News from the Conservation Lab — August 2019

By Suzanne Davis, Curator of Conservation and Co-Curator of Graffiti as Devotion along the Nile: El-Kurru, Sudan

Friends, we’ve got big news at the Kelsey — a large portion of the river Nile has come to our special exhibition gallery. It’s been re-created by our amazing exhibition team, Scott Meier and Eric Campbell, as have a bunch of life-size columns modeled after those found in the El-Kurru funerary temple. It’s all happening as we finish the final touches on our next special exhibiton, Graffiti as Devotion along the Nile, just in time for the opening on August 23.

View of the Kelsey’s special exhibition gallery as installation of Graffiti as Devotion along the Nile progresses. Note the Nile meandering through the right foreground.

This photo shows the relative calm before the storm, since beautiful photographic panels and all kinds of other stuff — including a representation of the ram-headed Kushite god Amun — are going in soon. Although Amun is associated with the sun and with creation, he seems intense and kind of scary and I’m not sure I would enjoy meeting him in person. That said, I think he’s going to look great in our gallery. If you can’t visit in person, check back on our website soon because the online version of the exhibition, built by web guru Julia Falkovitch-Khain, will go live as the in-gallery version opens.

My exhibition co-curator Geoff and I are also really looking forward to our graffiti symposium, which will be held here at the Kelsey on September 20. Yesterday we met with the symposium respondent, artist Jim Cogswell, for a fascinating preview of his thoughts.

And of course, we hope to see you on September 5 at our kick-off event at the Trotter Multicultural Center, where Geoff and I will give attendees a behind-the-scenes look at the El-Kurru graffiti project.

The Barosso watercolors are back!

FROM THE KELSEY CONSERVATION LAB

Conservators from ICA Art Conservation prepare to reinstall a watercolor panel.

The Barosso panel being reinstalled.

Following a brief hiatus from display, the Kelsey Museum’s famous renderings of the Villa of the Mysteries fresco cycle are once again on view. Commissioned by Francis Kelsey himself in the mid-1920s, the watercolors were painted by Italian artist and archaeologist Maria Barosso at a scale of 5/6 the size of the original frescoes in Pompeii. The watercolors captured the vivid color of the frescoes before color photography existed. They have served as an important educational tool and document of the paintings’ condition at the time the renderings were created. The original frescoes have darkened significantly since the time of the Barosso commission, and they are currently undergoing laser cleaning by conservators at Pompeii.

The Kelsey was able to put the watercolors on permanent display for the first time in 2008, thanks to the space provided by the new Upjohn Exhibit Wing, and an IMLS grant to support their conservation treatment and installation in the galleries. Conservators at ICA Art Conservation carried out this complex treatment, as well as some recent repair work to the watercolors’ mounting system that required their temporary deinstallation. It took about three days to reinstall the massive panels, the largest of which is 5 x 20 feet.

We are so grateful to conservator Jamye Jamison, Chris Pelrine, and 05 (that’s right, our colleague’s name is zero-five) for all their hard work!