Farewell to America's Rome

By: Christine Olsen, Registrar

As you may have read in my blog post “Making an Exhibition Happen” a lot of steps are involved in putting up and taking down an exhibit. In our exhibit, America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, we had 134 works from 24 lenders, including Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Toledo Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum of Art. In addition to some of the other projects that I am working on which I have blogged about, such as the Through the Eyes of Others Travelling show which returns from NYSM in January and preparing for the Thaw Travelling show to go to Cleveland in February, I am currently working on returning the loans for America’s Rome to their lenders since the exhibit closed on December 31st. Instead of shipping with UPS, Fed Ex or a standard moving company, I work with a handful of exclusive fine art handling companies who specialize in shipping for high value and fragile cargo. Their trucks have special air ride suspension, temperature/humidity control and dual drivers with a security system; a few more options than the standard shipper would provide! Sometimes, lenders require an exclusive use shipment, which means that their loan is the only one on the truck. For those that do not require exclusive use, I often combine shipments for lenders that are geographically near one another; they call these direct shuttles, and many lenders like to know that their artwork is on board with loans from other museums who lent to the same exhibition.

As I have discussed in detail in my blog “Making an Exhibition Happen”, each loan has specific requirements from the lenders which must be followed; for example, just as upon unpacking and installation, there are three lenders to this show that require a courier to oversee de-installation and packing. This means making flight and hotel reservations for each courier, and scheduling de-installation and shipping to coincide perfectly with their visits. It is a difficult juggling act, and it has taken me weeks to work out the details. Finally, two lenders to this exhibit require that their courier also ride on the truck for the return of their artwork; one lender will ride all the way from Cooperstown to Detroit in one day!

All of the crates for the work in this exhibit have been stored since April in a storage space with security, pest and environmental controls (you can go back and see the pictures I posted of crates stacked in the hallway in my previous blog). When it is time for de-installation, the crates will be moved into the exhibition gallery to be packed by myself and other Curatorial staff. The artwork itself is thoroughly examined again by me for condition changes and has detailed pictures taken of its packing. As anyone who has read my blogs knows, condition reporting itself takes a lot of time, and I can only do it when the museum is closed to the public.
This is the life of every loan that comes in and out of the museum; after doing this for so long I have a system down so that this process goes smoothly. But of course there are glitches along the way and unexpected things that come up that I and my colleagues must contend with. It certainly makes the winter go by quickly! I will soon be blogging about loans that will be coming in for our Spring exhibitions, such as John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Praise of Women…if the technical aspects of registrarial work interest you, stay tuned!

The Fall of (America's) Rome

By: Michelle Murdock, Curator of Exhibitions

It’s true what they say – all good things must come to an end. January is always a bittersweet month for us here at Fenimore. It’s sad to see the exhibitions we’ve come to love taken down, but it’s very exciting to prepare the road for new exhibitions. This week, we packed up America’s Rome, and several staff dropped by the gallery to say goodbye to their favorite works. While we are all looking forward to re-opening in April with a bevy of new exhibitions (cant wait for John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Praise of Women!), this is the time to lovingly pack up the old friends. Here’s a picture of Chris Rossi affixing a painting to its crate using Oz Clips.
As my colleague Christine Olsen noted in her blog Making an Exhibition Happen, there’s just as much involved in taking an exhibition down as putting one up. Thankfully, we have a new Preparator to help us out. Stephen Loughman comes to us from the Plattsburg State Art Museum where he was a Preparator. Look for his blogs soon, too.

The Big Crate

By: Christine Olsen, Registrar

As any registrar can attest, sometimes we have to get creative in our line of work. Case in point: When a painting for our current exhibit America’s Rome came to us from the Spanierman Gallery in New York City last spring the crate was larger than I expected and I had to think fast on my feet. The painting, Effect Near Noon – The Appian Way by George Loring Brown, is only 81” high x 110” wide but its crate measures 92 ½” high x 118” wide. Below is a picture of the painting on display in the gallery (it really is a beautiful piece, due much in part to its scale).

By crating standards it really isn’t that large, but this is the largest crate that has come into Fenimore Art Museum during my time here as Registrar. Despite receiving measurements from the crate fabricator and checking the maximum door height of our loading dock prior to shipment, upon delivery I discovered that the crate simply wasn’t going to make it through our loading dock doors and down the winding halls to the Great Hall Gallery.

