A question of preservation
A swath of spandex fabric with DayGlo pink graffiti designed by Stephen Sprouse.
Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Gift of Joanne Sprouse, in memory of her son Stephen Sprouse, 2020.42
“For artists, the effect isn’t simply cosmetic, because they intentionally use these colors for their visual impact,” said Sarah Schmidtke Sobeck, a photochemist at The College of Wooster who spoke at the ACS meeting.
Sobeck and Gregory Smith, a conservation scientist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, have been collaborating on researching such materials for the last decade after meeting at a cultural heritage science conference. Their partnership has already produced a two-part study on the composition, spectral properties, and light stability of daylight fluorescence artists’ pigments.
