Hello VCA! 

Please take a moment to RSVP for our upcoming January meeting next Thursday. We hope to see you there!

What: 

Join us at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture for presentations from two Post-Graduate Conservation Fellows: Charlotte Li, Marshall Steel Post-Graduate Fellow in Archaeological Materials Conservation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and Catherine Dussault, NEH Fellow in Paintings Conservation at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. In addition to the evening's talks, you’ll have the opportunity to go next door to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and enjoy their two current special exhibitions focused on photography: American Born Hungary and Long Arc. The evening will begin at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture with time to catch up with colleagues at 5:30 pm followed by the program at 6pm. 

When: Thursday, January 23rd, 5:30-7:30 pm

Where:

Virginia Museum of History and Culture

428 N Arthur Ashe Blvd

Richmond, VA 23220

Parking: We recommend street parking around the Museum. The parking lot behind the Museum will also be available, but there is a $5 parking fee. 

When you arrive: We will be in the Reynolds Conference Room which when you come in go up the staircase to the left then turn left at the top of the stairs go through the sliding glass doors and turn left at the corridor at the front of the library.  The corridor leads right to the Reynolds Conference Room. Refreshments will begin at 5:30 with presentations at 6:00.

Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s new Colin G. and Nancy N. Campbell Archaeology Center (CAC) is set to open in 2026, and a range of objects are undergoing conservation treatment for display in the new exhibition spaces. As one of the fellows hired to begin this process, Charlotte spent most of her first year treating two carboy bottles. The glass bottles, one clear and one green, were excavated from the historic site of the Public Hospital and assembled back in the 1980s. By the 2020s, the old adhesives were visibly degrading, and no treatment records could be found. Decades of open storage have also obscured them with surface dust. Charlotte, along with her ‘fellow’ teammate, took on the challenge of revitalizing these bottles. In this presentation, she will share their eight-month-long journey of examining, documenting, disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling the bottles, including the adventure of organizing 138 clear and 187 green fragments and reversing epoxies.

Catherine Dussault of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will present on the treatment of a mid-18th century Ethiopian wall painting recently undertaken at the museum. Conservators at the VMFA worked to create a bespoke mounting system for the fragile textile support that would enable the safe display of the artwork, centering the design on reversibility. The painting, in tempera on cloth and depicting the archangel Michael saving souls from hell, was originally created as part of a series of decorative panels installed at a church in Shoa; the materials, structural history and current context for the work presented complexities in the treatment of the object, which required cross-disciplinary research and practical problem solving. Though approached as a painting, the mounting system for the work was devised from methods employed in paper and textile conservation, and incorporates novel use of materials in its construction. 

*** Bonus! ***

Don’t miss the Special Exhibits next door at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The entrance fee has been waived for our group! Either before our meeting or following, walk next door to visit the two special exhibits of photography at the VMFA, free of charge. The VMFA will be open until 9pm. A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 explores the American South’s distinct, evolving, and contradictory character through an examination of photography and how photographers working in the region have reckoned with the South’s fraught history and posed urgent questions about American identity. Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces the South’s shifting identity in more than two hundred photographs made over more than 175 years. American, born Hungary: Kertész, Capa, and the Hungarian American Photographic Legacy follows a remarkable number of émigrés and exiles from Hungary to Berlin and Paris and then on to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where they reinvented themselves and American photography. 

VCA members, please join us at Jamestown Settlement Museum on November 21, 2024 from 5:30-7:30 pm for a program that includes a tour of the traveling special exhibition Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design. Featured in the exhibition are over 70 costumes designed by two-time academy award winning designer Ruth E. Carter for movies such as Coming 2 America, Amistad, Black Panther, Selma and Roots. The exhibit offers insight into Carter’s imagination, immersive process, historical research and attention to detail. The evening will begin with a reception at 5:30 pm in the 2nd floor Presentation Hall followed by the program and tour at 6:00 pm which will highlight the process to prepare and install the costumes, and the collection management measures to care for them.

The VCA Winter Party will be held this year at Agecroft Hall on Sunday, December 15 from 4:00 to 7:00 PM. We will have the opportunity for a guided tour of the house, fully decorated for the holidays, in addition to meeting with friends and colleagues for our holiday potluck feast. We will be sending out email reminders and a sign-up sheet in the coming weeks.