After weighing my options, one of which was to uncrate the painting on the loading dock thereby exposing it to a rapid shift in temperature and humidity as well as a long hand-carry to the gallery, I opted to take a more creative, and believe it or not, safer route. After triple checking the door measurements and carefully discussing the logistics, the crate was driven over the lawn of the museum and brought directly in through the back, emergency entrance of the Great Hall Gallery whose door frames are extra tall.

The next day, after acclimating to the environment of the gallery, the painting was unpacked and hung and the crate moved to my office for storage; the only storage room in which it would fit. Below is a picture of the crate in my office to give some perspective; it will feel really empty in here once it is gone.

Needless to say this will all have to be done in reverse in January when it is time for the loan to go back to Spanierman Gallery. By then there will be snow to contend with on the back lawn of the museum…but that is another blog.

Laying it out and making it all fit

By: Chris Rossi, Associate Curator of Exhibitions

When I first started at Fenimore Art Museum we would lay our exhibits out on graph paper. A scaled outline of the gallery would be laid out and we would painstakingly make little cutouts of paintings, sculptures, and exhibit cases. Then we would slide them around our floor plan until we got them where we wanted them. Little dabs of glue stick would hold them in place until some poor soul accidentally gave the page a good knock. Then your gallery got “redesigned” and you spent time muttering under your breath while you tried to get it back in order.

You can imagine our delight when we found the beauty of designing in a graphics program. Yes, you still had to make a floor plan and size stuff, but no one could knock the darn thing off the table and scatter little pieces of paper to the wind. You could even create multiple versions of a layout and email them to your colleagues! Ya-hoo, we were talking progress.

So, imagine the delight and disbelief when we stumbled across a 3-D design program that was actually user friendly. This baby could help you lay out a gallery in 3-dimension, color the walls, chose floor treatments, place paintings and allow for 3-d views that made you feel like you were walking through a dollhouse. And (are you sitting down?), it was free.

At this point many of you are nodding your heads and saying oh yes its Sketch-up (from Google). You would be right. For someone who started out way back using little cutouts to do floor plans this is indeed and amazing program. It is fairly intuitive to use. I find myself gaining skill as I go along. It does not do every single thing I would like it to, but it is a wonderful tool for giving you a fairly accurate feeling for how a gallery will look upon completion.

I used the program last year to good effect in laying out America’s Rome and the overall graphic treatments in the gallery. It was invaluable for figuring out how many animal-related objects could fit in the main barn for the Wild Times exhibit, and how the colors and graphics would relate to each other as you moved through regions. This year I have been laying out platforms for dresses for next year’s Empire Waists, Bustles and Lace exhibit.
My next trick will be to learn how to interface google earth and sketch-up. The possibilities seem endless and as the technology evolves there will always be another exciting opportunity to do it better.

