Walters Art Museum

Museums offer significant value by preserving cultural heritage, fostering education and intellectual curiosity, and promoting social interaction, contributing to economic development and environmental sustainability. Underwater museums are relatively new and innovative and the Museum of Underwater Art, (MOUA) installed in 2017 in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, offers an inspiring and educational experience that encourages positive conversations and garners significant media attention. Through a blend of art and science, MOUA provides a unique educational opportunity and initiates reef conversations on the challenging issues of citizen science, climate change, and coral bleaching, inviting snorkelers, divers, and the general community to protect the Great Barrier Reef. The MOUA asset is valued at $4 M and generates approximately $100 K per year from grants and earned income. The MOUA sculptures are seen by approximately 1.5 M people per year with the highest interactions associated with The Ocean Siren sculpture and approximately four thousand snorkelers and SCUBA divers a year visit the remote Coral Greenhouse and Ocean Sentinels sculptures at John Brewer Reef on commercial tourism trips. The MOUA has a large media reach of over 22 million. The Museum of Underwater Art demonstrates how art and culture can amplify reef conservation, achieving global research and community engagement beyond its small scale. This case study also exposes gaps in how ocean sustainability is measured across reef organizations and highlights the methodologies to fulfill those knowledge gaps. Our paper assesses Key Performance Indicators across other institutions and proposes methods to shift and improve conservation paradigms by the inclusion of cultural storytelling, citizen science, education, and carbon neutral events.

Humans have incorporated minerals in objects of cultural heritage importance for millennia. The surfaces of these objects, which often long outlast the humans that create them, are undeniably exposed to a diverse mixture of chemicals throughout their lifetimes. As of yet, the art conservation community lacks a nondestructive, accurate, and inexpensive flexible computational screening method to evaluate the potential impact of chemicals with art, as a complement to experimental studies. In this work, we propose periodic density functional theory (DFT) studies as a way to address this challenge, specifically for the aragonite phase of calcium carbonate, a mineral that has been used in pigments, marble statues, and limestone architecture since ancient times. Computational models allow art conservation scientists to better understand the atomistic impact of small-molecule adsorbates on common mineral surfaces across a wide variety of environmental conditions. To gain insight into the surface adsorption reactivity of aragonite, we use DFT to investigate the atomistic interactions present in small-molecule-surface interfaces. Our adsorbate set includes common solvents, atmospheric pollutants, and emerging contaminants. Chemicals that significantly disrupt the surface structure such as carboxylic acids and sulfur-containing molecules are highlighted. We also focus on comparing adsorption energies and changes in surface bonds, which allows for the identification of key features in the electronic structure presented in a projected-density-of-state analysis. The trends outlined here will guide future experiments and allow art conservators to gain a better understanding of how a wide range of molecules interact with an aragonite surface under variable conditions and in different environments.

The 6th century Codex Sinopensis or Sinope Gospels (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France) is one of the most precious purple codices that survive from the Late Antique period. Together with the Vienna Genesis (Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) and the Rossano Gospels (Rossano Calabro, Museo Diocesano), it has an unusually rich decorative apparatus with scenes representing biblical episodes. It can be, therefore, considered one of the most important preserved artistic productions of the early medieval era. The manuscript has been subjected to a non-invasive diagnostic campaign to evaluate the quality of the colourants used in its decoration, to understand how the parchment was coloured, and to carry out a comparison with the Vienna Genesis and the Rossano Gospels. The techniques used were UV-visible diffuse reflectance spectrophotometry with optical fibres (FORS), X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), spectrofluorimetry, and optical microscopy. Analyses highlighted the presence of ultramarine blue, which, besides the use of pure gold for the ink and paint, certifies the high value of the manuscript. In addition, this must be seen as one of the earliest examples of its use in paintings. The purple colour of the parchment was identified as orchil, a dye extracted from lichens, similar to the results of analytical investigations carried out on other purple codices, and not the expected Tyrian purple dye.

Malaysia is committed to growing its research universities and its reputation as one of the world's largest educational service providers. Malaysia has sizable population of international students, and the country is recalibrating its strategy and planning to increase the number of international students to 200,000 by 2020. However, neither the Malaysian government nor the universities have created the synergy to increase the wellbeing of international students, their research progress and, most critically, academic supervision. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the direct effect of research supervision, that is, the supervisor’s encouragement, content knowledge, and availability, and campus environment and facilities on international students’ academic and career growth. This study proposes a model, called R-SEECKA (relationships, supervision, environment; encouragement; content knowledge and availability) for effective research supervision and practice in Malaysian public universities. The sample size consists of 450 international graduate students from different countries studying at six Malaysian public universities. It uses quantitative methods and SmartPLS for data analysis. Findings of this study reported the effect of encouragement, environment, relationship, availability and content knowledge on international graduate students’ academic and career growth. It is also reported that encouragement and motivation from the supervisor was the strongest predictor of academic and career growth, followed by campus environment/facilities. The paper offers recommendations and suggestions for future research to see how much research supervision has improved and international students have progressed in research in Malaysia. The authors note that the R-SEECKA model may be applied at universities in other countries and to other student populations to assess the impact of research supervision on their academic and career growth.

ABSTRACT Reflectance imaging spectroscopy (RIS) in the visible and near infrared is revolutionizing the way cultural heritage investigators may analyze paintings nondestructively. In an ongoing, highly collaborative project, the authors are investigating a painting by American artist John White Alexander (1856–1915). The painting, titled A Study in Pink, is in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). An x-radiograph taken in 2014 revealed that there was a painting of another female figure, rotated 180 degrees, underneath the current composition. With this discovery, A Study in Pink became an ideal case study for evaluating the advantages and limitations of nondestructive instrumentation for the purpose of providing useful art historical information on cultural heritage objects. The study examined the information obtained using low cost (US$15,000) as well as high cost (US$300,000) imaging instrumentation. Additionally, the authors are seeking ways of making these technologies robust for in-field non-experts, as well as practical research instruments for undergraduate and graduate education. The preliminary research results revealed that the face of the female figure underneath A Study in Pink could be partially retrieved using RIS multi-spectral imaging equipment operating from 900-1700 nm and more completely revealed using RIS equipment operating from 400-2350 nm.

The forger’s strategy is straightforward: convince the person with the power (usually with the money) to accept the piece and pay the price. For most, this means keeping it simple, using materials and techniques that will convince on a superficial level but not invite scrutiny. The analyst evaluating the authenticity of the object must sift through the available evidence with the goal of uncovering just those methods and materials that are consistent with an artist or an age (suggesting authenticity) or inconsistent, indicating non-authenticity. An authentication study may be seen, then, as a contest between the two competing strategies of willful forger and the disinterested analyst. With highly complex objects, a team of experts may be called upon to collaborate in the study. This paper will focus on the analysis of a particularly complex work, the “Archaic Mark” codex, which was reputed to be a manuscript version of the Gospel of Mark possibly created in the 14th century but suspected to be a fake. The analytical team consisted of curatorial and conservation staff at the University of Chicago Library Special Collections, a New Testament scholar, a prominent manuscript conservator/codicologist, and a microscopist. The multidisciplinary approach was especially fruitful, not only proving the item false but illuminating the forger’s methods and overall strategy as well.