A look at the specific challenges and opportunities of collecting and displaying digital media.
A curator, a conservator, and a designer discuss the continual maintenance of Watercolor Maps, a born-digital mapping tool in Cooper Hewitt's digital collection.
Neri Oxman's 3D-printed GLASS series may contain answers for the future of the medium and its use.
Laminated glasses have many practical and aesthetic uses, and, when combined with modern applications of ancient technologies, can have dazzling effects.
Gloria Cortina creates stylized feathers from black obsidian in contemporary homage to Mexico's past and present cultures.
We’ve written before about Cooper Hewitt’s first acquisition of an iOS app, Planetary: first Seb Chan and Aaron Cope described their unique and unusual way of “collecting” the app in 2014, and then we wrote about why Planetary was no longer functioning in 2019. In 2020, however, software developer Kemal Enver remastered the work and...
by Jessica Walthew (objects conservator), Kira Eng-Wilmot (textile conservator), and Pauline Nguyen (conservation intern) Nebula by Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila is made with a beautiful variety of fibers and dyes, including indigo in different intensities and in combination with the red dye cochineal to yield a dark purple color. This woven textile features an...
by Jessica Walthew (objects conservator), Kira Eng-Wilmot (textile conservator), and Pauline Nguyen (conservation intern) Several contemporary designers featured in our current exhibition Nature by Design: Cochineal (November 16, 2019–May 25, 2020) were inspired by historic materials and chose this fascinating cochineal dyestuff for their work. James Bassler’s textile Six X Four II is made with discontinuous warps...
by Jessica Walthew (objects conservator), Kira Eng-Wilmot (textile conservator), and Pauline Nguyen (conservation intern) Cooper Hewitt’s Conservation team recently acquired a Multiband imaging (MBI) photography kit, a useful tool for investigating pigments, coatings, and other artistic materials. In preparation for the exhibition Nature by Design: Cochineal, we worked with our summer intern Pauline Nguyen to...
Digital Collection Intern Nicolai Garcia recounts the experience of producing x-ray images of electronic objects from Cooper Hewitt's collection.
This post was written by guest authors Martha Singer, Mette Carlsen, Jakki Godfrey, and Kerith Koss Schrager, a team of contract conservators who carried out Cooper Hewitt’s recent glass rehousing project. Today we’re taking a behind-the-scenes look at the nitty-gritty of object numbering in the museum. Object numbers aid in tracking storage locations and other...
This post was written by guest authors Martha Singer, Mette Carlsen, Jakki Godfrey, and Kerith Koss Schrager, a team of contract conservators who carried out Cooper Hewitt’s recent glass rehousing project. The Product Design and Decorative Arts department at Cooper Hewitt contains over 40,000 objects in all, and has a long history of collecting glass...
Cooper Hewitt’s object conservators’ technical study and conservation of the surtout de table (designed by Pierre-Phillipe Thomire, ca. 1805) in the museum’s permanent collection was recently presented at several conservation-focused conferences (including focuses on sliver-leaf mirror and gilt metal). Information about the treatments and special imaging techniques used to study the piece were also shared...
Conservators Jessica Walthew and Jakki Godfrey discuss their approach to cleaning and enlivening the gilt-metal features of Cooper Hewitt's surtout de table.
