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Megan Baker
The 2023 Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SISTA), hosted by Harvard Art Museusm and sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, was organized around the theme of color. This made SISTA particularly compeling to art history doctoral student Megan Baker, whose dissertation investigates why pastel painting became an important medium in North America around the time of the American Revolution.
Over two weeks in June, Baker and 14 other participants met with curators, conservators and material scientists, as well as artists and makers, which helped to provide participants with a new vocabulary for asking technical questions about artistic materials.
“Beyond all the knowledge gained through the institute, it is wonderful to now know so many colleagues who are interested in similar questions about materials, color, and technical art history," said Baker.
The SITSA program included hands-on workshops where participants became familiar with different materials and techniques. Experiences included learning how to make watercolor paints using pigments, gum Arabic and maple sap with the painter Anong Beam; patinating bronze at Sincere Metal Works; making glass paperweights and jewelry at the Bubble Factory; and participating in raku firing at the Harvard Ceramics Project. A cochineal dying workshop hosted by Porfirio Gutierrez, an expert Zapotec weaver and dyer, concluded the program.
“Experiencing different kinds of hands-on learning—from performing torchwork, and mulling cochineal to running microfade tests and looking at objects under UV light—was incredibly helpful in demonstrating various modes of bodily knowledge and expertise," said Baker.
Working with paintings conservators, the group also used 17th-century artistic treatises to replicate historical approaches to painting. The experience of working from documents to implement reconstruction as a methodology provided Baker with a new approach to her dissertation. Baker spent the fall procuring pigments, chalk and binding agents, ultimately crafting her own pastels in the same manner as 18th-century makers would have.