Study habits matter.
In the 1980s, a teenager drove from Countryside to St. Pete after school on the reg to do her homework. Her preferred place? Outside the MFA. She liked to study surrounded by art, and one of the pieces she loved was a mosaic from Antioch, dating to just after Jesus could have qualified for Social Security (had he lived, had Nazareth had Social Security… a lot of variables here, clearly) and unearthed by Princeton archaeologists in the 1930s. Antioch, as we called it back in the time of the early Christian church, became present-day Turkey. In the 1960s, the MFA, led by its first director, Rexford Stead, bought five mosaics from that Princeton dig. Across the country, roughly 30 museums have Antioch mosaics.
Current MFA executive director Kristen Shepherd was that teenager, doing her homework by one such mosaic in the '80s.
When she returned to the MFA last year she learned the mosaic in the garden was one of five mosaics, and that the other four had — to put it mildly — unconventional storage locations: one was under the stage in the Marley Room, one was now part of a fountain and, in 1989, museum staff had buried the remaining two in the museum's east lawn.
She wasted no time hatching a plan to get the mosaics out of the fountain, out of the Marley Room and out of the ground. The MFA has embarked on a restoration and preservation project. At its completion, the museum will have all five mosaics on exhibit. Until then, you can watch the restoration and preservation in real time at the MFA's newly established outdoor conservation lab.
Architecture conservation firm Rosa Lowinger & Associates is assisting with this project.
Contact Cathy Salustri here.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 5, 2018.
