Heads Up!

The Greene Textile collection includes superb examples of 19^th century hats—and each one needs an archival or storage display mount to preserve the shape of the object and to reduce handling—staff and researchers simply pick up the mount, rather than the object. Students from Villa Maria’s fashion program helped make storage mounts, shown below.

Meet Rich Christian!

Rich is the Gallery’s project conservation technician—someone constantly thinking outside the box to create archival mannequins for the Greene textile collection. At the moment, Rich is developing jointed mannequin arms and legs that will easily slip inside tight historic clothing.

We’re Coming Home!!

The collections of the John L. Wehle Gallery—and its staff—are finally headed back to GCV&M to our newly renovated gallery after being quartered in a warehouse in a secure undisclosed location for the last year. RIT intern Anton Siekmann lends a helping hand as we pack. Watch this spot for weekly updates on what’s happening with the art and costume collection as we get ready to unveil our stunning "new" gallery this summer.

National Endowment For The Hummanities & Institute for Library and Museum Service Awards

We are pleased to announce that we have recently received two major grants that will allow us to build a state-of-the-art storage center in our John L Wehle Art Gallery for our collections of fine art and historical artifacts, including our recent historic clothing acquisition, the Greene Collection.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded us a $400,000 grant. In addition to that, we also received a $150,000 grant from the Institute for Library and Museum Service.

Currently objects must be stored in different areas across the museum campus. This project will allow us to more efficiently organize objects for research and exhibition in the renovated galleries and provide the storage and conditions we need to properly store them. The work will be done as part of a larger $2.5 million renovation of our John L.Wehle Art Gallery and will create the environmentally controlled conditions necessary for long-term preservation and collection care in a sustainable and energy-efficient manner.

"We're absolutely delighted," said Peter Arnold, our president and CEO. "Our storage facilities are very inadequate, that's our main motivation for getting this done. We'll begin construction in the fall. I assume it'll take a year."

The gallery is closed this season in preparation for the renovation.

Trained day dress of heavy watered silk, c1865

You can still see some of the Greene Collection here THIS season! Starting next week we will be highlighting items from the collection on a weekly basis as the collection will be unavaliable for public viewing until the gallery renovation has been completed.

For another sneak peek at the collection, check out, The Collecting Gene's interview with prior collection creator, Susan Greene.