Tiffany developed a technique called plating where numerous pieces of glass are layered to create depth, shadows, and to manipulate colors viewed in transmitted light. The Art Museum’s windows contain up to four layers of glass. During conservation, it was necessary to partially disassemble the windows in order to remove layers of thick coal soot from the surface of each piece of glass. Cleaning the glass is an important step in preventing deterioration, but it also allows one to see the colors that Tiffany intended.

Plated layers before cleaning

Plated layers after cleaning

During conservation we counted how many pieces of glass were in each window.  One window alone had more than 580 pieces of glass!

Come see the exhibition!  Not only are the windows absolutely stunning, but you can learn more about plating and other techniques used by Tiffany Studios and the conservation process.

-Megan Emery, Associate Conservator of Objects

Edward H. Potthast, Man and Child on an Ox Cart, c. 1900, oil on wood panel, 12 x 16 x ¼ in., Cincinnati Art Museum, 2005.114. (top)

Microphotograph of highlight on ox rump. (bottom)

Close examination can provide clues about an artist’s working method, such as the materials used and how the paint was applied. In many of his works it is possible to see that Potthast intentionally flattened areas of impasto during the painting process. For example, the white highlight on the brown ox’s rump has been pressed down, but there is texture in the paint strokes applied on top.

It is hoped it will be possible to determine if certain paintings were executed in plain air, rather than the artist’s studio. Sand or other debris imbedded in the paint can be an indication that a work was executed outside.

-Conservation Department

The result is The Collections: 6,000 Years of Art, the first half of which opened the beginning of this month. We have taken several thousand of our works of art and put them on display in a manner that evokes the ways we pack, inventory, and study them.  This is, of course, only a small fraction of our collections of over 60,000 works of art, but we will be rotating pieces into the galleries (especially light-sensitive ones such as works on paper and textiles), and in the spring will open the other half of this exhibition across the hallway. Together these exhibitions will let you see a lot more of a collection we hold in trust for this community at one time than was ever possible in the past.

The display of The Collections does raise the question of how you actually show art. After a great deal of internal discussion, we decided we needed to bring variety into our presentations. We want to do this not just for variety’s sake, but because we all use the experience of art in different ways at different times, and according to the different kinds of art at which we look. There should be an opportunity for intense contemplation or focused discussion, as there is now in the Schmidlapp Gallery.  There should be a time and place to see a great deal of material in series, such as the many teapots on display in The Collections, or in juxtaposition, as there is in the painting area of this new display. You should also be able to see works of art in a measured rhythm, arranged according to some logic –whether chronology or style, or who made it, or medium—as you can in many of our other galleries.  We also think that sometimes it makes sense to develop a theme that becomes evident in the assembly of different works of art, and you will be seeing some of those themes activated in the Art Museum in the future.

Looking at art in all these different ways means having a different attitude in your looking, though we have been careful to design these displays so that you can still focus on most of the works of art in good light, at eye-height, and well-framed –the generic and default way you should be able to look at art in an art museum.  The relationship to the space around you, to the other works of art, and to information are what now change in these different displays. Those alternations free you to think about art as part of a culture, a way of making, a continuum of forms, or just as a singular thing of beauty.

These installations are experiments, and we hope to learn from them as we go along. We have already figured out one thing: that we need a lot more information. We will be producing more signs for the Schmidlapp Gallery, as well as the interactives that show you where you can find pieces related to the eighteen icons on view are on their way.  For The Collections, we are producing a book with information on all the works of art that will be available in the gallery, adding more wall texts, and improving the iPad app (which will soon also be available online).

The one issue that will not be address through these additions is whether these new displays treat the works of art with appropriate respect. The Schmidlapp Gallery turns each work into an icon, and in so doing removes it from the historical context in which most art museums (including this one) usually show such artifacts. In The Collections, the opposite happens: you have to look at what we think is an important work of art without many of the usual framing devices. For us, the questions both of these approaches, as well as some of the others we will be unveiling over the next year or two, raise get to the point of what an art museum does: at least in part, it makes the artifact into what we think of as a work of art through the way it displays that object or image. By varying how we do that, we want you to be aware of that process, and maybe even to be part of it.

Aaron Betsky, Director

At the Art Museum, we are lucky to have so many budding artists who join us for our monthly programs. This past Friday, we hosted our youngsters for the fourth Culture Kids of the season with the theme “A Stroke of Genius”. This program is designed for preschoolers, accompanied by an adult, who enjoy storytelling, a docent led tour, a snack, and hands-on art. This week we talked about texture in paintings and explored ways to achieve this in our own artwork without using a paintbrush. We focused especially on trees, as they contain an enormous range of texture both in nature and in art. We looked at the realistic representation of sycamore trees by Alexandre Calane and talked about the smoothness of the paint. We glanced around the corner to compare it to the bumpy, purple, impressionist trees by Claude Schuffenecker in The Road Under Trees and visited the American galleries to check out Sowing Wheat by Arthur Dove.

