Tag Archives: MFAH

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MFAH Rosine Building Field Trip

  By Emily Salomon • June 8, 2010

We were all looking forward to today, when we visited the Museum of Fine Art Houston storage facility, called the Rosine Building. We learned a lot about how the MFAH conserves, restores, and stores the artwork currently not on display in the Museum’s galleries. We met Wynne Phelan, the Head Conservator,  Andrea Guidi di Bagno, the Chief Paintings Conservator, as well as Curtis M. Gannon, the Collections Preparator, who all were very helpful in explaining the current storage and conservation system. The ability to speak with those who use travel frames every day was of great use to the team, for we were able to communicate our concerns and they were able to list their wishes for functions to integrate into our new design.

Tomorrow we plan to take the information we have learned and further research our findings. Here are some specifics we have learned that will help guide us in our research and design process.

What the museum uses and needs as travel frames is different form everything we have seen in our research. They want to be able to hang the travel frame on the current storage system — they don’t want to compact the frame.

Also, the fact that non-antique frames can be fragile was surprising.

Although we have learned a lot today, we are looking forward to our meeting with the preparators, for this will give us even more specific constrains and criteria for our design.

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Preparation and the Engineering Design Process

  By Emily Salomon • June 2, 2010

Today’s team-building exercise involved making a pentagram out of a length of yarn. We had five minutes to plan how to “draw” the figure as a group, and the execution of our strategy had to take place in total silence. At first, the yarn wasn’t tied at the ends, so we just had to go through the motions of drawing the typical five-point star. Afterward, Dr. Wettergreen tied the yarn together so that we had to give the process more thought. Ting figured out how, starting from a triangle, we could cross the yarn of one side upon itself and pull it up to form a pentagram (which ended up being easier than our first task). Success!

A part of becoming familiar with the engineering design process involves understanding our project management. Throughout the project, we have several mentors inside and outside Rice. Within Rice, we have the support from Dr. Oden and Dr. Wettergreen, as well as the MFAH head conservator Wynne Phelan and the MFAH Head Registrar Julie Bakke. Dr. Wettergreen is our primary mentor, and will guide us along the process. In order to ensure a successful project, we have to set appropriate deadlines that give us ample time to finalize and perfect each component. Along with clear goals and deadlines, documentation plays an extremely important role. All the work we do must be documented in some form either in our binder, wiki or both. When working with paper, it’s important to use ink and to date and sign each page to secure the page’s integrity. This will allow us or anyone else to follow or process later, and reproduce it. Following this idea, we should never erase ideas that we decide to get rid of. It’s possible that they could prove useful later, or would merely illustrate how we reached our end result.

We had two lectures on the engineering design process. The first one was on the general design process, which is split into two parts: the design analysis and the solution stage. These two stages can be further broken down into five steps.

1a) defining and understanding the problem

1b) brainstorming solutions to the problem and picking the best ones

2) coming up with a design strategy and building our initial prototype based on 1b

3) testing and refining out prototype

4&5) analyze our work from start to finish, and write a final report

Our second lecture focused on the design analysis stage — specifically parts 1a and 1b. We brainstormed the main issues we will have to take into consideration as we come up with the design, and the driving criteria behind creating a new storage. We also discussed the importance of quantifying everything, so we have a basis for comparison and reproduction.

After lunch, we walked through the Museum of Fine Arts Houston to get an idea of the paintings we will be attempting to store in our new design solution. While the museum was filled with many traveling exhibitions, we were able to focus our attention to the modern and contemporary permanent collection works. We noted how the paintings differed in overall size, frame, and media, and we began to consider how these differences would translate into our travel frame design.

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Recap of Week 9: Concluding the Internship

  By Rhodes Coffey • August 3, 2009

For the final week of our internship, we were racing to the finish–trying to get everything done just in time. Our to-do list was quite lengthy at the start of the week, but we managed to accomplish everything by the end.

On Monday, we met at the MFAH to make final precise measurements of the art pieces and take some more pictures. To start off Tuesday, we scheduled out the rest of the week so that everything would get done. We attended the weekly Center for Civic Engagement fellows meeting where we learned the specifics of giving a good PowerPoint or poster presentation from Dr. Deborah Barrett, Director of the Program for Communication Excellence. The Cain Project, established at Rice University, is a great source of information on this topic and can be utilized to find poster templates. Although all of us feel comfortable giving exceptional presentations due to years of experience, this presentation about presentations was a good refresher.

The remainder of Tuesday was primarily spent sending out orders for supplies. We ordered supplies from Regal Plastics Inc., McMaster Carr online, The Strap Store of Houston, and a couple of other sources.

On Wednesday, we received some of our structural framing materials and began making test frames. As part of the iteration process of our prototyping, we realized that a few parts were not sufficient for our designs and decided to modify one of our orders. We also made test silicone molds in the Wet Lab, leaving ample time for these to set. A large portion of the day was also spent working on the business plan for our Innovation Norway class. By the end of Wednesday, the business plan for ArtArmor had been masterfully completed, including sections for executive summary, product overview, market analysis, marketing strategy, critical risks, and the company management. That afternoon, Caleb picked up the plastics order from Regal Plastics and Rhodes retreived the order of straps.

By Thursday, more and more materials were pouring into the Design Kitchen. We continued to test the framing components and assess what materials were still needed. Caleb worked on the plaster and mold for the Head of a Child piece, Nicole created the hanger element for History Dress # 1, Kristi formed the mold for the bottom of The Bronco Buster, and Rhodes planned out design dimensions for all of the pieces using CAD. We also spent some time designing the poster for our project.

