Description

The Virginia Conservation Associations (VCA) January Member’s Meeting will be hosted in Richmond at VCU Libraries and feature presentations from three Graduate Conservation Interns: Tatiana Shannon, Paintings Intern at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Paola Valentin Irizarry, Objects Intern at the VMFA, and Binh-An Nguyen, Preventative Conservation Intern at Colonial Williamsburg. Students interested in conservation careers are encouraged to attend. 

Schedule: 

4 - 5 p.m. Open House for VCU Libraries Collections Care, Room 231
5 - 6 p.m. Refreshments, Room 250
6 - 7 p.m. Presentations, Room 250

Speaker Bios:

Tatiana Shannon’s talk, “Hopper's Paintbox: Characterizing Modern Oil Paints through Instrumental Analysis”, is her second-year graduate research project, co-authored with Catherine Matsen, and investigates the palette of American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Instrumental analysis has been carried out on paint samples taken from eighteen tubes of Winsor & Newton oil paint present in a paint box belonging to Hopper from the latter half of his artistic career. The analyses of the paint tube samples characterizing the pigments, additives, and binding media present utilizes X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy, X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and Raman. 

Tatiana Shannon is a third-year Paintings Conservation major at the Winterthur/University of Delaware program in Art Conservation. Her first and second-year graduate summer internships were held at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center and Conservazione Beni Culturali respectively, and she is currently in the midst of her third-year graduate internship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to starting at Winterthur/University of Delaware, Tatiana held multiple training opportunities at a range of institutions including the National Park Service, Central Park Conservancy, Sculpture and Decorative Arts Conservation Services LLC., and Elizabeth Leto-Fulton Paintings Conservation.

Catherine Matsen has worked as a conservation scientist at Winterthur Museum’s Scientific Research and Analysis Laboratory (SRAL) since 2003, advising, teaching and working with more than 200 WUDPAC students over the years.  She has undertaken analysis on all types of decorative arts in the museum collection using the techniques of XRF, SEM-EDS, FTIR, Raman, XRD, GC-MS, pyGC-MS and peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) with MALDI-TOF.

Paola Marie Valentín Irizarry’s talk, “Conserving Islamic Ceramics from the Buffalo Museum of Science”, presents a comparative technical and conservation study of three Islamic ceramics. The study investigates the materials and fabrication technologies of each object while documenting the layered histories of excavation, collection, and restoration that have shaped their current forms. Irizarry is a current graduate student specializing in objects conservation in the Garman Art Conservation Department at Buffalo State University. 

Irizarry holds a BA in Art History from the University of Puerto Rico and an MA in Archaeology from the Center for Advanced Studies on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, and is currently completing her third-year graduate internship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Her experience includes work at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and in private practice. 

Binh-An Nguyen’s talk “Preventive Conservation Theory: A Roadmap for What Preventive Conservation Entails and What It Could Be” highlights the main themes of preventive conservation and how they are connected to one another to develop a foundation of what its practice entails. Within the past few years, formalization of preventive as both a designated major in master’s degree programs and as a role in institutions within the United States has been on the rise. The new developments in educational methodologies have prompted questions of what preventive conservation entails, what preventive conservators do, and how curriculum and institutional positions can be integrated into currently existing systems. Future work is planned in the next few years to expand upon the theory and create a resource guide to document preventive conservation practices around the world. The Preventive Conservation Theory serves to describe and expand upon what preventive does, while the resource guide will illustrate how preventive work is being done, and provide some guidance to other institutions working to set up their own preventive conservation positions and departments.

Nguyen is a preventive conservation graduate fellow at the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC). She is currently completing her third-year internship at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in their Preventive Conservation department.

The event is free and open to the public. 

For special accommodations, or to register offline, please contact Frances Burson, communications coordinator, at bursonfa@vcu.edu or 804-827-5363.