9:13 a.m., Jan. 21, 2009----Summers are a productive and important time for graduate students in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation.

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Summer is when the students apply their academic knowledge and training to real projects in the art world and interact and learn from with experts in the conservation field through summer internships.

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded the program $100,000 to help support these internships for the next five summers.

“We are thrilled with this multi-year award from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation,” said Debra Hess Norris, vice provost for graduate and professional education, Henry Francis du Pont Chair in Fine Arts and chairperson of the Department of Art Conservation. ”Our graduate students benefit greatly from global summer experiences that have included the preservation of collections and monuments in India, Australia, Greece, Turkey, Peru, Malaysia, France, Italy and Great Britain.

She said the work has “expanded students' understanding of cultural traditions, provided opportunities to work closely with skilled conservators, curators, scientists and scholars who provide alternative perspectives and practices, and solidified international partnerships resulting in post-graduate fellowships, jobs and collaborative research.”

“The Kress Foundation has been a generous supporter of our graduate program and its students for several years,” said Jae Gutierrez, assistant professor of art conservation who wrote the grant proposal. “This grant will support unique, international summer work projects that greatly enhance and enrich our students' academic experience. We are grateful for the foundation's continued support.”

Gutierrez pointed out that the internships work both ways -- students receive hands-on experience and institutions in need preservation assistance get help and input with their conservation projects.

Last summer supported by past funding from Kress, Jessica Keister had a 10-week photograph conservation internship at a private practice, the Fotorestauratie Atelier C. C. von Waldthausen. Her major project was treating and framing a contemporary work by British artists Gilbert and George.

She also has opportunities to visit the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Heritage and other institutions in Europe. “I am extremely grateful to the Kress foundation for supporting my summer internship,” she said. “It was an amazing experience that I will always recall with fondness.”

On the other side of the globe, Meghan McFarlane worked on ethnographic objects in the Australian Museum in Sydney. She said she was grateful for the “generous support” from Kress that made the summer internship abroad possible.

With colleagues from Australia she not only learned from their practices but was able to share some of what she learned at UD. “It is wonderful to be exposed to all of these different practices so that I am better informed as I set out on my own,” McFarlane said.

Another opportunity was spending five days at the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture where she joined several hundred people from around the world to learn about Australian Aboriginal culture first hand from those seeking to preserve and celebrate it. It not only helped her as an art conservator, but also helped her to appreciate a totally unfamiliar culture.

In past years, Kress-supported interns have worked at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Museums in Liverpool, the Benaki Museum in Athens, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburg and the with the Cultural Resource Conservation Initiative in Delhi.

Article by Sue Moncure