The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $750,000
grant to Bard Graduate Center to continue its “Cultures of Conservation” curriculum,
which the foundation initially funded in 2012 for a period of five years. The
second phase of “Cultures of Conservation” will continue its mission to model
the best ways of integrating the approaches and insights of objects
conservation and materials science with those of academics in the human
sciences (anthropology, archaeology, art history, history). A key part of the
grant initiative involves the appointment to the Bard Graduate Center faculty
of a professor of cultural heritage science who will bring a different kind of knowledge
of materials to the close work of conservation. To this end, Jennifer Mass, who
holds a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Cornell University, has been
appointed Andrew W. Mellon Professor to teach courses on conservation
for non-scientists. Her research interests include the degradation mechanisms
of artists’ pigments and developing nondestructive depth profiling methods for
imaging buried paintings.
Another major component of the initiative is a collaboration
among Bard Graduate Center, the Conservation Department of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,
and the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik of the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Teams led by Peter N. Miller (BGC), Robert van Langh (Rijksmuseum), and
Wolfgang Schäffner (Humboldt), will delve into the question of “Conserving
Active Matter” with the goal of creating intellectual resources with which twenty-first
century conservators and art historians will be able to think about objects and
the discourse of “material culture.” “Conserving Active Matter” aims to reshape
conservation thinking and training by creating new expectations for the
intellectual contributions of conservators and the kinds of discussions in
which their presence will be required. In a world of active matter—the way in
which organic materials are intrinsically active and therefore constantly
change—the conservator’s scientific training is essential as is a philosophical
understanding of the long history of the issues given new form by the
challenges of modern materials. “Conserving Active Matter” will focus on the
consequences of taking into account the highly mutable, dynamic, and active
character of objects and images, which pose challenges not only for exhibiting
but also for conservation, and even, for the museum itself. The three
geographically dispersed teams will work in parallel through videoconferenced
seminars and twice-annual workshops at which representatives of the groups,
along with invited visitors, will present current research. The project will
launch with a symposium on November 28, 2017.
“We are grateful
to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their continued support of this
initiative, though perhaps even more for their encouragement, which has allowed
us to think deeply and push into these unexplored territories of investigation,”
said Peter N. Miller, dean of Bard Graduate Center. “Our partners in this, with
their great human and material resources in Amsterdam and Berlin, are ideal
interlocutors as we explore the shape and shaping of conservation as a human
science in the twenty-first century. With this project we hope to deepen the
dialogue and to create a new platform for thinking about the place of
conservation among the broader sciences of the human past.”
“I founded Bard
Graduate Center with the conviction that the aspirations and habits of
civilization are revealed through objects, which are fundamental to the lives
of all individuals,” said Susan Weber, Bard Graduate Center’s founder and director.
“The Mellon Foundation’s continued support for this initiative augments our
existing program of study by integrating conceptual and technical issues of
conservation into the broader scholarly dialogue, allowing us to bridge the
divide between theory and practice in the study of material culture.”
For more information about
the Bard Graduate Center’s “Culture of Conservation,” visit cultures-of-conservation.wikis.bgc.bard.edu/.
