A reason to love the Mint? We see the worth in conservation.
The Mint Museum was awarded a grant by Bank of America to help restore artist Sheila Hicks’ work Mega Footprint Not Far from the Hutch (May I Have This Dance?).
The grant is part of the Bank of America Art Conservation Project, a global program that awards grants to nonprofit cultural institutions to conserve historically or culturally significant works of art, not least of which include works by Monet, Degas, and Cezanne; and museums like The National Gallery in London, the Guggenheim in New York and the Louvre.
This year’s recipients included 24 projects representing 11 countries — 13 United States-based projects and 11 outside the United States representing a diverse range of artistic styles, media, and cultural traditions. In July, textile conservator Howard Sutcliffe (pictured above) handled the conservation, which included cleaning and stabilizing the large textile sculpture.
To design the site-specific installation, Hicks, a United States State Department Medal of Arts award recipient, was inspired by the natural light-soaked space of the Haywood-Morrison Atrium, plus the energetic vertical sweep of the soaring ceilings, and the modernity of the building at Mint Museum Uptown. The work is comprised of 42 bas-relief sculptural components of varying lengths and thicknesses, made form flexible synthetic and cork tubes wrapped in dyed and twisted linen thread.
—Michele Huggins, Associate Director of Marketing and Communications