Smithsonian American Art Museum

, paintings conservators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum were confronted by the vandalism of Morris Louis' Beta Upsilon, a masterwork painting from his unfurled series (1960¬61). Comprised of colored bands of paint flowing inward from the edges on an unprimed canvas, the work was defaced with penciled graffiti lines on the raw canvas that mimicked the unfurling strokes of colors. Testing revealed the solution was not readily at hand at the time. Despite pressure to treat the artwork immediately, conservators persisted in finding the right solution. Laser cleaning was considered as a possible solution, but the correct parameters needed to be identified. Extensive testing was conducted on mockup samples using various pulse durations and wavelengths: 1064 nm, 532 nm, 355 nm, and 266 nm. After many years of preparation and testing, it was concluded that the 532 nm wavelength was appropriate for this particular cleaning problem. An entirely new laser cleaning system, the GC-¬532, was designed and built specifically to clean the Beta Upsilon. In order to allow great flexibility in laser parameter optimization the new bespoke laser system was built to have the 2nd harmonic 532nm, tunable pulse duration, pulse frequency, and pulse energy, an ultra¬high speed hot¬spot free circular scanner with tunable RPM, and various focal lens options. The research and testing leading up to the creation of a new purpose built green 532 nm pulsed laser system, the process of optimizing laser cleaning parameters, and the cleaning results achieved will be presented. This new laser technology will have future applications in cleaning canvases and organic materials.

Abstract As we contemplate the future of forest landscapes under changing climate conditions and land‐use demands, there is increasing value in studying historic forest conditions and how these landscapes have changed following past disturbances. Historic landscape paintings are a potential source of data on preindustrial forests with highly detailed, full‐color depictions of overstory and understory environments. They display key details about forest community composition, microhabitat features, and structural complexity from a time well before the advent of color photography. Despite these paintings' potential, their scientific applications have been impeded by questions of validity.How truly accurate are the images portrayed in these paintings? How much of an image is an artist's manipulation of a scene to best illustrate an allegory or romanticized view of nature?Following an established assessment model from historical ecology for evaluating resource validity, we demonstrate how scholarship on art history can be integrated with ecological understanding of forest landscapes to follow this model and address these questions of image veracity in 19th century American art. Further, to illustrate the potential use of these historic images in ecological studies, we present in a case study assessing microhabitat features of 10 different paintings. While this paper explores 19th century landscape art broadly, we focus our art historical review in particular on Asher Durand, a prolific and influential artist associated with the so‐called “Hudson River School” in the mid‐1800s. Durand left clear records about his perspectives on accurately depicting nature, and from a review of images and writings of Durand, we find support for the potential use of many of his paintings and sketches in historic forest ecology research. However, we also identify important caveats regarding potential ecological interpretations from these images. More broadly, because 19th century landscape paintings are not always directly transcriptive, and because regional art cultures differed in the 1800s, we cannot within this paper speak about landscape image veracity across all 19th century landscape art. However, in following established methods in historical ecology and integrating tools from art history research, we show that one can identify accurate historic landscape paintings for application in scientific studies.

Exhibition Schedule: The Block Museum, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, January 26–July 21, 2019; Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada, September 21, 2019–February 23, 2020; Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, TBD–TBD

This Section of Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences appears in each issue of the Journal and is dedicated to all forms of creative production born of an intimate and individual urge, often secretive, unbound from the conventional art system rules. Through short descriptions of the Outsider art work of prominent artists and new protagonists often hosted in community mental health services, this Section intends to investigate the latest developments of the contemporary art scene, where the distances between the edge and the centre are becoming more and more vague.

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Museums around the world have built databases with metadata about millions of objects, their history, the people who created them, and the entities they represent. This data is stored in proprietary databases and is not readily available for use. Recently, museums embraced the Semantic Web as a means to make this data available to the world, but the experience so far shows that publishing museum data to the linked data cloud is difficult: the databases are large and complex, the information is richly structured and varies from museum to museum, and it is difficult to link the data to other datasets. This paper describes the process and lessons learned in publishing the data from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). We highlight complexities of the database-to-RDF mapping process, discuss our experience linking the SAAM dataset to hub datasets such as DBpedia and the Getty Vocabularies, and present our experience in allowing SAAM personnel to review the information to verify that it meets the high standards of the Smithsonian. Using our tools, we helped SAAM publish high-quality linked data of their complete holdings (41,000 objects and 8,000 artists).

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