FOURTH (and last) REPORT FROM "BROWN BAG LUNCHES"

It has been a long time from my last post...
Unfortunately yes, SFMOMA summer interns educational program finished last week, no more lunchs from now on.. But the last meeting we had was one of the most interesting: today is the day of CONSERVATION DEPARTMENT!!!
A Staff of 7-8 people works hard in one of the "secret area of SFMOMA", in a big (but could be bigger) space, dealing with conservation techniques, chemical substances and air pumps, in order to preserve or restore pieces of art.
We have been shown some current works subject to restoration, and has been impressing seeing how long could it take to restore an artwork: I've seen a damaged painting which needed to have parts of the back canvas removed; the technique used required from 30 to 60 minutes to remove a little square (5x5 cm), and the painting was approximatively 80x120 cm.
One of the more interesting issues arised during the meeting was about the fact that SFMOMA currently deals with the restoration of contemporary art pieces, requiring great flexibility in the solving of problems about restoration: one of the pieces shown was made of lamb interiors, because of the choiche of the artist to used only the materials that she could find in the place she lived (somewhere in South America, sorry for the imprecision!); the installation was damaged, so conservation departement staff had to buy lambs interior at a butcher, an try to find samples and pieces compatible with the ones of the original piece..
The department deals with a wide spectrum of media, from painting to sculpture to photography, and sometimes has to deal with painted sculptures made with photographical films.. it could drive you crazy!!!!