Jean Sanders' class of 11 is seated around a conference table loaded with artwork in the print study room of the Palmer Museum of Art. On this day, Sanders, associate professor of art, and her "Introduction to Printmaking" class have visited the Palmer to look at a representative selection from the museum's print collection.
The class has been seated for barely 10 minutes when guest speaker Patrick McGrady, Charles V. Hallman curator at the Palmer, prods them to get up and look at the artwork on the wall displays and around the table. "Come, come, come, look. Use your eyes," he said. "This is important. This is good stuff." The students file around the tables, examining the prints closely, some with noses almost touching the paper. Some take notes, others listen intently. McGrady shows them two seemingly identical etchings by Rembrandt and challenges them to determine which one is better -- the left or the right. The students vote by a show of hands. "Take a look at the print on right," McGrady said. "The black is more velvety. The black on the left is much less rich."
McGrady is an enthusiastic lecturer, gesturing with his white-gloved hands and urging the students to crowd closely around the prints. "You are some of the first people to see these other than the staff," he said as he gently removed a 16th-century illustration from its matting and, using a sheet of paper as a wedge, turned it over to show the printing on the reverse. "This is one of the reasons we have this collection. This collection is for teaching. The more you study, the more it becomes obvious."
Thanks to a 2002 renovation at the University Park museum, the print study room on the second floor provides a space for classes like Sanders' to get up close and personal with the art.
Although the museum at any time has 11 galleries full of works of art, what the public may not know is that only about 10 percent of what is in the permanent collection is on exhibit at any given time. Some 90 percent of the 5,500 pieces remain in storage. "The national average is about 7 percent in museums, so we feel pretty good," said Beverly Sutley, the Palmer Museum's registrar. Her job is to keep the records and manage the storage of the permanent collection.
A walk through the museum's main storage facility is like a junket through the past. The facility contains racks and bins for paintings as well as metal cabinets full of small items -- coins, jade, porcelain, masks, etc. Then, there's the furniture -- chairs, end tables and a Chippendale bureau with a drop cloth hanging over it. The storage area is nearing capacity. "You always need room to grow because you're always going to be acquiring things," McGrady said.
Space requirements are only one reason that much of the permanent collection remains in storage, although the 2002 renovations added a gallery allowing the museum to put about 90 more pieces on display. A more important reason is that many of the items in the permanent collection are so fragile that they require special handling, especially the works on paper, which comprise about half of the collection -- photographs, prints, drawings, watercolors and pastels. These are easily damaged by light and thus their exposure should be limited. The works on paper are stored, mostly unframed, in acid-neutral paper in archival boxes on shelves. The storage room is temperature- and humidity-controlled. Curators wear white cotton gloves when they handle papers. The conundrum is that "those are often the most interesting things we have," Sutley said.
This is where the print study room comes in. Faculty, students and independent scholars with interests in objects or groups of objects in the museum's collection can make appointments with the museum's registrar or curators to view particular pieces in the print study room. The room is equipped with a large table and several display boards to facilitate viewing all kinds of works on paper and some smaller paintings and three-dimensional objects. "Think of it as a closed stack library," said Robin Seymour, coordinator of membership and public relations. In the print study room, prints often are unframed, removing one more barrier between the viewer and the object, and the staff person on hand can show watermarks in the paper or notations (or even other images) on the work's reverse.
A computer station at the back of the room allows researchers to look through the digital database of the permanent collection. For instance, a Lock Haven professor e-mailed asking about what drawings were available for study. A quick search found 850. Eventually that database will be online.
The room doesn't get as many requests for use as some at the museum would like. "I would love it if we had a request every week," Sutley said. "Or at least as many as we could handle."
Other than the sculptures in the lobby, very little of what the museum owns stays permanently on display. "We are conscious of frequent visitors," Seymour said. The museum has continuing acquisitions that it would like to get out on display and important Palmer pieces occasionally are borrowed by other institutions. The museum puts together about nine to 12 exhibitions a year. That includes recent acquisitions, loans from other museums and traveling shows.
In recent years, many special exhibitions, some of them quite large, have been organized using works on paper from the permanent collection. These exhibitions allow the museum to share large segments of the collection in one place. For instance, this past summer, the museum mounted an exhibition that included several modern and contemporary works on paper from the permanent collection. Some of the pieces in that show had not been on view in years; other had never been seen.
Acquisitions to the permanent collection mainly have been through gifts and occasional bequests, although the museum does have a modest acquisition fund and the Friends of the Palmer Museum hold an annual "purchase party" to buy artwork. Over the years this has amounted to more than 50 pieces of art.
"The museum has very educated, concerned and conscientious donors," McGrady said. "They really care about what they see here."
Over time, the museum's position in the community has grown. In the last seven years, there has been a conscious effort to shape the way the museum's collection is going. Curators work to complement parts of the collection where they already have strengths, such as American art and ceramics, and they build on that. In some of the museum's minicollections, there are "pockets of richness, unexpected but well developed," Seymour said.
As an arm of a teaching/research University, Sutley noted that the museum has a responsibility for preservation. "As a keeper for the public," she said, "we hold these items in trust for everyone."
To see photos of students studying art in the print study room, go to http://live.psu.edu/still_life/2005_02_17_printclass/index.html and to view photos of the museum's growing permanent collection, visit http://live.psu.edu/still_life/2005_02_17_palmer_art/index.html