The Silver Lining of My Hard Work
Hello, Readers!
To start off the week, I made more progress on the digital catalog. This time, I worked with more T-shirts and awards. Here is a picture of my favorite award: “Best Place to Make Your Move”, awarded to the Yayoi Kusama Firefly Room. I definitely think the award was deserved; if someone made their move on me there, my heart would be fluttering like the fireflies the installation’s lights represent.
Two interesting pieces I worked with this week were a silver tray and a silver platter. Since these were so big, they could not fit on the previous background setups I had. I came up with a new background where I would lean a board against a bookshelf and put another board on the floor.
After taking the pictures and adding catalog entries for the items, I noticed that there was no box large enough to store them. Previously, they were stored on a shelf with only some tissue covering them, but we needed a box to properly ensure they would not get damaged. To fix this problem, my mentor taught me how to make custom boxes. Here is the guide we used. My mentor made an amazing excel sheet where we just plugged in the measurements of the items and it told us how long each section of the box needed to be. Then, we used the box cutter to cut it into the shape required and folded up the flaps to give the box dimension. The last step was to create flaps out of the triangles at the edges to glue to the other flap so the box would stay together at the corners.
Working with the silver got me thinking that all my efforts needed a fun “silver lining”, so as a break from the cataloging, I helped my mentor organize some slides. I moved the slides from two plastic sheets into archival-quality sheets, and I had to reorganize the binders that were scattered around the back corner of the archives. While cleaning up, I found a box of 29 copies of the same slide. Usually, only around 4 copies of a certain slide would be kept for insurance, so I wonder why they needed so many…
I finished off the week with trying my hand at creating my own slide. My mentor brought out the materials for an activity to create art on a small plastic sheet and put it in a slide casing. There were alcohol-based inks as well as different colored markers, so I experimented with blending the colors. These are the two slides I made: a starry sky of purple, blue, orange, and yellow inspired by the Yayoi Kusama Firefly Room (if you could not tell, it is my favorite part of the museum), and a pink and blue background with a cute frog in the middle. Let me know which one you like better!
These two lines popped into my head as I was writing my blog:
Worked hard to create
My own silver lining
(It is a little confusing, but I tried to refer to the fact that the box-making for the silver led to my mini art project while also referring to the actual pencil lines on the box resulting from measuring the silver items.)
Next week, there is another docent meeting, so I am excited to see what I will learn next. Then, my mentor reached out to the installation team to hopefully get us an exclusive behind-the-scenes view of the installation process of an actual exhibit at the museum. I heard we just needed approval, so I am praying that it all works out! Finally, I will, as usual, continue to work on the catalog, possibly finding more interesting items stored in the archives along the way.
Comments:
All viewpoints are welcome but profane, threatening, disrespectful, or harassing comments will not be tolerated and are subject to moderation up to, and including, full deletion.