One day between winter storms, three Buffalo State College graduate students filed across Elmwood Avenue to Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where they spent the morning on their knees in the marble-floored 1905 wing, stretching a 12x12-foot canvas. Not any canvas, but Phil Sims’ monochromatic painting “Marienbad,” part of the just-concluded exhibition “The Panza Collection: An Experience of Color and Light.” The students were from Buffalo State’s art conservation curriculum, one of the few academic programs of its type in the United States and — since 2002 — part of the museum studies department, which has fostered partnerships with the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, Buffalo Museum of Science, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum and Burchfield-Penney Art Center as well as Albright-Knox. In return for course credit, students can be found in those places almost every day, working as volunteers or interns to preserve the city’s cultural treasures.

The trio at the art gallery, Cynthia Albertson, Ana Alba and Katrina Bartlett, helped professor James Hamm reverse the mounting of “Marienbad” and a companion piece by removing the upside-down canvases from the wood frames to which they had been stapled, ironing the wrinkled tacking margins, rolling up the works and placing them in thick cardboard tubes normally used to make concrete forms for construction. It was a learning experience for the women, all second-year painting majors in the art conservation master’s program. They had never handled paintings this large in the conservation lab in Rockwell Hall, opposite the art gallery. As a bonus, they had met Sims during the setup for “Color and Light.” “We had a chance to collaborate with the artist and talk to him about his materials,” said Bartlett, who is from Corning.

As the Sims painting was readied for storage at Albright-Knox, over at the nearby Historical Society, Allison Brady, a history major who is minoring in museum studies, compiled material for a forthcoming exhibit on past presidential races. And in Rockwell Hall, conservation progressed on a relic from the Museum of Science collection — a two-foot-tall ceramic rooftop ornament dating to China’s Ming Dynasty.

Though the museum studies program is growing, there are too few students to meet the demands of cultural institutions seeking interns, said Kathryn Leacock, a Buffalo State history and social studies lecturer. “Museum careers are hot right now, and nonprofits know Buffalo State has a good program,” she said. Leacock, who minored in museum studies at the college, and Cynthia Conides, a history and social studies associate professor, are the program’s only full-time faculty members. Since 2006, Conides has also been acting executive director of the Historical Society.

The museum experience is invaluable for graduate art conservation students, said Hamm, who has directed restoration of many historic Buffalo artworks. Only 10 of the dozens of students who apply each year are accepted, and graduates are highly likely to land jobs in the museum world. “All of the major museums, including some overseas, have our graduates,” Hamm said. One even works in the Vatican secret archives. The conservation program, which occupies part of one floor in Rockwell Hall, soon will expand into space on two floors that will be vacated when Burchfield-Penney moves into its new building across from the campus at Rockwell Road and Elmwood. For Albright-Knox, where putting up and taking down big shows like “Color and Light” is harder and more complex than you might think, assistance from young people schooled in state-of-the-art conservation techniques is always welcome, said senior art preparator Jody Hanson. “I wish we had them here all the time."

Pablo Picasso’s celebrated painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” transformed the art world when it was unveiled 100 years ago. By the time The Museum of Modern Art acquired the piece in 1939, it was already considered a pivotal painting in the development of modern art. It had achieved immortality over the years, but it had also accumulated surface dirt and discoloration from wax and varnish used in previous treatments. …In the early 2000s, conservators began their work on the painting, and in December 2004, the restoration was complete—a blessing to MoMA’s permanent collection and to modern art in general. To read the entire article, click here...

Inspired by the tool-making traditions of northeastern Native Americans and the people of the South Pacific, Thornton makes these crooked knife tools, called “mocotaugan,” and uses them for carving. The handles, finished with wipe-on polyurethane, are (from top) curly maple, apple, “lemon” wood degame, and apple. To make the fiddlehead-fern knife (bottom in photo), Thornton employed an Iroquois technique, casting a pewter inlay to hold the blade in the handle.

Elizabeth Peña, director of the Art Conservation Program at Buffalo State College, and Susan Maguire, lecturer, Anthropology, have been named editor and associate editor of the Northeast Historical Archaeology, a journal of the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology. With Peña and Maguire’s term commencing in January 2008, the editorial office for the peer-reviewed journal moves from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, to Buffalo State College.