Around the MAG
collection news
MAGazine has gone digital! The Gallery's annual member magazine is now Around the MAG, with headlines and features that change each month. Don't look for us in your mailbox, but do visit this site often. (If you're a MAG member, you'll still receive ARTiculate, our bimonthly calendar, by US mail.)
From left: Works by Joyce Treiman and Jerome Witkin are currently on view.
On your way to see the new exhibition Paint Made Flesh, spend a moment in the Forman Gallery. You'll find two monumental works from the MAG collection—Jerome Witkin's Breaking the Pose (1986), with its beautifully rendered female nudes, and Joyce Treiman's The Parting (1983), with its otherworldly portraits of the artist and her deceased mother. Like the works in Paint Made Flesh, these two paintings show how different artists have chosen to render the human form.
This Greek Kylix with Scenes of Warriors in Battle, from the 6th century BCE, is one of the objects that will be receiving treatment.
In August, MAG received a conservation grant from the Greater Hudson Heritage Network in association with the New York State Council on the Arts. The $7,500 grant will be used to treat four objects in the collection—a pair of ancient Greek drinking cups, a 19th-century clam basket from the American Northwest Coast and a 20th-century mask from the Ivory Coast of Africa.
Details from Trellised Garden with Animals (Brussels-Brabant, ca. 1550).
Trellised Garden with Animals, the most important Renaissance tapestry in the Gallery’s collection, has been off view awaiting conservation treatment since 1993. Now, thanks to a major federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, it’s off to the Textile Conservation Laboratory at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine for cleaning, conservation, relining and remounting. The painstaking process should be completed—and the tapestry back on the wall—in late 2010.
Finely woven of wool and silk in the Flemish workshop of Wilhelm de Pannemaker, the colorful, 12 x 15' work shows a colonnaded garden with lush foliage and wildlife including lions, birds and fish. It was a 1931 gift of Mrs. Granger A. (Elizabeth Watson) Hollister, an original member of the Gallery’s Board of Managers and sister-in-law of MAG founder Emily Sibley Watson.
HVAC technician Jamie Chudyk safeguards the collection—from behind the scenes.
Heating Solution Yields Greener Gallery
Sometimes innovation turns a problem into a green opportunity. That’s just the case at MAG, where last summer a leaky heat exchanger forced some quick thinking and allowed the Gallery to save thousands of dollars on utilities—with no consequences to thousands of priceless artworks that must be kept in strictly controlled environments. Read the whole story
RELATED ARTICLEs
Looking Back: William Ordway Partridge's Iconic Sculpture Memory Now Greets MAG Visitors
October 2009: New Interactive Website Explores the Collection (Picturing a Story)
October 2009: Traditions and Encounters Gallery
Gifts: Million Dollar Gift Will Fund New Gallery of Ancient Art
Story archives
May 2009: MAG in Motion (Seeing America improvements)
March 2009: Celebrating Women in Art
Fall 2008: Swing Low (Harriett Tubman sculpture) by Alison Saar
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