Before heading to class, Rhodes and Caleb worked on elevator pitches for ArtArmor, LLC. These 90 second pitches were then presented before the entire class and a partner from the DFJ Mercury venture capitalist firm. Both elevator pitches included humorous and informative components that were well-received by the rest of the class and instructors. During the remainder of the class, Ned Hill, Managing Director of DFJ Mercury, presented on every possible detail of term sheets.

Friday, the last day of July, marked the final day of the internship and it turned out to be the busiest of the entire 9 weeks. The epic day consisted of cutting and polishing the framing beams, cutting the sides and bottoms to size, creating the final silicone molds, and finally building our housing solution prototypes. We all utilized the machine shop and tools to finalize the prototypes. A few more final materials were picked up as the building progressed. Our final solutions will be unveiled at a later date, but for now we are quite proud of the ultimate outcomes of our project. After a long last day spent at the Design Kitchen, we celebrated the conclusion of our internship. The endless hours of research, hundreds of ideas, and weeks spent designing modular housing solutions for the MFAH’s art pieces had surmised into impressive prototypes. This is not the end, however, as we will be presenting our work this Fall and our endeavors will be wrapped into the class taught this Fall semester by Dr. Wettergreen. Although the summer internship has ended for EDAAC, you will definitely be hearing more from us in the future.

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Recap of Monday and Tuesday

  By Nicole Garcia • July 14, 2009

On Monday, we did an initial Pugh Analysis of all of our designs to weight its possible use for the team selected piece La soriddez. In order to do a Pugh Analysis, we first came up with some evaluation criteria. These criteria are important in the storage for the piece and are features that we think the final solution should include. Examples of some of our criteria include: breathability, visibility, ease of use, and contact with piece. Then setting the original packing solution as a baseline for the analysis we rated each design with a 1, 0, or -1, as respectively being better, the same, or worse than the current solution in the evaluation criteria.  From this, we were able to eliminate many of the weaker designs from the pool of possible ideas. Once this was completed, we broke up into teams of two and completed an initial Pugh Analysis of all the designs for possible use for our individual pieces. The initial analysis was very labor intensive as about 200 designs had to be analyzed for each of the five pieces.

Today, the team spent some time working on a presentation for our CCE meeting. In this presentation, we included who was on the team, what our goals for the summer were, some of our daily activity, and what must be done to complete many of our goals (including the Pugh Analysis).

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Recap of Week 2

  By Kristi Day • June 12, 2009

The Monday of our second week was dedicated to further research about conservation, both online and in print. On Tuesday, we were given a presentation by Dr. Matthew Wettergreen, our project coordinator, about the Engineering Design Process. We also wrote a mission statement for our team.

Julie Bakke, Chief Registrar of MFAH, gave us a tour of both the museum’s off-site storage facilities on Wednesday. During our tour, we witnessed preparators packing art for transportation, loading it onto a truck, and moving it to and from storage facilities. They offered us valuable insight into the process, and gave us information about the materials that they use. User feedback from preparators who handle art on a daily basis was extremely helpful to our understanding of the current state of need at the museum. We also got a behind-the-scenes look at a conservation lab, where restorative conservation was taking place.

On Thursday, we had the opportunity to attend The Life Science Technology Venture Forum, hosted by Rice Alliance. Here we witnessed many elevator pitches and business plan proposals, and heard two keynote speakers. We, along with other students in the Innovation Norway course, scored each elevator pitch and business plan, as did official judges. Both the top three and bottom four ratings of the  elevator pitches were the same for the students and the panel of judges. To hear more about the things we saw at the Forum, visit our Discussion Recap post, or Dr. Wettergreen’s response.

On Friday, we had the chance to write our own elevator pitch for our project. We also started outlining our Design Analysis Phase report, which encompasses all our research thus far, and will be used as a reference during future stages of the design process.

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Conservation Tour of MFAH

  By Rhodes Coffey • June 4, 2009

Today, we were given a tour of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) collection and storage areas by Wynne Phelan, MFAH Conservation Director, and Julie Bakke, Chief Registrar of the MFAH. They started the tour by showcasing a variety of pieces in the museum and explaining the conservation issues surrounding these pieces.

One of the things we learned was that the history of the piece’s treatment was often more important than the age of the piece. We also learned about the specific concerns for different materials. They talked about specific needs for the housing of each piece. Some of the main priorities in establishing housing are visibility of the piece, minimizing handling, stabilizing the piece inside the housing, and making efficient use of space in the storage facilities.

They also gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the current storage facilities. The storage of most of the MFAH permanent collection takes place at an off-site facility. We will be touring this facility next week. In the storage areas, we were surprised to find such basic components as cardboard boxes and bubblewrap that were being used to protect priceless works of art. Many of the objects weren’t packed at all, but placed on crowded shelves. This really opened our eyes to the need for a new approach to housing artwork.

After finishing the tour, we were able to sit down with Wynne and Julie and have some of our specific questions answered so that we could get a better understanding of the goals of our project. We need to create housing solutions that will meet the needs of the artwork under all circumstances with the exception of when they are on display. We came away with a better vision of what our project is really aiming for.

One of the most exciting things about our day was having a chance to see some of the pieces that Wynne and Julie had selected as possiblities for us to work with. A few of those pieces are currently on display at the museum, while others are in storage. After our museum trip, we had a chance to sit down and discuss which pieces we should design housing for. Choosing the actual pieces that will be the basis for our project was an important step, and is really making the project start to come to life.