One of our favorite things to talk about with kids is how every artist in the whole world can be told to paint the exact same thing and each one will turn out differently. It fosters a sense of confidence in their work that you can’t find anywhere else. At this age, we think it is important that they feel comfortable expressing themselves creatively and that  they know that if they say it’s a tree, then it is definitely a tree and not one of us can argue it. So, without further ado, here are three examples of trees created by some of our favorite Art Museum visitors.

By: Vincent

By: Carolyn

And to get us in the holiday spirit…

By: Meghan

Please join us next month on January 13^th from 10:00-11:30 or 2:00-3:30 for another Culture Kids. The theme will be “Fine Print” and we will explore printmaking all over the museum. Each child will create their very own original edition of prints using some unexpected materials. Be sure to check back the following week to see what they come up with! Call 721-ARTS for ticketing and more information.

Integrating art at home:

In light of this month’s Culture Kids project, here is an idea for a project to paint with unusual tools at home.

Step 1: Get a shallow box (lids work great) and tape a white piece of paper to the bottom.

Step 2: Have your child go on a little hunt through the house to find anything that will roll, and that you don’t mind getting paint on; i.e. marbles, tennis balls, ping pong balls, beads, etc.

Step 3: Put two tablespoons of paint in the bottom. This is a great way to introduce color mixing by picking two primary colors and have them guess what will happen when they mix.

Step 4: Put the objects in the box either one at a time or all together and move the box to make them roll and see what happens.

Also on the agenda:

Wednesday, December 21^st—Wee Wednesday: “Winter Wee Wednesday” 10:00-11:30 a.m.

FREE. Need something engaging to bring the kids to while they are off school for the holidays?  Wee Wednesday, usually held on the final Wednesday of each month, always includes four interactive storytime stops in our galleries with our highly trained docents. However, this month, we have some surprises up our sleeves. Enjoy storytime as well as drop-in art projects.

*NEW– This program is now featuring a lunch buffet that will include a healthy, kid-friendly lunch. Brought to us by our very own Terrace Café, this optional buffet will begin at 11:30.  It is all you can eat for a small fee of $3/child and $6/adult.

Saturday, January 7^th—Family First Saturday: “Multiple Masterpieces” 1- 4 p.m.

FREE. Kick off the New Year with your family by learning about printmaking at the Art Museum. Visit Happen Inc.’s toy lab to make a one-of-a-kind toy made out of recycled toy parts. Talk to local artists Katie Labmeier and Chrissy Jackson about their work and enjoy performances by Chinese dancers. Complete our scavenger hunt that takes you through the museum and make a pit stop in Artworld for hands-on art!

Happy experimenting!

-Elissa Conte, Coordinator for Family Learning

One of the things we realized was that we wanted to make moments where you can truly concentrate on some of the great works of art we have in our collection.  You should be able to lose yourself in them, and learn a great deal from a concentrated experience.  At the same time, an art museum is a social place and you always want to feel as if you are part of a larger community.  It should let you see the best at whatever pace you want, giving you an opportunity to browse, discuss, contemplate, and learn.

We decided to try this out in the Schmidlapp Gallery.  I suggested that we might want to think of that long, thin space like a church, with side chapels each devoted to one single work of art.  We didn’t want the experience to be too sacred-seeming, though, and we certainly did not want to be blasphemous.
Eli suggested hanging the work on beautifully crafted walls, and devising a way to both light them and provide information that would concentrate your gaze.  The Venetian plaster backdrops were the result.  We still needed a way to define the space around each work, however, and that was difficult.  Chief Curator James Crump and Eli both thought that we should try to keep the space open, and our Curator of Learning and Interpretation, Emily Holtrop, pointed out the importance of accommodating tours and docent activities.

Eli found a great new flexible wall system that we could shape according to our needs, altering it as needed.  It was cheap and light, but it was also brand new, and the only installations we could see did not make us think that it would look good enough for the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Then Eli came up with the string curtains.  I have to admit I was skeptical, because they reminded me at first of 1960s beaded curtains.  The advantage they have –along with being affordable—is that they can create a sense of enclosure, without making you feel completely isolated.  These curtains have a way of giving you glimpses of what lies beyond, while also having overtones of the kind of heavy curtains that once framed important works of art –including at the Art Museum, in the 1940s.   Eli figured out a way to hang them so that you move through them without causing any harm, and have to really pull at them to get any of them loose.  You can’t hurt yourself by backing into them, and yet most people stay away from the curtains. If any rambunctious child manages to get enough time away from adult supervision to really do the job, each string is fairly easy to replace.

We decided to make the curtains black to help focus your attention on each work of art (and to lessen the 1960s associations) and we used theatrical lights to make that art shine.  The labels also glow, so you can read them with ease.  We are working on an installation towards the south end of the gallery that will tell you where to go in our other galleries if you liked one particular work or another, and a mobile app will make that even more easy by this December.

