Conserving and Re-housing Stetson University's Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection of Oscar Bluemner Art

FAIN: PG-50501-09

Stetson University (DeLand, FL 32723-8300)
Roberta Smith Favis (Project Director: May 2008 to December 2009)

The purchase of storage furniture, preservation supplies, and environmental monitoring equipment for the re-housing of the art work of Oscar Bluemner, a significant figure in the creation of American Modernism; his better-known colleagues include Georgia O'Keefe, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Alfred Stieglitz. Bluemner's part in that movement was explored in a 2005-2006 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His subject matter was the quasi-industrial, quasi-rural hinterlands of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and he worked in a wide range of media: oil, watercolor, pencil, ink, and charcoal.

A $6,000 National Endowment for the Humanities preservation access grant will fund the purchase of storage furniture, preservation supplies, and environmental monitoring equipment for re-housing and storing Stetson University's Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection. In 2009, the Bluemner Collection will be moved from an existing storage facility in Sampson Hall into the 5,000-square-foot Homer and Dolly Hand Art Center. Items purchased will include shelving and museum boxes to house smaller works on paper and archival materials, archival museum flat files to house large works on paper, and two hygrothermographs to measure humidity and temperature in the Art Center's vault and Bluemner exhibition gallery. The equipment will make it possible to address the recommendations in conservation assessments conducted in 2005, beginning with conservation and matting of large works requiring expanded storage in large museum boxes and flat files that cannot be housed in our current facility.