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“Poor mummies,” said Mimi Leveque. Es restorer and belongs to a small organization of experts in the country that paints on ancient mummies for museums and academic exhibitions. Many restaurateurs have been marginalized by Covid-19 restrictions.
In Leveque’s case, he was scheduled to fly from Boston to help repair two mummies to an Atlanta museum in June, an abortion due to pandemic restrictions. still waiting.
“I fully perceive the state of the global right now,” Leveque said. Layoffs and vacations have spread widely in the global museum, and many worry about returning.
As leveque’s three-person branch at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where he worked for 16 years. She was one of 38 museum staff members who were fired in June. “My total branch has been removed,” he said. I know it’s permanent. “
Leveque, an experienced restaurater who has worked on dozens of mummies around the world, has worked as a representative when pandemic restrictions are eased, but others might not be so lucky.
“Many museums are under enormous pressure and monetary burden as a result of the pandemic,” said Pamela Hatchfield, former president of the American Institute for Conservation, who retired early from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in August, when the museum ceased 57 workers and another 56 to retire. The museum closed from March to September and reopened with some of its exhibitions as they limited the number of visitors.
“We’re all incredibly moved and conservatives aren’t the only ones,” he said. “But what will the world of museums look like in the long run?
Restorers are guilty of cleaning, restoring and stabilizing all kinds of art objects, not just mummies. Curators, a better-known word, are specialists in art or history that create exhibitions. Restaurants are “the doctors of the arts. ” We are the other people who do all the practical work, ” said Leveque. “We are expected to perceive its chemistry and art history. “
The estate has never been well funded, say those on the ground, however, its positions can be removed without an immediate view having an effect on the public.
“That’s all the preventive work,” said Molly Gleeson, an eight-year-old curator at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. “It’s about tracking the environment, tracking the temperature and relative humidity of storage, tracking the smooth exposure of objects, making sure insects enter construction and damaging collections.
“This kind of painting is complicated when you can’t let a lot of staff into the building,” he says. “It was a difficult time for everyone, of course, but the cultural heritage sector (museums, libraries, cultural sites) affected.
Leveque ran to an archaeological site in Syria in the 1970s when the curator of the project became ill, intervened and became addicted to work. He’s not as suffocating as the mummies he works on. He refers to one as “a dear. ” And he admits he likes a smart mother movie: “The first one, with Boris Karloff. Seriously, she’s the best. “
She “tried,” as she says, 27 Egyptian mummies, tried another 14 and worked on a variety of mummified and almost dusty Peruvian animals. She has been interested in this since the training years and her mother read her the story of King’s discovery in 1922. Tut’s 3,200-year-old tomb (“Still words. They pass there, and they are about to open it, and Lord Carnarvon said, “What do you see?”And Carter says, “Wonderful things. “
For the most part, she characterizes the problems of restaurateurs to any mythical curse of mummies: “No, don’t buy it. If that were true, I’d be dead now. “
But she takes her technique to work very seriously. The recovery of the mummy should be a tribute to the deceased, he insisted, and is helping to expand the professional criteria to ensure it. Part of a restorer’s task is like attacking a giant puzzle.
Leveque helped repair what is probably the oldest Egyptian mummy in North America: a 4,000-year-old mummy at the Michael C Museum. years at the university museum. The mummy shredded; his dirty laundry shredded, his head in a separate box, others boneless.
She and Emory curator Renee Stein, along with a team of experts and students, worked for a year, meticulously cleaning and rejoining, making inflated polyester fleece pads for the bones that had given way to gravity, sculpting missing bones with epoxy putty from skeleton models. .
But other projects with mummies are taken with minimal falsehood to respect the deceased.
“The task I’m doing is restoring that person’s dignity,” he said. “In humans, there is a sense that the bodies of the deceased deserve respect. “
It is a careful structure of the supports to keep the skeleton intact, to stop the inevitability of gravity and decomposition.
“I think they deserve to be in as solid a condition as you can imagine, so they don’t keep deteriorating, and as presentable as you can imagine so it’s not a macabre demonstration,” Leveque said. “There are museums where I’ve worked where the mummy sheets have been ripped off, and they show them as if I’m looking for a looted grave. I find it unacceptable. “
While conservatives sometimes paint on a variety of art objects, Leveque and others believe there are “nothing but a handful” who paint mummies. There is no mummy count in this country: tourists who arrived in Egypt in the 19th century bought mummies as souvenirs, although Leveque believes the population of American mummies is hundreds.
Aside from the preservation paintings that aren’t being done lately, Ms. Leveque said she wondered about the education of the next generation of restaurateurs in this era of staying home.
“How is conservation taught in a practical way?I don’t know,” he said. ” At some point, you and the object will have to be in the same room. “
Gleeson, who helps oversee 21 mummies at the Penn Museum, agreed.
“Lately we’re in crisis,” he said. But she sees “a ray of hope. “Many museums are creating more online equipment to succeed in the public. And while we were at home, “we were going to spend more time thinking about other facets of our work. “
Leveque temporarily points out that many others are more affected by the pandemic.
“How can I feel bad about myself when I know there are other people who are suffering right now?” he said. “I mean, my patients have been dead for a long, long time. “They’re not going anywhere.
The mummies he had planned to repair in Atlanta were acquired at a California exhibition at the Carlos Museum. They are among the dozens of mummies sold through the Egyptian government to raise funds, and Leveque said he may not repair them for the museum, which is still closed to the public, as long as it is not safer. The mummies are also waiting, locked in the darkness they had known for millennia.
“I know the mummies waiting for me are stable,” he says. “They are in an air-conditioned garage area and they come up with something that has already happened. It’s just that I wish I got rid of the age dust, paintings about it and making it a little happier. “
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