Author: Jessica Walthew

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X-Ray Vision: Exposing 40 Years of Gadgets
Digital Collection Intern Nicolai Garcia recounts the experience of producing x-ray images of electronic objects from Cooper Hewitt's collection.
A photograph of three wine glasses on a table. They are inverted and accompanied by barcodes and paintbrushes.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane!… I think it’s a “b”!
This post was written by guest authors Martha Singer, Mette Carlsen, Jakki Godfrey, and Kerith Koss Schrager, a  team of contract conservators who carried out Cooper Hewitt’s recent glass rehousing project. Today we’re taking a behind-the-scenes look at the nitty-gritty of object numbering in the museum. Object numbers aid in tracking storage locations and other...
Photograph of three shelves in a storage facility. All shelve archival gray boxes, and the top shelf also holds two teal glass bowls.
Glass Collection Storage at Cooper Hewitt
This post was written by guest authors Martha Singer, Mette Carlsen, Jakki Godfrey, and Kerith Koss Schrager, a  team of contract conservators who carried out Cooper Hewitt’s recent glass rehousing project. The Product Design and Decorative Arts department at Cooper Hewitt contains over 40,000 objects in all, and has a long history of collecting glass...
Conservation Investigation: Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI)
Cooper Hewitt’s object conservators’ technical study and conservation of the surtout de table (designed by Pierre-Phillipe Thomire, ca. 1805) in the museum’s permanent collection was recently presented at several conservation-focused conferences (including focuses on sliver-leaf mirror and gilt metal). Information about the treatments and special imaging techniques used to study the piece were also shared...
Conserving the Surtout de Table: Gilt Metalwork
Conservators Jessica Walthew and Jakki Godfrey discuss their approach to cleaning and enlivening the gilt-metal features of Cooper Hewitt's surtout de table.