cool shit

was happy to write an old coworker a letter of reference for an internship with a Smithsonian collection. Marion Mecklenburg sounds like one rad dude:

For nearly forty years, conservator, scientist, and engineer Marion Mecklenburg studied the mechanical behavior of art materials, with resulting discoveries that had—and continue to have—a direct impact on the preventive and treatment efforts of collections professionals around the globe. While conservators of fine art have traditionally focused on the chemical deterioration of art materials, Dr. Mecklenburg argued that the physical behavior of those artworks is further understood, predicted, and managed when approached as an engineering problem. Through his own studies—and through the studies of the countless researchers who worked or trained with him—Mecklenburg made mechanical engineering a formative aspect of conservation research.
Dr. Mecklenburg retired from the Smithsonian Institution in 2010 and the organization of decades of his materials, research, and equipment is currently underway at MCI. The planned Mecklenburg Materials Archive will house the paint, wood, and fabric samples prepared and studied by Dr. Mecklenburg, and provide researchers with access to the raw materials (such as custom-made paints) from which those samples were created. The Archive will also include working and study samples of the equipment used over the course of Dr. Mecklenburg’s career (and information to help researchers interested in building similar equipment); a library of notes, books, and publications related to the environmental, lighting, and material mechanics research of Dr. Mecklenburg and his colleagues; and correspondence related to the archived samples, the commercial production of art materials, and the application of engineering principles to the study of material behavior in artwork.

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