Bard Graduate Center’s week-long summer school for conservation students, early career conservators, and conservation scientists is designed to acquaint them with a variety of approaches to scholarship on, and interpretation of, material culture. In the last ten years there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of technical art history on the part of art historians. At the same time there has been an increasing attention to material, materiality, and material culture among students of the humanities. However, there has been no similar attention thus far to bringing the latest humanities-originated thinking and discoveries about material culture to early career conservators and conservation scientists. This summer school aims to do just that.

The goal of this program is to connect the material turn in humanistic scholarship with the practice of conservation and conservation science. Such a combination aims to present conservation as a human science, capable of asking and telling us many things about human interactions, beliefs, and existence (not just about the art work itself, and certainly not just about the art work’s creation or state of preservation in a museum environment).

The program will run from Sunday, June 23 through Friday, June 28, 2019.

Applications due February 15, 2019.

Lead funding provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.