Making an Exhibition Happen

By: Christine Olsen, Registrar

Have you ever wondered how a piece of artwork gets from a lending institution across the country onto a gallery wall at FAM? A lot of the work is done before the artwork even arrives at the museum and it takes months of planning for an exhibition and its accompanying loans to come together. Everyone on the Curatorial staff at FAM has a different role to play; my job as museum registrar is to orchestrate the legal and logistical details of loans and to make sure that the requirements of the lending institutions are met. I work closely with lenders for months leading up to an exhibition to make sure loan agreements are signed, insurance coverage is in place, necessary conservation work is done, and the artwork is crated and shipped safely.
Exhibitions may have a just few lenders or they have many, with lenders as close as the next town over or as far away as across country. For example, the current exhibition America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City consists of 24 lenders and 134 works from lenders near and far, including Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Toledo Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum of Art. In contrast, the exhibit Walker Evans: Carbon and Silver has 84 works from one exhibition organizer based in New England. From start to finish, however, both exhibits required the same amount of attention to detail and planning on the part of the registrar and other staff at FAM.
When appropriate, specific requirements of the lender must be followed during the life of the loan; for example, some lenders require a courier be sent to oversee installation and de-installation, some require particular security measures to be taken while the artwork is on exhibit, and others have condition issues that must be periodically evaluated. In other words, the work doesn’t end when the exhibition opens!
Let’s follow the path of a typical incoming exhibition loan at FAM: As soon as a shipping crate comes off the fine art shippers’ truck at our loading dock, it comes to the registrar’s office for safe keeping and to acclimate to the environment of the museum. All crates and the artwork they contain must continuously be in temperature and humidity controlled environments, and because of very slight changes during transport, it usually takes 24 hours for a safe transition from the environment of the truck to that of the museum. The crate is then moved to the exhibition gallery in which it will be unpacked. The empty crate is later stored in a holding area by the registrar’s office that has security, pest and environmental controls. During a busy exhibition season this holding area is lined to the ceiling with stacked crates and boxes! The artwork itself is thoroughly examined by the registrar for condition changes and has detailed pictures taken; each piece of artwork is given a temporary number and is entered along with all of its descriptive information into the museum’s collection database. Finally, the artwork is installed on the gallery wall along with a descriptive label. Of course, the entire process is done in reverse when it is time for the loan to go back to the lending institution.
The next time you visit an exhibition at FAM, keep in mind how much time and effort went into getting each and every piece of artwork here. It really is an amazing process. We certainly feel that it is well worth it…we hope that you agree!

Designing the campagana, or, notes from an antediluvian blogger

By: Chris Rossi, Associate Curator of Exhibitions

When working on graphics for upcoming exhibits I am often reminded of where I come from. When you grew up using a slide rule rather than a calculator, some things (like blogging!) just don’t seem to come naturally. Not to say we didn’t make it to calculators, it was just that my first one was a huge beige model that my high school classmates dubbed the DeSoto.

Again, like the DeSoto, my first foray into computer graphic design was on a General Electric machine that was the size of a small refrigerator. The crude shapes that acted as design elements reminded me of my childhood Colorforms. The only slot my roommate and I could get for lab time was 3 am. We slept out in our studio and chugged coffee at 2:45 am. It was hot stuff.
Technology is still hot stuff. In fact now I do all my design work on a machine that often seems to know more than I do. America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, 1800-1900, our feature exhibit at Fenimore this year, was laid out on a computer; graphics and design elements all composed on the same Mac G5. Now I am working on a map of the Roman Campagna and am impressed at how the Mac and Photoshop seem to be holding out on me – holding back on some secrets that will make this the map that will unlock the glories of the Roman Campagna to our visitors and link the paintings to those romantic names – Tivoli, Frascati, Nettuno, to name a few. The green and yellow ochre fields, Roman ruins, peasants, and waterfalls that the 19th-century painters found so intriguing. How to connect the names and images in a way that will make them easily accessible to the visitor is always the big design challenge. Sometimes the tools are more sophisticated than their driver and we all have to play a little catch-up.

In the end, the results will exceed what was created with the slide rule, or the DeSoto, or the GE. The new technology can lead to amazing ends. Who knows where it may take the map and I.

We love Otsego County!

By: Michelle Murdock, Curator of Exhibitions

Twelve years ago I moved from Maine to a small town just outside of Cooperstown. I was embraced by the local community and within a short period of time, came to feel like part of a larger, county-wide community. This was a completely new experience for me because Mainers rarely identify themselves by the county they live in. But here in upstate New York, I soon realized the importance (and pleasure!) of county affiliations.

This week at the Fenimore Art Museum and The Farmers’ Museum, we are showing our deep appreciation for our friends and neighbors in our county. Otsego County Appreciation Week began on Monday and continues through Sunday June 28th. We’ll be offering half off admissions and memberships for Otsego County residents, and we’re hosting lots of fun events. At the Fenimore Art Museum, art activities will be offered for kids every morning at 10:15 a.m., and a curator-led tour will be offered each weekday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. My tour will be on Wednesday June 24th and I’ll be giving an overview of all the exhibitions currently on view. My colleague Paul D’Ambrosio will lead a tour of America’ Rome on Monday and Thursday and Eva Fognell will lead a tour of the Thaw Collection on Tuesday and Friday. And at 11:00 a.m. each morning, visitors can experience a guided tour of the new Interpretive Trail and the Mohawk Bark House which are located on the shore of Otsego Lake behind the Fenimore Art Museum. Speaking of Otsego Lake, I want to encourage you to bring a picnic to enjoy on the grounds of Fenimore when you come. I, too, will be taking my lunch lakeside, enjoying one of Otsego County’s natural treasures, near its premiere cultural treasure that I’m lucky enough to call my home away from home.Thank you Otsego County!

