The Hood Museum of Art will be closed until Sept. 15 due to interior renovations consisting of replacing worn carpet, replacing windows and painting one of the galleries.
Director of the Hood Museum Timothy Rub said the nature of these renovations required "removing the entire [art] collection from all the galleries" in the museum.
The most important and most disruptive of the renovations will involve replacing the carpeting in the entire museum, he said.
Rub said Summer term was the best time to perform the renovations.
While summer is "a good time for visitation from the public," it was important to choose a time that was low in terms of use by College faculty and students, Rub said.
Although the galleries are closed for the term, the museum offices, study facilities, storage facilities and the Hood Museum Gift Shop will remain open during the renovations, he said.
When the museum reopens Fall term in time for freshman orientation, it will open in two stages. On Oct. 4, several weeks after the general museum opening, the second-floor gallery will reopen with an exhibit that is on special loan to the museum, Rub said.
The exhibit features 18th century French painting and will include works by Chardin and Fragonard, according to Rub. "It is a very important show," he added.
Facilities, Operations and Management Coordinator Douglas Kerr said the entire Hood Museum collection will go into storage for the duration of the renovations.
The museum's galleries "flow" into one another so that it is really one extremely large piece of carpet that has to be entirely replaced at one time rather than one room at time, Kerr said.
The carpet that will be pulled up is "messy and dusty," and in order to protect the pieces of art that are in each gallery, they need to be removed and placed in storage until the new carpet is in place, Rub said.
He added that several other renovations, including replacing windows and painting, would also be performed in the museum while it was closed.
Putting new glass in some of the outside windows will help protect the art once it is moved back in the Fall, Rub said. The new glass would filter out ultraviolet light which would aid in conserving the works of art, particularly those on paper.
Kerr said it will cost approximately $50,000 to replace the carpet and around $5,500 to replace the windows.
In addition, the second-floor gallery in the museum will be repainted. The gallery is two stories high and will require scaffolding in order to paint much of it, he said.
Rub said although it would have been possible to condense all of the renovations into a shorter period of time, there still would not have been a sufficient time frame to display a major exhibit this summer.
