterranean style villa which is undergoing a complete architectural restoration as a result of the 1994 Northridge earthquake. ConservArt has already conserved the rotunda murals and will be working next on the main entrance and conference room areas. This work also involves consultation with the architect on adaptive reuse of historical structures as well as fabric and color consultation and remounting of sculptures. Susanne and Duane are also pleased to announce that Melissa is staying on with ConservArt for another year as Assistant Conservator of Paintings.

The Paintings Conservation Department of the J. Paul Getty Museum is preparing to leave the villa in Malibu for its new home on the hill in Brentwood. The move is scheduled for mid January 1997. The new address is The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1000, Los Angeles, CA 90049-1687.

Carol Kenyon of the South Coast Fine Arts Conservation Center and Julie Unruh of Wharton and Griswold Associates participated in a panel discussion, " Conservation Issues for Sculptors," as part of the 1996 Sculpture Symposium held at Santa Barbara City College.

Scott M. Haskins has recently printed his book, How To Save Your Stuff From A Disaster. Written for the general public, the book gives hints on how to protect the items that make up one's family history against disasters. The book also gives instruction on salvage of items after a disaster. Mr. Haskins was the featured speaker at a lecture/book signing fundraiser for the Berkeley City Club in October. Scott also attended and participated in the International Conference on Disasters: Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tsunamis in Vancouver, B.C., in July. The conference was held for all fire ring countries.

Since August 1996, Mary Piper Hough has been at the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa as a Research Associate working with Stefan Michalski on a research project concerning the local treatment of cupped cracks in paintings consisting of oil on acrylic ground. The work is being done in the context of her M.A.C. (Research stream) degree requirements at Queen's University, Kingston. Mary is also the recipient of the Gerry Hedley Research Scholarship in support of the project; the award is administered through the Courtauld Institute in London.

ARIZONA

Gretchen Voeks,WACC-NPS, has been working on collections at the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor Hawaii.

Scott Carroll, Nancy Odegaard, Dave Spurgeon and Werner Zimmt , ASM, are in the final phase of a NCPTT funded project to develop a manual for material characterization tests.

Janice Schopfer, Fine Arts Mus. of SF, gave a well received paper conservation clinic in Tucson in November.

Colin Pearson, University of Canberra Conservation Program, lectured at the University of Arizona in November on "The preservation of cultural property in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. "

Nancy Odegaard, ASM, lectured at the New York University Conservation program and presented a paper "Including Native Americans in the Development and Installation of an Interpretive Exhibit and the Continuation of Mutually Educational Relations" at NMAI and FIT symposium "Caring for American Indian Cultural Materials: Policies and Practices" in NYC Oct 19-20. Nancy and Matthew Crawford, presented a paper "Laundry Bluing as a Colorant in Ethnogrpahic Objects" to the ICOM-CC meetings in Edinburgh. Nancy has also been elected Co-coordinator of the Ethnographic Working Group of the ICOM-CC.

Kelly McHugh and Suzanne Davis, were summer interns at the Arizona State Museum from the NYU Program. They worked on the Homolovi Ruins site in Northern Arizona as well at at the museum lab in Tucson.

Bettina Raphael conducted a conservation tour in October for the Entorches Foundation in Argentina that included lectures, workshops, and museum visits.

HAWAII

Christine Thede has joined the Conservation Services department of the Bishop Museum for a one year Mellon Fellowship in objects conservation. Christine is a recent graduate of the Winterthur program and spent her third year internship at the American Museum of Natural History. Michele Pagan attended "Adhesives for Textile Conservation" and Sarah Ili the first part of the "Archaeological and Ethnographic Core Curriculum" at the Campbell Center in Mount Carroll, IL.

Downey Manoukian,paper conservator, private practice has been working on a variety of projects for the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Contemporary Museum and Institutions and private clients in San Francisco.

Gregory Thomas, while providing paper conservation services at Perry Huston & Associates, had the opportunity to be the courier for the Dallas Museum's Ballet Dancers by Edgar Degas, traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago. In Hawaii Greg has recently visited Kauai to provide paper and painting services to private collectors and local institutions, including the Kauai Museum and Grove Farm Homestead. Greg will again be working with Perry Huston in Ft. Worth, TX after the first of January 1997. He will also be teaching the History of Painting Technology spring semester at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Linda Hee is busy with several new installations at the Tropic Lightening Museum at Schofield Barracks. She also was instrumental in arranging a reunion potluck picnic of all the remaining alumni of the former Pacific Regional Conservation Center including Downey Manoukian, Larry Pace, Melissa Arnold, Julie Ancheta, Tracie MacKenzie and Dana Olores.