America's Rome - Opening Saturday

By: Paul D'Ambrosio, Vice President and Chief Curator
What a month it's been in Curatorial! After nearly two years of planning, more than 100 paintings have arrived on our doorstep to be uncrated and installed in time for Saturday's opening of America's Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, 1800-1900. The pieces look spectacular, especially when placed in their appropriate groupings and hung on the wall. The exhibition will take you through the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, and particularly the Campagna, or countryside. There are great Hudson River School style paintings by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, Jasper Cropsey, and Sanford R. Gifford, among others. All of these painters traveled to Rome to improve their art, and the results showed in the fame they received upon returning and painting American landscapes in the same style. Come see for your self. The public opening is this Saturday, May 23, beginning at 10 am.

Rome Calling

by: Paul D'Ambrosio, Vice President and Chief Curator I spend a lot of time planning exhibitions; deciding which artworks tell a particular story, negotiating to bring those works together here at the museum, writing or editing labels, and working with the exhibitions staff to create a layout that brings the visitor into the world that the art portrays. My absolute favorite part of this job, however, is sharing that world with visitors after the exhibition is mounted. Over the course of the season I might give dozens of tours and lectures to hundreds of people. When we have exhibitions that are particularly popular, we simply schedule more and I make the time.

The problem is, even if I worked 24 hours a day, it would be impossible to reach more than a few hundred people this way. That is why we are currently exploring other forms of media to reach a far larger number of museum-goers. One of our new social media experiments this year will be cell phone tours of our new exhibition, America’s Rome. In the next few days I will be taping a tour of the exhibition (the paintings haven’t even arrived yet!) so that any visitor to the Fenimore Art Museum can dial in on their cell and listen to me while they tour the exhibition at their own pace. This way, I could reach thousands with the exhibition content that I’ve spent the last two years developing.

Importantly, the cell phone tour will include a feature allowing visitors to leave comments. This is very exciting and unprecedented here. Over the course of the year we plan to find ways to share these remarks with everyone, thus creating a shared product that I alone could not create.
If you get the chance this year, please give the cell phone tour a try and let us know what you are thinking about the topic of the meaning of Rome to America. Together we can make something worth more than the sum of its parts.

Worthington Whittredge. Aqueducts of the Campagna, 1859, Oil on canvas, 33 by 53 ¾ inches, Cincinnati Art Museum, Gift of Caroline Hooper, 1900.1

Art Speculations from the Non-Curator

By: Kate Betz, Manger of Public Programs
I grew up with two ideas of Rome in my head.

Idea 1: Rome was the birthplace of democracy and its great buildings (now relics) should be celebrated—nay, enshrined—as icons to be lauded.

Idea 2: Rome was full of drunken debauchery, violence, and anything except democracy.

Our museum curators recently showed me some of the amazing paintings that will be featured in this summer’s exhibit America’s Rome. To me, these paintings represent part of the dichotomy of Rome that has been a part of the American collective consciousness throughout my life. I think that Idea 1 is the inspiration that drove most of the paintings that I’ve seen of the exhibit so far. An amazing society grew and flourished right there where these nineteenth-century American painters stood painting landscapes. Though this society is gone, the remnants of it remain, and these remnants are still worth preserving.

As far as Idea 2 is concerned, I think that Rome as a debauchery is appealing for the same reason that I like to hear about the quirks of famous people. Call me crazy, but I like knowing that everyone has flaws and yet our society continues to function and progress continues to be made. Those Romans sure could party, but they could also create an unparalleled system of aqueducts and some really stellar philosophers along the way. Now, it is possible, of course, that the only reason I have this idea in my head is because I just finished watching Season 2 of HBO’s miniseries Rome last week. However, if Thomas Cole’s series Course of Empire is any indication, I think that these painters were struggling with the same thing. I could just be making this up, but these simply remain, speculations from the non-curator…