One factoid about the Museum that never fails to amaze in conversation is the estimate that what’s on exhibition is less than 5% of our total collections. The usual response is, “where’s the rest of the stuff?” The answer is ‘in storage’. The Museum has a whole array of storerooms (my usual joke is that [...]
One of the responsibilities of the conservation department is to provide advice and consultation on conservation matters for colleagues, the university community and the general public. The University Community often produces some interesting queries, like the time the ICA wanted to know how to prevent pest problems when exhibiting artworks made of chocolate. Some time [...]
That’s how they say “A big success” in Honduras. I learned that last week in Copan, the site where Penn Museum has been involved for over 25 years. I went to Honduras in mid February with other Museum staff members (Dr. Loa Traxler, Bob Thurlow, and Tessa de Alarcon) for two purposes: to see the [...]
![Graph taken from publication of Libby's Nobel Laureate address, showing Penn Museum's own Aha-Nakht[sic] as one of the baseline known dates.](http://www.penn.museum/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/c14graph-150x150.jpg "Permalink to Willard Libby, Alfred Nobel, and Ahanakht")
How cool is this? While working on a post for our Artifact Lab blog, I Googled Ahanakht, the ancient Egyptian buried in an elaborately inscribed wooden coffin in our collection. Besides learning that Ahanakht I was the first Middle Kingdom governor of the Hare nome (province) in around 2000 BCE, I got a result citing [...]
Last week the preparations for the Artifact Lab (see my previous post) really began to gather speed. On Monday, Molly Gleeson the project conservator arrived and was immediately plunged into the preparations. Molly, a graduate of the UCLA/Getty program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials, has experience and interest in public outreach regarding [...]
Two years ago in this forum, I wrote about Conservation’s move to temporary, smaller quarters, blithely saying “it may be two years before we get back to our proper spaces”. Well, as anyone who’s had renovations done knows, things take longer than expected and it will probably be another two years before we get those [...]
One of the responsibilities of the conservation department is to provide advice and consultation on conservation matters for colleagues, the university community and the general public. The University Community often produces some interesting queries, like the time the ICA wanted to know how to prevent pest problems when exhibiting artworks made of chocolate. Most recently, [...]
The Museum often loans artifacts from its collections to other museums for exhibit. Under certain circumstances, the artifacts will be accompanied by a courier, a museum staff member who oversees the transport, unpacking or repacking, condition reporting, and installation or deinstallation of the artifact(s). One of those circumstances is if the artifacts are traveling by [...]
In the final week our Chinese colleagues were with us, we did give them a chance to do something other than work on the Horses. Our colleagues at Historic Preservation on Penn’s campus gave them a tour of their architectural conservation labs and digital resources and very kindly arranged for them to have a special [...]
In the old days (which are still around sometimes), if you wanted to make a copy of something like the Tang Horses, you’d take an impression using silicone rubber or rubber latex or something like that. It was/is a messy business that required a lot of preparation and even then sometimes damaged the artwork it [...]
