Under the FAC

Hello! It's Amber here. This post is going to be the first of our weekly "museum picks" section of the blog, where Suzy and I will each pick a favorite piece currently on display at the FAC, and share some thoughts, photos and information about them (with copyright permission of course!) This week, I have chosen a painting by local artist Andrew Velez: Emergence , 2010, acrylic on canvas. It is currently on loan, courtesy of the artist, in our gallery of Southwest art. I was captured by Velez's sharp details that continue through the planes as they recede in space. I love the sharp contrast between the warm greens and earth tones in the foreground, and the cool icy blue tones in the background, and the balance created by this stark juxtaposition of color temperature. I love how the saguaro in the forefront is cut off at the top, giving a sense of a full, overflowing landscape, and a sense that nature is uncontainable. Velez's detailed brushwork is incredibly

In our last post we talked about the beginning of the journey of our Arthur Dove Fog Horns piece that began when we took it off display so that it could be assessed by a painting conservator. This post will be focusing on what we learned from watching the assessment. Conservators on the job have one main goal: to preserve the artists intent . Their job is not to strictly fix damage and clean the work, as often the issue is much more complicated than that. Often times, things that can be perceived as damage are actually just a part of the artists original techniques. An example is a 'holiday'. Not to be confused with vacation time, the term 'holiday' in the art conservation world refers to a gap in the paint that was a product of the artists style of brushwork. Without trained eyes, these 'holidays' can be mistaken for cracks or scratches. The next step for a conservator is to assess what needs to be fixed. Are there cracks that might spread without attenti

Today we began the grand send-off for our Arthur Dove Fog Horns . It will be dearly missed, but we know that it will be well cared for in its temporary home of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany. The museum is one of three prominent museums in Cologne and boasts a collection that ranges from the medieval period to the twentieth century. Fog Horns will be one of 120 loans in a four month exhibition titled Once Upon a Time in America. The exhibition will be covering three centuries worth of American art. It will explore the phase of artistic exploration after the Colonial period and continue through the Hudson River School, the reaction to the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Ashcan School, and end with the Armory show of 1913. The show will focus on the wonderful diversity of American Art. Quoted from the Wallraf-Richartz website: "The show is vivid proof that there is not “one single” history of US American art, but many." As interns, our small piece in th

We are Amber and Suzy, the interns at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, taking part in the summer museum internship program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We dwell in the basement of the FAC in the registration and collections department, under the watchful eyes of Michael Howell, the registrar and director of the internship program. We put this blog together to share our experiences with collections management, art handling, researching, and everything else we encounter within museum operations. But we also put it together to share our fun experiences and daily shenanigans. We hope it is useful to anyone out there considering a internship or job in the museum field!