Building Community
Addressing Needs in the Field of Conservation
Our profession has the capacity and responsibility to strengthen cultural understanding, to give a voice to the voiceless, and to ensure that through our advocacy and the actions of examination, documentation, analysis, treatment, and preventive care, cultural heritage is preserved for the education and enrichment of future generations.
For example photographic materials are a composite of organic and inorganic materials—finely-divided metallic silver particles, light-sensitive organic dyes, gelatin and egg-white binder layers, thin paper supports—readily affected by inadequate environments and poor storage, handling practices. Many of these collections are at-risk. For decades our department has worked to preserve these holdings worldwide.
Our January 2019 project with the Fisk University Library involved the conservation treatment and stabilization of 300 (primarily) silver-gelatin photographs owned by Fisk university, depicting campus life. These fragile images required surface cleaning, binder consolidation, mending, and flattening. We also helped to preserve a collection of 80+ photographs owned by The House of the Boxer in Puerto Rico, a treasure of prized images treasure by the San Juan community. To further assist the island of Puerto Rico we organized 3-day workshop in photograph conservation with the Puerto Rican National Archives and the FEMA, Joint Recovery Office that was both theoretical and hands-on—nearly 100 individuals were registered.
Our department has partnered with the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Library Alliance, Lyrasis, the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA), and the Image Permanence Institute (IPI) to preserve at-risk photographic and audiovisual materials held in HBCU member institutions. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, this initiative helped care for HBCU special collections including irreplaceable documentation of the African American experience in the 19th and 20th centuries that reflect monumental themes from slavery to Black Lives Matter. We have worked closely with the HBCU Library Alliance to manage internships for HBCU undergraduates in leading research libraries that include Harvard, Yale, the Library of Congress, Duke, UVA, Humanities Research Center (at University of Texas), and Winterthur.
Since 2017, the University of Delaware (UD) Art Conservation Department and Winterthur Museum have partnered with the Alliance of HBCU Museums and Galleries and Yale University to offer an intensive summer program of study for advanced undergraduate students enrolled in HBCUs. In its first three years, this “Two-week Introduction to Practical Conservation" (TIP-C) took place in person at the Winterthur Museum. In 2020 and 2021, the program was converted for online delivery and renamed DIP-C for distance learning. The program introduces students to careers in art conservation as they engage in learning about conservation from a variety of practicing professionals. In TIP-C, students had the opportunity to execute the examination, documentation, analysis, and treatment of a multi-media diorama from the Tuskegee University. In DIP-C, students delved into conservation philosophy, ethics, and preventive principles. Since the inception of the program, eight dioramas have been conserved at Winterthur, the Lunder Conservation Center, Smithsonian Institution, Fisk University/Shelley Reisman Paine, and Buffalo State College Garman Art Conservation Department.
The Department of Art Conservation also continues to seek, implement, and support opportunities to engage in community-level dialogues designed to deepen mutual understandings of the value of cultural heritage preservation and strengthen opportunities for professional training.
Past initiatives
- Working closely with the New London African-American Newark community members to document their history via the development of a walking tour and podcasts.
- Bringing educational activities related to art conservation to children (K-12) in urban center parks and the Salvation Army each summer in an undergraduate service-learning project in cooperation with Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. (This program won a DE Governor's award in 2012.)
- Leading (with other partners, including International Global Studies), a photograph preservation initiative for collection repositories in Sub-Sahara Africa that started with the School of African Heritage in Benin in April 2014.
- Offering lectures and behind-the-scenes tours to UD and visiting McNair Scholars, Young African Leaders, MEPPI participants, Iraqi Fulbright scholars, and others.
