This summer, as part of my dissertation research on the history of art conservation in North America and Europe, I visited several institutions in Canada and northern New York. The history of conservation is an emerging area of research, often conducted at the level of individual conservators or institutions, so I’m trying to zoom out to understand “the field” as a whole. This research trip took me to the only master’s program in conservation in Canada, as well as a core government institution for conservation, museums, and one of the major American conservation degree programs in Buffalo, NY.

I’ve researched art-science interactions for quite a while at this point, both technical analyses of art and the history of such work, which led me to the history of conservation. In the course of studying art, I’ve been interested in both studying how art was made and, in turn, the history of this type of research. As a result, I use conservation and technical analyses in addition to traditional historical training to better understand the many ways we treat material culture.

This phase of my research has led to new discoveries and important parallels with the other institutions I’ve studied. Canada is, as far as I have found, the only country with a national institution of conservation that both serves as a hub for research and knowledge of the field and provides conservation services for museums and communities across the country. Going into this summer, I knew that there was an effort to establish a similar institution in the United States at roughly the same time in the 1970s. To my surprise, there was a parallel effort in both countries to establish regional conservation centers, likely due to the size of both countries making it difficult for smaller or more remote museums to access conservation services. While I’m still trying to determine whether conservators or legislators were discussing their respective projects across the border at the time, the similarity is striking.

The history of conservation is a story both about the development of tools and methods to preserve cultural heritage and, underneath that, how we collectively have decided what is worth preserving. Conservators frequently recognize that there are far more objects in museums than there are conservators to treat them, or at least resources to reasonably do so. Historians of science and technology have increasingly recognized, especially in the last decade or so, the importance of maintenance. Conservation is a science and practice dedicated to maintenance, making it an important case study to understand how we maintain our systems of material culture.