Professional Collaborations
Objects Conservation staff contribute to conservation projects and organizations around the world. Here are some of the highlights of the last decade:
The Department of Objects Conservation played an important role in the joint initiative to establish a conservation fellowship program aimed at broadening the experience of Indian conservators and enhancing conservation practice in India. This program is a partnership between The Metropolitan Museum, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Ministry of Culture of the Government of India. The two-year pilot phase (2014–15) provided training for nineteen Indian museum professionals at the Metropolitan Museum and the Stichting Restauratie Atelier Limburg (The Netherlands), supplemented with follow-up visits, consultations, seminars and workshops in India. In 2016, the program was renewed with two more host institutions, the National Museum of Asian Art (Freer Gallery of Art & Arthur M. Sackler Gallery) (Washington D.C.) and the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (Brussels), and this opportunity was extended to an additional thirty-five fellows over a five-year period. Objects Conservation welcomed its first fellow under the renewal program in February 2017.
Image: P. M. Vasundara preparing to consolidate flaking paint on Virgin of Quito, an eighteen-century polychrome wood sculpture from Ecuador
In keeping with the Museum’s long tradition of exchange with museum professionals in the Middle East, Objects Conservation staff, together with other Met and Columbia University colleagues, have partnered with colleagues in Iraq and Syria on a project aiming to assist professionals working in collections affected by the war and civil strife. Funded by the Whiting Foundation, the program has included yearly workshops that bring together regional museum professionals and cultural heritage specialists to discuss topics such as documentation of museum collections under threat, emergency care, and conservation. In addition, the program has provided specialized imaging training in Iraq and Syria, which was identified by our local partners as their greatest need, along with state-of-the-art portable documentation kits that currently are in use in eight major museums. The resulting documentation from four Iraqi museums has been published in multi-lingual museum catalogues.
Met conservators joined representatives from the Smithsonian Institution, ICOM, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, and the Museum of Islamic Art (Cairo) to assess damages to the collection following a 2014 terrorist attack to an adjacent building and consider conservation strategies for recovery. The Department of Objects Conservation later hosted two Museum of Islamic Art conservators.
Departmental staff have participated in several projects sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Ambassador Fund for Cultural Heritage. In 2011, two conservators carried out a study of museum display and storage conditions at Cyrene, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Libya, as part of the Cyrenaica Archaeological Project directed by Professor Susan Kane of Oberlin College. A multi-phase project started in 2014 brought Objects Conservation staff and experts from India and Germany to Sri Lanka for a project to survey facilities at the Department of Antiquities of Sri Lanka and train staff in collections care protocols, mechanisms of biodeterioration, the laboratory examination of antiquities, and preventive conservation.
Image: Condition survey of stone monuments at the Cyrene Museum
In the past, staff members have served in an advisory capacity for a range of projects abroad, including “Climate4Wood,” a collaboration of several Dutch cultural and educational institutions for the purpose of establishing environmental guidelines for furniture in museum collections; “Study of Medieval Polychrome Wood Sculptures in Auvergne,” under the auspices of the Direction Regionale des Affaires Culturelles, Conservation Régionale des Monuments Historiques, France, which aims to define a corpus of little-known Romanesque period sculpture in regional churches and survey their condition; “WoodMusICK (Wooden Musical Instrument Conservation and Knowledge)” funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), a four-year program, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) with a multidisciplinary and multinational group composed of curators, conservators/restorers, scientists, acousticians, and instrument makers; and as part of an international team of assembled by the World Monuments Fund. Participants also helped to establish and continue to teach at the first training program and facility dedicated to the conservation of Chinese furniture and historic interiors (now a masters-degree program at Tsinghua University in Beijing) that benefits the Palace Museum and serves as a resource for the field as a whole.
World Monuments Fund and Palace Museum participants visiting Fuwangge, the "Belvedere of Viewing Achievements” in the Imperial Palace, Beijing. Photo courtesy of Jim Laev
Newly excavated objects are often in need of stabilization before, during, and after they have been removed from the ground. Conservators on archaeological sites also identify materials, investigate manufacture, document condition and technical details, and advise on appropriate conditions for storage. Since the early 1990s, departmental staff have worked alongside Egyptologists at the Museum’s excavations at Dahshur and Lisht. Departmental conservators have also participated archaeological sites elsewhere in Egypt, including Abusir and Abydos, as well as in Greece, Italy, Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Peru, and the United States.
Until recently, Met staff carried out most conservation work at Dahshur. Now, this work is predominantly carried out by an Egyptian conservator, with the Museum’s designated conservator assuming a more advisory role.