Virginia's Top 10 Endangered Artifacts is a program of the Virginia Association of Museums. Over the past seven years, VAM has successfully promoted awareness of collections care and the efforts of museums, libraries, archives, and historic sites across the Commonwealth of Virginia and District of Columbia to care for their cultural and historical treasures, which is an expensive and time-consuming effort. In fact, over a 150 organizations have benefited from participating and the spotlight that the program has provided has generated extensive publicity, new supporters and volunteers, and access to funding to conserve and preserve their artifacts.

 

Virginia's Top 10 Endangered Artifacts is a project of the Virginia Association of Museums and was originally funded through an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Connecting to Collections Statewide Implementation Grant. Due to its success, the program has been replicated in other states and recognized as one of the most successful outcomes of the Connecting to Collections grant program. 

Edgar Allen Poe Museum

Richmond, VA – Central Virginia

Illustrations for “The Raven” by Artist James Carling, 1884 

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This set of illustrations is the masterpiece of the Liverpool born American artist

James Carling.

Carling's aim in creating these works was to create original and unusual

work by thoroughly sympathizing with Poe's own ideas and emotions. As a result, his work is unusual in American art of the 1880s, and have more in common with the work of the most advanced European Symbolists

like Odilon Redon than they do with Carling's fellow Americans like Winslow

Homer.