New Britain Museum of American Art
With the experience gained at CCSU I feel pretty confident about any job I get assigned at the museum. I am so exited to work in a much bigger establishment, having bigger responsibilities, and learn so much more during the time I will be spending working together with the Special Collection Management.
August 14th, 2020
This week I have been working on preparing a painting by Winslow Homer to be loaned to the Portland Museum of Art in Portland Maine. I spent a good amount of time analyzing the entire art piece doing a detailed report of its condition. I also went over the loan agreement which was quite large and took some time to read. I couldn’t believe how much information is needed for a museum to loan an artwork. The most time consuming part so far has been preparing the packaging for the piece. The big wooden vault has to be customized according to the dimensions of the artwork. In the process we decided to reframe the art piece replacing the back of the frame and have it secured and ready to be displayed. After the art piece was ready with the new frame, I wrapped it and its waiting to be placed in the vault. Meanwhile, I worked on getting the dimensions needed to the artwork to be in the most
protected position for shipment. Using all acid free material I built the supports that will be holding the piece in place, preventing it from sliding and even from shaking movements. Besides working on that piece, I was also able to prepare a pedestal to display another artwork. We worked in the gallery rearranging art pieces and the lighting for the additional piece that we were incorporating to the exhibition. We also relocated some artwork in the storage to make room for upcoming artwork making sure the new location was added to the database. So far this first week has beed extremely interesting and fun. I cannot wait to see what other work I will be doing at the NBMAA.
August 21st, 2020
One of the things that makes an exhibition be professionally installed is the lighting. The lights play a big roll on displaying an artwork, some need soft indirect light while others need more luminosity and consistent intensity. So this week I switch some of the lights from traditional halogen to LED light. LED not only are more efficient, they last longer, and most important they won’t do any damage to artwork. I also had to measure a lot of lithographs to potentially get framed, from the size o the paper to the size of the actual drawings. One thing that I leaned this week and I was so excited to do was knowing how to frame a paintings. Measuring the mat and cutting it to perfection so the paintings is nice and centered was a little difficult but with a good eye and some patience things came out great. I even got to frame one of my own paintings and I love the results. We were also gathering all of the artwork from the museum members for their upcoming shows. In the process I recognized a couple of paintings from my art professors. That was really nice to see the work of people you know, it makes you feel like you are part of the art world. After that, I helped making the labels for the artwork. And finally, I went over a collection of paintings and categorized each one of them. Doing that I got to see a lot of beautiful paintings.
August 28th, 2020
This week has be the busiest so far. With the members shown opening date getting close, the gallery has to get ready for the exhibition. After all the artwork from the previous exhibition was deinstalled, I removed all of the hardware and signals including the vinyl wording from the wall. I helped painting some of the pedestals that will be displaying the sculptures, while the rest of the team got the walls painted. Later in the week I created the labels for the new artwork for the members’ show as well as the labels for another exhibition that is coming up at the NBMAA in the neat future. Since there was a lot of diverse artwork from paintings, 2D, and 3D sculptures, bringing the pieces to the gallery took quite some time. We then lay out all of the artwork to visualize a way to organize it all including the the wording for the walls. While all of these is going on at one of the galleries, down in the basement we are getting another load of prints ready to be displayed. These prints need to have individual french cleats. the cleats for the print need to be at the same distance on each one of the prints so they are all at the same label at the time to be displayed on the walls. And finally I had to do a conditioning report an a small painting that is currently on display. I love doing condition reports because you get to look at the artwork up close and in detail from top to bottom. As a painter myself by analyzing the artwork I get to study the technique used by the artist on the piece regardless of the medium. It’s amazing to see the quality of the work from many many years ago, and how valuable in so many ways those pieces can be.