From Sharks to Sugar: Addressing Conservation Issues of ... - incca

Their goal is to prevent the need to guess after the artist’s death what the
artist would have intended. They want to be able to make decisions about
how to perform treatments with allegiance to the artist’s wishes.
Through this conference, I learned that not every museum has
conservators on staff, but museums are often accessioning at a rapid pace.
This made me think about museums without conservators and wonder if
collections managers could use this information. Regardless of whether or
not a museum has a conservation lab, this information could be very
useful to have at the time of accession or even beforehand and keep it on
file. Collections managers play a key role in the process of conservation,
as they are the staff members who look after the collections regularly and
spot conservation issues that need to be handled by a conservator. I was
interested in tackling this issue from a collection manager’s point of view.
Expert Interviews
Separate from my case study interviews, I talked with two people
who I consider experts in the fields of conservation and collections
management: Dr. Glenn Wharton and Jill Sterrett. Both scholars served on
discussion panels at “The Object In Transition” conference in Los Angeles
and also spoke at the “Interview Methodology for Conservators”
workshop in Denver, and they have researched and written extensively in
their fields.
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