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2019 Annual Meeting with tour of
SFO Museum and facilities
On Saturday July 13, 2019 BAACG held its Annual Business Meeting at the new San Francisco Airport Museum. Guild members met, first, for a private tour of the new SFO Museum facilities hosted by Museum Conservator Alisa Eagleston-Cieslewicz. Alisa led us through the building’s impressive storage facilities, massive prep and mount-making spaces, and well-appointed conservation labs. In the latter we oogled ongoing treatments such as a 1960’s era cut-away model of United Airlines DC-8-20 jet, for which Alisa had had to make and attach replacement limbs for tiny passenger and crew figures in their tight and awkward miniature cabin.
The tour was followed by a buffet lunch provided by BAACG board members. Over lunch, we held our Annual Business meeting, during which retiring board members Gawain Weaver and Jonathan Fisher shared what their time in the Guild had meant to them, and new board members Candis Griggs Hakim, Jena Hirschbein, Karen Zukor, and Justine Wuebold were welcomed. Upcoming events were discussed, and recently passed founding BAACG member Roger Broussal was remembered.
Members then moved on via private SFO Museum bus to the airport terminal, where we enjoyed a guided tour of several exhibits.
2018 Annual Meeting with Guest Speaker Gawain Weaver at the
San Mateo County Historical Museum
Gawain Weaver was not only our President for over a decade but a photograph conservator in private practice, co-author of the AIC Guide to Digital Photography and Conservation Documentation, and President of Two Cat Digital. He discussed the preservation of digital photographs with an emphasis on the needs of the art conservator. Digital images, whether born-digital camera files or images from flatbed scanners are inherently fragile and require vigilance to maintain over time. Digital preservation, hardcopy output options, RAID drives, and cloud backups.
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After the meeting the guild was welcomed to tour the Museum at their leisure. www.historysmc.org
Presentation at
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
a second composition discovered beneath a work by Robert Rauschenberg- presented by SFMOMA paintings conservator Paula De Cristofaro
Robert Rauschenberg’s Untitled [glossy black painting] in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of a series of the artist’s monochromatic paintings from the early 1950’s. Glossy Black is constructed of torn paper collage elements covered by a thick layer of enamel paint which was poured over the collage overall, effectively adhering the paper fragments to the underlying support. The presence of vibrantly colored paint on Glossy Black’s tacking margins inspired the Conservation Department at SFMOMA to x-radiograph the work, with surprising results. It was assumed that the underlying composition was executed by Rauschenberg or by artist Susan Weil, to whom Rauschenberg was married. The composition revealed by the radiograph is closely related to early paintings created Cy Twombly (many of which have been lost or were destroyed). It is apparent that Rauschenberg, who was a friend of Twombly’s and a fellow student at Black Mountain Collage in North Carolina in 1951, appropriated one of Twombly’s canvases to create Glossy Black.
This presentation explored a pivotal moment in the oeuvre of these two artists who would become important figures in the 20th century art world.