In the 23 years that Debe and I have been doing custom framing we have done some big jobs. This past fall we framed 45 original paintings from the Edward J. Elhoff estate for an art auction to benefit the National Kidney Foundation. We have helped dozens of artists and antique dealers prepare for shows. We have done several houses for the Parade of Homes as well as residential and commercial jobs for Interior decorating firms. Nothing however was as big and prestigious as the Ellen Biddle Shipman exhibit.
Ellen Biddle Shipman is regarded by many as the greatest american landscape architect. Her projects were vast. Her accomplishments made even more impressive by the fact that as a woman she dominated a field previously exclusive to men. The show would include blue prints, drawings and photographs of many of the Shipman gardens.
In the fall of 1996 David Kwasigroh, then Director of the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn, NY contacted us to bid on framing for a major project. I had met David when we both served as Judges for the Fine Art exhibition at the New York State Fair a year or two earlier. We then ran into each other at shows at the Pyramid Art Center in Rochester and elswhere. We stayed in touch and when he was asked by a colleague to help organize this exhibiton he called us about the framing.
There were 77 large pieces that needed to be framed. All materials were completely archival and the glazing was conservation acrlyic. We landed the job that was underwritten by UBS Payne Webber and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Debe and I delivered the work in our van to the Schweinfurth to be crated and shipped to NYC for the first exhibition of the four year tour. A tour that would take the show to some of America's most acclaimed museums.
I remain in awe of this great artist and the opportunity that we had to be involed first hand in this wonderful and important exhibtion.
To learn more follow the link below
http://www.lalh.org/exShipmanMain.html