We are pleased with the way the Schmidlapp Gallery turned out.  I think the eighteen pieces there look better than they ever had.  If you are coming to the Art Museum to have lunch or for an event, and you just get a glimpse of something great on the way, that is fine with us.  If you come here for the first time and see this installation, we hope you will be inspired to see more.  And if you want to really get to Whistling Boy or Warhol’s Soup Can, I think this will give you every opportunity.  We would love to hear what you think of the installation.  This is, after all, just the beginning.  Next up: The Collections, a presentation of thousands of works of art in our second floor galleries.

Aaron Betsky

This notion of history and the Art Museum’s place in it prompted our discussion question for the week – The Art Museum of the 22^nd Century, What does it look like to you? What will the Cincinnati Art Museum look, sound, feel like in 2111? What is our future? Will we arrive for our visit in flying cars; will we all have microchips in our heads that will upload information on works on view right to our brains. What new works will be in the collection from this century? Will these works continue to tell our story, our history?

A recent article on ARTINFO.com, discusses just this issue, the collection of items from today for the museum goers of tomorrow. The article talks about how the Smithsonian American History Museum and the New York Historical Society are collecting ephemera from the Occupy Wall Street protests. That they are racing to preserve this moment in history for future generations, to, in essence, tell our story for museum visitors of the 22^nd century. This story reminded me of my previous life in Miami, Florida as a museum educator for the Historical Museum of Southern Florida and the Caribbean (now History Miami). From 2000-2002, I taught Miamians their history and was there to witness firsthand the contentious 2000 presidential election. Yes, I voted on the butterfly ballot and yes, I was in the epicentre of the dangling chad.  So how does this relate to the story in ARTINFO? Just like the Smithsonian and NY Historical Society, HMSF raced to collect ballots, pregnant and dangling chads included, for the collection so that visitors from the next century learned the story of this one.

While many may think that museums only look to the past, the future of museums and where we are going is actually a hot topic in the museum world.  Every Thursday afternoon the American Association of Museums sends out a weekly e-blast from their Center for the Future of Museums titled Dispatches from the Future of Museums. This is a very popular email in the Division of Learning and Interpretation and I can always tell when a member of my staff has opened it and started reading. Some of the best conversations in our office about what we do, why we do it and how we can do it differently come out of something from this weekly email.

It is also makes you wonder if museum staffers from 130 years ago were sitting in this same building thinking about what the Art Museum of 2011 would look, sound, and feel like.

Emily Holtrop – Director of Learning & Interpretation

To design this site, we turned to a local firm, Crush Republic, that has developed ways of helping institutions and companies figure out what people think of them, how they use them or their products, and to improve their communications. They are also aces at building complex sites. They created the backbone you don’t really see. We then engaged Thonik, a design firm based in Amsterdam, to shape the site and make it look good.

I have known the principals at Thonik, Thomas Widdershoven and Nikki Geunissen, for more than a decade, ever since I first worked with them when I was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I was charmed by the way they created clean, declarative designs, while also giving them a human touch.  In their early work, they only used one, very modern typeface, but pictures of Nikki kept cropping up everywhere.

In the last few years, they have become most famous for doing projects that are not just styling jobs, but more conceptual pieces. For a small political party in the Netherlands, the SP, they created a logo and identity, which consisted of a red tomato: it’s a socialist party, and a rather irreverent one, and they liked the ideas of throwing red tomatoes at the establishment. That turned into campaign items such a mobile cart in the form of that vegetable from which the party leader served tomato soup. Partially through Thonik’s help, this party became the fourth largest in the country in the subsequent elections.

In 2008, I turned to Thonik to design the identity for the 11^th International Architecture Biennale Venice, which I directed. They translated the event’s theme, “Beyond Buildings,” and the question I asked, which was how we can be at home in a world shaped by technology, into a globe out of which a stylized house grew. By putting that form together, they created tapestries that hung from Venice’s bridges. By isolating the form and making it three dimensional, they constructed markers that helped people find the way to the exhibit. The globes could also be three-dimensional spheres, their houses slotting into each other to form words. Some of those words floated in the Venice canals.

For this website, they turned to the notion of an image carousel, in which the wealth of art we hold for this community or bring here for exhibits floats in front of your eye, while the rest of the images lurk right behind it, as our collections do.  They adapted Pentagram Design’s 2007 Footnote system, which you can see in our galleries, to help lead you from the images here to all the information you might need.

We will be working with Thonik over the next year not only to refine this site (and we would love your comments and suggestions here), but also to improve all the ways we communicate with you. You will be seeing new labels, new signs, new ads and heavens know whatever else the Thonikers come up with. I hope you will be as amazed and delighted as I always have been by their work. And that you will watch this space for regular news and views from inside the Art Museum.

Aaron Betsky, Director