2025 Poster Session

The Penn Museum’s Coxe Wing opened in 1926 to display and house the breadth of the museum’s ancient Egyptian collection. Nearly 100 years later, the Coxe Wing is undergoing the largest renovation project ever undertaken by the Museum. When the renovation is complete, the new Ancient Egypt and Nubia Galleries will span 14,000 square feet of gallery space and will feature thousands of artifacts spanning all of ancient Egyptian history. Beginning in 2018, the Museum partnered with a team of designers, architects, and engineers to plan and design updates to these galleries, followed by a phased deinstallation of the exhibitions from 2018 through 2023. The monumental stone architectural elements were subsequently moved to a dedicated offsite workspace at the Conservation Laboratory Annex, where work on these materials continues. Decisions about structural support are made through intensive collaboration between conservators, engineers, and mount-makers. Decisions about the aesthetics of surface treatments are the result of conversations between conservators, curators, and the exhibitions department as well as outside designers and fabricators. 

The Conservation Department is responsible for the evaluation and treatment of all objects selected for display, including the monumental architectural components of a New Kingdom pharaonic palace and painted stone blocks from an Old Kingdom funerary chapel. While the most critical work relates to the structural stabilization of the pieces, the aesthetic compensation is integral to the interpretation and overall visitor comprehension and experience. At this scale (e.g. 30-foot-high columns and 13-foot-tall doorways), the six feet – six inches rule becomes somewhat irrelevant.  

Many of the monumental pieces have large missing sections. Some of these monumental pieces were included in the original 1926 installation and many have a history of extensive restoration. Much of the restoration work from the 1920s requires painstaking and slow deconstruction to reverse. As part of the new design, conservation, and engineering process, decisions are being made for loss compensation that must be stable enough to last another 100 years, but the conservation team is also emphasizing the importance of building in the flexibility to allow for potential future modifications or changes to the aesthetic compensation. Inevitably, the solutions are a balance of curatorial wishes, conservation ethics, and engineering requirements.  

The conservation team has faced challenges in achieving consistency in the approach and appearance of large fills across a variety of monumental stone elements. This poster will present the approaches being taken and the rationale behind these decisions.