Chemistry Professor Michael Samide and Senior Conservation Scientist Gregory Smith will be the beneficiaries of a three-year, $75,000 grant that the Indianapolis Museum of Art has received to continue their work on preserving works of art.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant will allow Samide to spend the next two summers at the museum as an NEH faculty fellow. In addition, two Butler undergraduates will have the opportunity to work at the museum during the next two summers.

The work is centered around the development of a new method for rapid analysis of volatile organic compounds released from materials used in museum construction. The hope is to find a better quantitative method for material testing so that museums can safely design and build museum spaces that will not damage the art.

The work began as part of a sabbatical leave in 2014 and continued with Samide serving as a Dreyfus MUSE scholar in the summer of 2015. Preliminary results have been published and the data was recently presented as part of symposium on conservation and exhibition planning at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

 

Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822