Delaware Art Museum works vandalized

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The Delaware Museum of Art is on the lookout for a group of visitors who recently vandalized a number of the museum’s rare and expensive pieces of art with stickers.

The small stickers, placed on some of the museum’s Pre-Raphaelite paintings and an outdoor statue, displayed some religious script and iconography, according to an email obtained by The News Journal. Amy Hussey, the museum’s registrar, sent the email to members of the Registrars Committee of the American Alliance of Museums. Other stickers with a large red ‘T’ with gold backing were placed on paintings as well.

Hussey appealed for help, asking others if they had run into similar problems with a group placing stickers on art.

The museum captured security footage of the group, which “was aware that it was an act of vandalism and tried to hide from cameras when in the act,” the email said. Jessica Jenkins, the museum’s manager of marketing & public relations, said the museum does not comment on acts of vandalism.

The stickers, described as very hard to spot at first, were successfully removed by a painting conservator. The amount of damage done to the museum’s collection, recognized around the world as being one of the best outside Britain, is unknown.

Joyce Hill Stoner, an art conservationist at the University of Delaware, said stickers generally should cause no damage to paintings as long as a trained conservator is removing them.

“With tiny Q-tip-sized swabs and tweezers, we would work to carefully lift the edge, apply additional solvents as needed, and gently peel away the stickers when the adhesive is no longer ‘sticky,’” she said in an email.

Stoner said people have vandalized art for centuries, from spraying red paint onto Picasso’s “Guernica” to taking a hammer to Michelangelo’s “Pieta” or throwing acid on paintings.

“Sometimes it’s a political statement. The culprit thinks that by doing something this high profile she or he will call attention to him or herself and a cause,” she wrote in an email.

The vandalism comes after the museum has said it hopes to sell as many as four works by October to meet a deadline imposed by its bank to repay $19.8 million in debt from a 2005 expansion.