|Newark Education| Saving history

Students in the University of Delaware’s art conservation program search for the story in each artifact

By Ken Mammarella Contributing Writer

The objects included a grave marker, a wallet and a bust of a Supreme Court justice. Their tools included saliva, a scalpel and a reversible acrylic adhesive called Paraloid B-72.

And the tools were used on the objects only after extensive documentation and sensitive contemplation by the University of Delaware students in their art conservation internship class.

“We take care of artifacts so that we can take care of the people who created them,” said Nina Owczarek, their instructor.

The University runs one of only six undergraduate art conservation programs in the United States, said Madeline Hagerman, the program’s chair, and it’s the only one of them where all the instructors are experts in conservation (as contrasted to other museum skills).

There are only five graduate art conservation programs in the country, she said, and UD runs one of those, too, along with Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. UD is America’s only university with both undergraduate and graduate programs in art conservation.

“Why do we conserve objects?” Hagerman said. “Because they’re important to somebody.”

Much more than paintings

Art conservation is probably best known for its work on paintings, which have the frustrating tendencies for colors to change by light or pollution and for surfaces to become marred by tiny cracks called craquelure. Despite these flaws, conservationists work on all sorts of objects, with all sorts of issues.

People in the field today are very attuned to respecting the cultures that created the objects. Is it appropriate for outsiders to investigate, clean and repair them? “It always starts with documentation,” Owczarek said, “so we know what we’re doing is done with thought and respect, without insulting a culture.” That lesson to think and analyze first was clear to the students in this class.

Here’s another question they need to answer: What period should the conservation aim for? Its creation, today – or some time in between?

The department regularly treats objects for several partners.

They include the New Castle Historical Society; the Iron Hill Science Center, near Newark; Wilmington Friends School in Alapocas; Central High School in Philadelphia; George Leader, of the Arch Street Project, a salvage archaeology project at the site of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia’s burial ground; and Adam Fraccia of the Wye House Plantation, a 1792 plantation on Maryland’s Wye Island. The department plans in October to host an open house that will showcase the fascinating and delicate work. Details will be posted on www.artcons.udel.edu.

Art conservation has always been dominated by women, Hagerman said, tracing its history to the wives of archaeologists working on items found by their husbands and their crew.