The IMS funded Conservation Project to upgrade the framing of 100 paintings in the collection of the Honolulu Academy of Art has been completed. Laurence A. Pace will begin work soon on the conservation of the 1927 Portrait of General Schofield which belongs to Schofield Barracks.

SAN DIEGO

Barbara McGiffin, who has worked for ten years at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage as a conservation technician, has been promoted to Conservator.

Will Chandler, Project Art Director for the Reconstruction of the House of Hospitality, Balboa Park, has completed designs for 8 ornamental chandeliers, a very large Italo-Spanish baroque fireplace based on historical photographs, and missing ornaments from the facade roof line, including an eight-foot tall tower finial.

The Balboa Art Conservation Center reports that Karen Abend, pre-program student with BACC was accepted to the University of Delaware/Winterthur Art Conservation Program and is enjoying her studies there. BACC now has two students: Yasuko Ogino, their current conservation, pre-program intern and Alise Bowler, a graduate of the Queen's U. Art Conservation Program, who has just joined the center as a post-graduate Getty Advanced Intern in Paintings.

Laura Downey was recently promoted to Associate Conservator of Paper. She presented a paper at the WAAC Conference in Las Vegas on recent work involving the BACC on the collection of South Asian Paintings at the San Diego Museum of Art. As a part of these projects, approximately 1450 works have recently been rematted.

The Paintings and Paper Departments are currently treating a small group of works by Conrad Wise Chapman which will form a part of an upcoming exhibition on the artist at the Timken Museum of Art. Other notable painting projects recently completed include a Daniel Seghers, Still Life with Holy Family, Thomas Eakins' Portrait of J. Carroll Beckwith for the San Diego Museum of Art and Luis Mena's painting La Madre de la Luz for the San Diego Historical Society.

In October, Frances Prichett attended the "Treatment of Japanese Woodblock Prints" workshop at the Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies. The four day course was taught jointly by Betty Fiske, Paper Conservator, Winterthur Museum, DE, Anne Rosenthal, Paper Conservator in private practice, San Raphael, and Judith Walsh, Paper Conservator, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

BRITISH COLUMBIA

Miriam Clavir is on study leave from September through December and is busy completing her PhD dissertation.

As for general news from the UBC Museum of Anthropology (MOA), early in October conservation scientist Ian Wainwright and Marie-Claude Corbeil from the Canadian Conservation Institute traveled to Vancouver to perform composition analysis of MOA's collection of trade silver. MOA has also been happy to welcome Dr. Susan Hardman, a conservation scientist from England who is visiting Vancouver and volunteering her time at the museum. She is currently attempting to identify the fiber composition of several of the Chilkat blankets in the collection.

Cynthia Cripps returned in September after attending the IIC conference in Copenhagen, and visiting several museums and conservation labs in England and France. Just recently she presented a paper at the bi-annual meeting of the Pacific Conservation Group. The subject of the presentation was her work to date, on removing the shellac varnish from a painted Heiltsuk totem pole. Generally, her time has been spent working on a variety of projects as part of her internship at the UBC MOA. During the last two weeks of November, she will be assisting staff at the U'mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay in creating a mount for a totem pole by the artist Charlie James.

Murray Frost has been busy providing document conservation review and advice services for museum and art gallery building projects in Melbourne, Australia; Hong Kong; Whitehorse, Yukon; Kamloops, BC; and Prince Rupert, BC. Visits were required for the Whitehorse, Prince Rupert, and Hong Kong projects. Other building projects on which preventive conservation consultation services are being provided are located in BC, England, Singapore, and Barbados.

TEXAS

At the conservation department of the Harry Ransom Research Center, UT at Austin, major building renovations are now underway. Despite construction, work continues, activities this year will focus on an important map collection and a mix of 17th-20th century book collections. The Book Lab will continue work on the Carl J. Pforzheimer collection of English printed books, the Paper Lab will survey the Jean Cocteau drawings collections and continue treatment of the Eric Gill drawings, and the Photo and Book labs will pursue their survey and treatment of the photograph album collections.

Recently, Barbara Brown couriered the William Lake-Price photograph album to and from the J.P. Getty Museum, for their photograph exhibition entitled "Roger Fenton: The Orientalist Suite". She also participated in the workshop on "The Conservation of Cased Photographs" coordinated by Tom Edmondson and held at the studio of José Orraca in Kent, Connecticut, September 27-28, 1996. She anticipates that this experience will prove useful in the survey and housing project for the cased photographs in the HRC Photography Collection.

Conservator Miranda Martin has resigned from the HRC to accept a position as a paper conservator with the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Perry Huston and Associates is continuing the conservation of the Allen County Courthouse murals, including the removal of overpainting.

At Texas Memorial Museum, Marilyn Lenz spent time this summer working at the Metropolitan Museum in the Arms and Armor section.

Jessica Johnson recently gave a lecture (with Olivia Primanis and Ann Zanikos) to the Collections Managers Committee of the Texas Association of Museums on "Condition Reporting". She also gave a lecture on "Materials for Storage and Exhibit" to the Central Texas Museum Association, and a lecture on "Museum Housekeeping" to the South East Texas Museum Association. Kathy Hall is working on projects to improve storage for the mineral collections.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN REGION

Victoria Montana Ryan, Rocky Mountain Conservation Center Paintings Conservator, worked on the Boardman Robinson murals in the Fountain Valley School as part of the Boardman Robinson retrospective sponsored by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Mus. and the Gallery of Contemporary Art at Colorado University-Colorado Springs. Victoria recently returned from Scotland, where she attended the ICOM conference in Edinburgh.

Victoria, Hays, Jeff Wells and Camilla Van Vooren, from the Western Center for the Conservation of Fine Arts, are presently in Brookings, South Dakota, reinstalling four large murals in the dome of the Brookings County Courthouse.

A major installation called the Imperial Tombs of China is now on exhibit at the Denver Museum of Natural History. This significant traveling exhibition from China includes rare art objects never before displayed in this country. The museum was pleased to receive an IMS Conservation Grant of $49,000 to rehouse their mineral collection.

Continuing their work with the AIC Outreach Initiative, the Western Center for the Conservation of Fine Arts (WCCFA) hosted the October meeting of the Denver Chapter of the American So. of Appraisers which included tours of the facility and informal discussion groups on various conservation topics.

In addition, Carmen Bria and Camilla Van Vooren made presentations to a group at the Leanin' Tree Museum of Western Art in Boulder, as a part of that museum's "Open Studios Week".

Carmen conducted an on-site survey at the National Mus. of Wildlife Art in Jackson, WY. He also made a presentation on the conservation of fine art during the monthly "Art Sandwiched In Gallery Walk" which is an ongoing part of that museum's educational program.

Five CAP surveys have kept Judy Greenfield, of Art Objects Conservation, very busy this past summer and early autumn! She surveyed the Indian Center Museum (KS), Rock Springs Historical Museum (WY), Wyoming Frontier Prison (WY), Trail End State Historic Site (WY) and Buffalo Bill Memorial Museum (CO). In between, Judy assessed a collection of Native American artifacts at the Roswell Museum and Art Center (NM). Perhaps the most noteworthy artifact she's treated recently was an ancient Roman mosaic pavement.

Carl Patterson reports that the Denver Art Museum has received a grant from the Institute of Museum Services to rehouse Asian costumes and textiles. In preparation for the reinstallation of the European galleries at the DAM, nine Renaissance paintings are being conserved through the Kress Foundation at New York University under the supervision of Dianne Dwyer Modestini.

Eileen Clancy's private practice in Denver, Conservation of Paper, Parchment and Photographs, has kept her busy since opening doors last January. Projects completed include treatment of fine art, photographs and ephemera from the collection at Devil's Tower Nat'l. Monument and Olympic Diplomas from the past 100 years for the new Visitor's Center at USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs. She has also surveyed the paper collection at the Buffalo Bill Hist. Center in Cody, WY. and wallpaper at the Horn-beck Homestead Nat'l. Monument, one of the first log cabins in the Pike's Peak region. Thanks to assistants Wendy Fairchild and Liz Patterson, CPPP will have a very successful first year.

You are what you take time to become.
- Joseph Shein